In Berkeley??
Another Krishna Encounter
[Here we meet Hansadutta, guru of the Berkeley Hare Krishna Temple circa 1984. He was one of the 11 higher-ups who took control of the massive Krishna organization upon its founder's death in 1977. Like Bhaktipad and the rest of the 11, he fell into scandals, including shooting live ammo at a car dealership in Berkeley. He eventually disappeared, lived for years in trailer-park obscurity with his devotee/wife, and has now re-emerged to carry on his mission apart from the main Krishna group. A number of his fellow Krishnas have documented his craziness when he was a guru; Hansadutta himself has written an apology for what he calls his "complete degradation and disgraceful behaviour" during the period we encountered him.
[The Berkeley temple continues to function today, and is known as New Jagannatha Puri.]
JANARDAN: Do you want to conclude by talking about our last encounters with the Krishnas - in Berkeley? There was the Thursday night Krishna feasts, open to the public: prashadam [spiritually blessed food] for 50 cents.
STUART RESNICK: Yes, being dirt poor in Berkeley, it was great to have the Krishnas to go to and for a buck or two you can have the vegetarian meal.
JANARDAN: You have to dodge the fifty dollar Bhagavatam books that they're trying to sell you, but once you get past that ...
It got to be a little unnerving, though, after a while. We'd be standing there, waiting along with all the other street people for the food to come out, and the food would come out later and later, every time. [The food came only after the spiritual discourse.]
STUART: The main thing I remember about the Berkeley Temple is that a guy called Hansadutta was their guru, and I remember because one of their chants was "Jaya Hansa-doo-ta, jaya Hansa-doo-ta ... !"
JANARDAN: They could say anything in those chants, make any syllables fit.
STUART: From reading Monkey on a Stick I recall that he was on Percodan at the time.
ALAN ROSS: Percodan?
STUART: A depressant, a drug, a psychiatric drug. Tranquilizer, maybe. The kind of stuff they give to people that have their wisdom teeth out.
JANARDAN: So, the guru was on tranquilizers ...
STUART: Yes, and eventually he was picked up for shooting out windows of some used car lots.
JANARDAN: On Shattuck Avenue. With a machine gun. He had uzis in the back seat. His temple was an armory!
STUART: Well, we knew nothing of this at the time, we just knew that this is another guy being worshipped as God.
JANARDAN: One of the founder's [Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada's] ten representatives. When Prabhupada died - before he died, actually - he appointed ten representatives to succeed him.
ALAN: So you met a fifth of them.
STUART: So the highlight of the evening at the Berkeley temple was when Hansadutta would give his talk, and the main thing I remember is that he once got up and said, "Krishna is the Supreme Person. The universe is filled with people, and then you have Krishna, who is the Supreme Person." He says, "It's like in America. You have all these millions of Americans, and then you have Ronald Reagan, who is the Supreme American." You know? And again, as with Bhaktipad: first of all, you've got to be an idiot to think that Reagan is "Supreme." Second of all, if you think it, you've got to be really out of touch to say it. And if you're gonna say it, you've got to be really psychotic or on drugs to say it in Berkeley.
ALAN: Percodan.
STUART: Exactly, you know? Berkeley is the last place in the world you'd want to say something like that and expect to convert people to Krishna!
JANARDAN: The last bastion of conservative thinking on Telegraph Avenue!
All I recall was that we went in there once and it was the first time we heard Hansadutta speak, and Stuart whispered to me, "Either this guy's mind is in an extraordinary transcendental state, or else he's on drugs." The things Hansadutta was saying were so oblique, so monotonously dull, that it was mind-boggling. You had to kind of switch gears mentally - go back to first gear - just to keep pace with him.