Hare Krishna Maha Mantra

The formula is sixteen words, made of three vocatives repeated: Hare, Krishna, Rama. Hare is a vocative of Hari, a name of Vishnu, though Gaudiya Vaishnava interpretation reads it instead as a vocative of Hara, a name of Radha, so that the formula addresses the divine couple rather than one deity. Which reading is correct is a theological question internal to the tradition, and the two are not reconcilable by grammar alone.

The source is the Kali-Santarana Upanishad, and its status is worth being exact about. It is one of the minor Upanishads, of which there are more than a hundred, and it is late, it does not belong to the classical group of principal Upanishads that the great commentators treated, and it is generally placed in the late medieval period. It presents the formula as the means of crossing over the degenerate age. Citing an Upanishad for it is therefore accurate and considerably less impressive than it sounds.

The practice that made it consequential is sixteenth-century. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, in Bengal, made congregational singing of the names, sankirtana, the central practice of the movement he founded, taken into the streets, accompanied by drum and cymbal, and open to anyone regardless of caste. That last point was the radical one and it is what the tradition itself emphasises.

The claim sometimes made that the formula is ancient Vedic is not supportable. It is medieval in its text and early modern in its practice.

Its arrival in Europe and America can be dated to a single voyage.

A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada arrived in New York in 1965, at the age of sixty-nine, on a cargo ship, with a trunk of books and almost no money. He chanted in Tompkins Square Park, attracted a following from the countercultural scene of the Lower East Side, and founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in 1966. The movement grew very fast in the following decade and the formula became, briefly, one of the most recognisable religious sounds in Western popular culture, recorded by George Harrison in 1969, sung in a Broadway musical, and audible in airports.

Two things are worth noting about this. The first is that Prabhupada was transmitting a specific lineage, the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition through the Gaudiya Math, and not Hinduism in general; the theology is a particular one, and the identification of the movement with Hinduism as such, common in Western reporting, misrepresents both.

The second is that the movement's subsequent history includes serious institutional failure. Investigations and litigation from the 1990s onward established patterns of abuse in its boarding schools in India and the United States, and the organisation has acknowledged this and paid settlements. This is a matter of court record rather than of allegation, and an account of the formula's spread that omits it would be incomplete.