The Four Regulative Principles Forbid Meat, Intoxication, Illicit Sex and Gambling

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness binds members who accept formal initiation to four regulative principles, prohibitions against eating meat, fish or eggs, against the use of intoxicants including caffeine, against illicit sexual activity outside of marriage undertaken for procreation, and against gambling in any form, treated together as a single undertaking accepted at one time rather than as four separate rules a member might adopt piecemeal. Hare Krishna Transformed records that the four are understood within the movement as interconnected supports for spiritual life rather than an arbitrary list, each one held to weaken a specific obstacle, ignorance, intoxication, lust and greed respectively, that the tradition regards as standing between a practitioner and clear devotional consciousness. The 2009 Resolutions of the movement's own Governing Body Commission confirm the principles as continuing to bind initiated members today in the same fourfold form the movement has maintained since its founding, administered as a standard expected of those who have taken initiation and accepted its conditions rather than as an entry requirement imposed on every visitor or sympathizer who has not yet made that formal commitment.

The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements situates the four regulative principles among the clearest markers by which scholars of new religious movements have distinguished committed ISKCON membership from looser affiliation or sympathetic interest, since the principles function as a visible line an outsider can observe being crossed or kept, unlike an internal doctrinal conviction that leaves no outward trace. The Encyclopedia of Hinduism notes that the specific combination, diet, sobriety, sexual conduct and gambling governed together as facets of a single discipline, has parallels in older strands of Vaishnava asceticism but was codified into this particular fourfold form by the movement's own twentieth century founder for a following drawn substantially from Western converts unfamiliar with the wider ascetic vocabulary of Vaishnava tradition. That codification has proven durable, continuing to structure initiated life within the movement across the generations since its founding, and the principles have become, for many outside observers, the practical shorthand by which the difference between an interested visitor to a temple and a formally initiated devotee bound to the community's discipline is most readily explained.