About Our Legacy

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), otherwise known as the Hare Krishna movement, includes five hundred major centers, temples and rural communities, nearly one hundred affiliated vegetarian restaurants, thousands of namahattas or local meeting groups, a wide variety of community projects, and millions of congregational members worldwide.

On the nineteenth of September 1965, a cargo ship “Jaladuta” sailed into New York Harbor and docked at a Brooklyn pier, at Seventeenth Street. An old Vaishnava sannyasi dressed in a simple cotton dhoti, old shawl, neck beads, having a golden complexion with a shaven head and sikha got down from that ship. It was Srila Prabhupada. He had a sponsor, Mr. Agarwal, somewhere in Pennsylvania. Although he had little idea of what to do as he walked off the ship onto the pier—“I did not know whether to turn left or right”— he came to spread the message of Lord Chaitanya in the western world on the order of his spiritual master. Thus began a spiritual revolution flooding the world with the chanting of Hare Krishna Mahamantra.

In the world history major changes took place because of a few people who actually lived by their ideals. Srila Prabhupada was one such person. A Holy man creates Holy places wherever he visits. Srila Prabhupada confirmed this statement in the modern times, especially in the western countries, where no one had ever heard of Lord Krishna before his arrival at New York.