<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
SUPER BOWL SUNDAY, and Boston is fixated on its Patriots. Yet, here, in the city's chic Back Bay neighborhood, I am with just about the only people not thinking of football. Here, as most pregame parties are starting, a horn sounds, and a familiar chant is repeated over and over: "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna...."<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
If you thought the Hare Krishna’s faded away with bell-bottoms and disco, the scene at 72 Commonwealth Ave. tells a different story. This former boarding house serves as the local temple of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON)--the Hare Krishna’s.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
While the mantra may bring back memories of a past era, a look at the worshippers this Sunday makes clear these are vastly different Hare Krishnas than those once ubiquitous in American cities. Thirty years ago, this room would have been filled to capacity with devotees looking every bit the stereotype: white, young, wearing colorful robes, the men sporting heads shaved except for one tuft at the crown of their scalp.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
That was then, but this is now, and these are the faces of Krishna in the 21st century. The robed monks are here, but fewer in number. They are worshipping alongside people dressed in jeans or other casual clothes. Maybe half the faces are white, with the rest belonging to Indian immigrants and their American-born children. They are students, pharmacists, computer programmers, stay-at-home moms. If they were not here, chanting in praise of a Hindu deity whose likeness graces the ornate altar, they could blend in easily at any of the Super Bowl parties going on throughout New England.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
"It's entirely possible these days that a Hare Krishna could be living next door to you and you wouldn't know it," says Middlebury College professor Burke Rochford, who has studied ISKCON since the 1970s. "They're just now part of the culture in ways that the average person couldn't have imagined some 20 or 25 years ago.... Now we're looking at what I just think of as an American religious community."<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
If the Hare Krishnas seemed to capture the nonconformist zeitgeist of the 1960s, today's ISKCON likewise reflects the reigning cultural mood, with its emphasis on responsibility and balance--of career and family, of spontaneity and constraint, of worldly and otherworldly pursuits. Today's Hare Kristmas live as part of, and not apart from, mainstream American society. The overwhelming majority make their homes outside the temple, work in secular professions, get married, have children, and cope with all the accompanying anxieties, like paying rent, finding quality schools, and being solid citizens and good parents.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
For support, they look to their religious community, putting ISKCON in a role it is not used to playing. "We're addressing the needs of their kids for Sunday School, and parking lots, and playgrounds," notes Anuttama Dasa, an ISKCON leader and spokesman. He speaks enthusiastically about committees and training programs and systems--just the kind of institutionalization early converts were fleeing.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
"Twenty-year-olds who are single can live pretty simple," Anuttama points out. "You don't need playgrounds if your whole community is 20-year-olds. You may not need marriage counseling. You may not need to deal with a lot of the different kinds of social issues that churches and synagogues all over the country deal with."<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
It was not an easy transition, but without it, ISKCON easily could have faded away like so many flash-in-the-pan spiritual fads. That it is still here is testament to the dedication of its members and the attractiveness of its message. Yet, its history also provides a cautionary tale about the dangers of unbridled spiritual exuberance and what it takes to "make it" as a religion in the U.S. Four decades after its founding, ISKCON is both thriving and struggling, hopeful for a bright future while facing immense challenges just as it is getting its house in order.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
It was on another Super Bowl Sunday, this one in 1992, that Paul Swinford fast stepped into a Hare Krishna temple. Thirteen years later, now known as Premananda Dasa, he is pastor of the Boston community. At 40, Premananda again is adapting to a major transition. After living in the temple for 10 years, he got married and moved to New Hampshire, where his wife, also a Hare Krishna, works for a financial-services company. He continues to work full time for the temple, so among other adjustments, Premananda has joined America's commuter class, now driving 90 minutes to the place he called home for a decade.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
After graduating from college, Swinford worked in grassroots politics before joining the corporate world to pay off debts. He developed an interest in spirituality and was intrigued by the personal relationship with God promised by the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture central to ISKCON theology. After that first Sunday service, he started attending regularly and worshipping at home. He then took a step that increasingly is rare. His debts paid off, he quit his job to move into the temple. There, he eschewed bookselling--the occupation of most temple residents then--and instead assumed a variety of administrative roles: treasurer, secretary, congregational director.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Like ISKCON broadly, the temple is at a pivotal moment in its history. The temple was slapped with an anticult lawsuit by a former member in 1976, a common occurrence then. After spending more than 20 years wending its way through the system, the two sides settled for an undisclosed sum in the late 1990s. That financial burden removed, the community can look ahead for the first time.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
