03 Oct Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
You could go just for the food and the people watching. The restaurant is full of attractive vegetarian foodies savoring the inexpensive, all-you-can-eat, fresh, tasty colorful food, that just-by-the-way is prasad (has been blessed).
Or, you could go just for the boutique upstairs, full of magical, spiritual treasures: saris and kurtas, jewelry, statues of gods and goddesses, ayurvedic products, malas, and books. Prices are reasonable making it quite difficult leave with finding some new article of clothing or a tchotcke you can’t live without.
Many people are put off by the idea of visiting the Hare Krishna Temple, imagining they’ll be trapped by orange-clad geeks sporting strange hairdos, but really, it’s not like that. A few of the devotees may dress unusually, but they’re not any weirder than someone you’d see at a skate park. The ones I’ve met are polite and quiet, and there is zero proselytizing going on.
The Los Angeles temple was the first world headquarters of The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), founded in 1966 by their Guru, Swami Prabhupada. Their core beliefs are based on Hindu scriptures and tend to be rather fundamentalist in practice. They believe in bhakti yoga which is a spiritual path focused on the cultivation of love and devotion toward God. ISKCON today is a worldwide organization of more than 550 centers.
If you do want to visit the Temple, which many people never do, you’ll find a silent sanctuary inside. If they’re having a service, you’ll observe a Hindu ritual of worshipping divine statues led by a monk singing Sanskrit chants, blowing a conch shell, and waving incense.
Over the years, many celebrities have been involved with the Hare Krishnas including the Beatles, Steve Jobs, Allen Ginsberg, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, and Russell Brand, who married Katy Perry in a Hare Krishna ceremony.
Over the years, the Krishnas have also been involved in numerous scandals which are easy to research on the Internet: racketeering, mail fraud, stockpiling guns, potential murder, and the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children. While certainly not great you have to ask yourself, is it any worse than the Catholic Church?
The temple hosts the “Festival of Chariots” every summer, a fantastic event where the Krishnas take over a large stretch of Venice Beach and provide music, various booths, and free food to up to twenty thousand people. You read that right: twenty thousand. One of the Krishna missions is to feed the hungry and they serve up to 2 million free meals every day in sixty countries.
When you visit, you won’t even have to hear the chant Hare Krishna if you’d prefer not, but on the other hand, why wouldn’t you want to? The Krishnas believe that listening to the Hare Krishna mantra promotes “peace, happiness, God realization, freedom from repeated birth and death, and total self-fulfillment.” Hey, personally I’ll take whatever help I can get.
© 2020 Catherine Auman
This is an excerpt from Catherine Auman’s book Guide to Spiritual L.A.: The Irreverent, the Awake, and the True
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