The synthesis would begin when A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prahupada arrived in New York City in 1965 carrying seven dollars in rupees, the phone number of the son of a friend, and a few battered cooking utensils. When Prabhupada died in Vrindaban, India, in 1977, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, the movement he started in a New York storefront, had over two hundred temples and farms in sixty countries, tens of thousands of followers, and tens of millions of dollars. In the United States alone, ISKCON had fifty-seven temples and farms, more than five thousand devotees, and thousands of uninitiated believers.

Once grasped, the basic tenets of Krishna Consciousness are surprisingly simple. Man is not his body; he is an eternal spirit. The body goes through countless incarnations; the eternal spirit that is buried deep within us is unchanging and everprcsent. Christians call it the soul; Krishna Consciousness calls it the atman.

The purpose of life is to become one with the atman. This is harder than it sounds and usually takes many, many lifetimes. To reach the atman, we must defeat the ego. The ego would have us think that life is about accumulating money, exercising power and satisfying the senses' unquenchable desires for sex, food, and countless luxuries. But the ego can be defeated and the atman uncovered by dedicating every action to God. "Whatever you do, make it an offering to me—the food you eat, the sacrifices you make, the help you give, even your suffering," Krishna tells Arjuna in Chapter Nine of the Bhagavad-Gita. To assure that every action is dedicated to God, devotees chant the names of the Lord. When they chant the Hare Krishna mantra ("Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare; Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama, Rama, Hare, Hare"), devotees believe that God is literally present on their lips.

Krishna is a personal God, like the Jewish Yahweh and the Christian God. But part of Krishna Consciousness' great appeal is that Krishna was a fun-loving, beautiful blue boy, not a wrathful Jehovah. And, in the sixties and seventies, Krishna Consciousness was exotic, it was new, it was fresh, it was from India, home of the Vedic scriptures, the world's oldest revealed scriptures.

It was also hard work. Many of the Catholics who joined the movement had decided the sin-confess-sin-confess cycle was meaningless; many of the Jews had decided that their synagogue was more of a social center than a holy place; many of the Protestants thought that the confirmation process in their churches was so easy, it was a joke. Krishna devotees were united by the belief that finding God is the hardest work you can do. They relished the opportunity to spread their new faith by chanting and begging for alms in public places.

Some of the new devotees were spiritual people, genuinely dedicated to serving Krishna. Others were stoned-out hippies from troubled homes who had never had much to believe in. Heirs to fortunes, M.D.'s, and M.B.A.'s joined street people who had dropped out of high school. They shaved their heads and put on robes; they handed out literature and solicited money on street comers and in airports; they opened vegetarian restaurants and temples in major cities. They became part of the American scene, a bridge between East and West.

"The fact that there is now in the West a vigorous, disciplined, and seemingly well-organized [religious] movement—not merely a philosophical movement or a yoga or meditation movement . . . is a stunning accomplishment," said Harvey Cox, a Harvard divinity professor. "The more I came to know about the movement, the more I came to find out there was a striking similarity between what [Prabhupada] was saying and my understanding of the original core of Christianity: Live simply; do not try to accumulate worldly goods or profit; live with compassion toward all creatures; live joyfully. . . . When I say [Prabhupada was] 'one in a million,' I think that is in some ways an underestimate. Perhaps he was one in a hundred million."

In the beginning, the movement attracted thousands of people. For some, Krishna Consciousness provided an opportunity to leave competitive America and follow a spiritual path. For others, the movement offered a family far more stable than the ones they had been raised in, and a highly structured refuge from the hedonism of the sixties. Krishna Consciousness embodies the wisdom of Eastern religions; it has much to offer America. Even today, there are hundreds of sincere, gentle devotees who are chanting Hare Krishna in countries around the world.

The gurus who succeeded Prabhupada theoretically accepted the premise that to find God, the ego must be defeated. And yet with few exceptions they had huge egos. Religious scholars say that a crisis occurs when the charismatic leader of a new religious movement dies. The success or failure of the movement depends upon how the successors spread the teachings of the founder. To a large degree, Krishna Consciousness is in shambles because too many gurus did not want to spread Prabhupada's teachings; they wanted to be Prabhupada. Because of that, the Hare Krishna movement degenerated into a number of competing cults that have known murder, the abuse of women and children, drug dealing, and swindles that would impress a Mafia don.

Since 1987, reformers in the movement have worked to purge ISKCON of the horrors portrayed in this book. They hope to restore the spiritually powerful principles on which the movement was founded. But this is the story of how the destructive metamorphosis happened; of how good became evil; of how gurus claiming to embody Krishna's mercy behaved with no mercy. And no power, as we will discover, corrupts as absolutely as fanatical religious power.