"For us to have finally gotten to a point in the late 1990s where we had no debts, where we had all our invoices paid, this was revolutionary for us practically," Premananda says during a conversation in his temple office, the first time I have seen him in "Western" rather than devotional clothes. What will the community do with that freedom? Premananda goes on excitedly about "cultivating congregational leadership" and "systematizing" management. "When ISKCON started, it was a missionary organization, and most of the emphasis was placed on expanding the mission. Right now our primary emphasis is more liturgical and pastoral."<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Boston's Hare Krishnas range in commitment from occasional attendance to near-constant presence. Many are in their 20s or 30s and joined within the past 10 years. Young couples and their toddlers represent hope for the future, while devotees in their 50s and 60s constitute a solid foundation. The temple is undergoing a major management reorganization and, with only 16 devotees living in-house, lay leadership will be key. A committee will work on articulating a long-term vision for the temple, and a "theological director" will be named.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
"Will we be a community that continues to struggle with just a few devotees taking responsibility and some degree of a revolving door, people coming and going?" Premananda asks. "Or will we go where the primary source of our stability and strength is the congregation, and inspire members of the congregation to take more leadership roles, more responsibility roles?"<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Throughout ISKCON, similar transformations are taking place. Temple presidents attend management courses; counselors offer premarital classes; and lay leaders worry about college acceptances among day-school students. Temples are participating in interfaith activities, running social service programs, and building for their members "parking lots and playgrounds," a phrase Anuttama uses frequently.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
"We've kind of done things in the past by simple inspiration, perspiration, and we're starting to see more clearly that we need more structures, systems, and things like that," Anuttama explains. "Our duty is to make sure we create communities and an institution that care for the variety of people's needs, so they want to come to us. We can't think they have to come to us. That'll be our downfall."<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
In Boston, Premananda dreams of someday opening a seminary and establishing a rural community to supplement the urban temple. That is for another day, though. First, there is the business of smoothing out everyday temple management and strengthening the commitment of existing congregants.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Before leaving his office, I comment on a bookcase prominently displaying a surprising title: Nori Muster's Betrayal of the Spirit, a bitter memoir of the author's ISKCON involvement. The name alone made me assume that people like Premandanda would treat the book derisively, but he accepts Muster's rebuke. "It's something that helps to remind me I have a position of responsibility in the temple," Premananda maintains. "If we don't learn from the past, I'm afraid we'll repeat it."<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
When an elderly monk arrived in New York by ship in September, 1965, no one could have predicted that he would establish the first major orthodox Hindu presence in the West--for Westerners.

The story of the man known as A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada is lore among Hare Krishnas. Inspired by his gum to spread Krishna consciousness in the West, Prabhupada left India at 69 and suffered two heart attacks on the voyage. Chanting in New York's Tompkins Square Park, Prabhupada began to gather disciples and launched the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in July, 1966. With public chanting and proselytizing in places like airports, ISKCON grew rapidly, opening new temples and farm communities regularly.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Four decades later, the movement maintains 50 temples in the U.S., and a total of nearly 400 worldwide. It claims 100,000 adherents in America and 1,000,000 globally, though accurate statistics do not exist and scholars say the numbers likely are smaller.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Prabhupada brought with him a monotheistic Hinduism known as Gaudiya Vaishnava, which is based on the teachings of the 15th-century Bengali monk Caitanya, himself considered an incarnation of Krishna.

Caitanya preached devotion through simple living and the repetitive chanting of the Lord's name, giving birth to the mantra that defines ISKCON in the Western mind. In the U.S., Prabhupada adapted the tradition in some ways; most notably, he preached gender equality and initiated women into the priesthood, which was not done in India.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Living "Krishna conscious" starts with refraining from four activities: gambling, intoxication, meat eating, and illicit sex, which is taken to mean sex without marriage and only for procreation within marriage. Temple life is rigorous, with morning worship beginning before dawn. On Sundays, the entire community gathers to worship and feast.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
ISKCON offers different levels of formal commitment. The most common is "initiation"--receiving a devotional name and vowing to chant 16 rounds daily. In ISKCON's early days, most devotees also took a second vow, becoming priests, which allowed them to worship on the altar. Many took vows of celibacy.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Prabhupada's early disciples took to it with such zeal that being a serious Hare Krishna came to mean the total commitment of monasticism. Book distribution and proselytizing became their primary focus. They severed ties with their former lives, including their families and, through missionary work, encouraged--sometimes pressured--new recruits to do likewise.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Cult hostility<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
From the beginning, Hare Krishnas faced hostility, as Americans took one look at their youth robed and shaved and cried "cult." Ironically, it was partly ISKCON's fidelity to tradition that made Americans uncomfortable; while other Eastern transplants--such as Transcendental Meditation--did not demand major lifestyle changes, Prabhupada's followers fully embraced an Indian religion and culture.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
"Dancing in the streets with okra robes on your men, women in saris with the red dot on their forehead, and reciting in Bengali old Krishna stories that originate from the 16th century is absolutely deemed to be cultic," asserts Larry Shinn, president of Berea College and author of Dark Lord: Cult Images and the Hare Krishnas in America. "But the 'strange' behavior is really Indian and Hindu. It's not some aberrant human being who's developed this system in the last 10or 15 years." <o:p></o:p>