Purañjana Dāsa – US:
Ramesh says: April 13, 2012 at 9:16 pm
Purañjana Das Prabhu, I think you are the author of this nice article which proved that May 28 1977 Appointment tape fraud of tampering , overdubbing by bogus gurus.
In this following comment GiriNayaka Das attacks it as madness and “calling Prabhupāda’s words are meaningless.”
http://prabhupadavision.com/2012/04/henceforward-means-from-now-on/#comment-17678
I think you are the right person to confirm the truth and validate the details. Thank you for your selfless service of exposing bogus FISKCON gurujis and criminals and bravery.
[PADA: Thanks prabhu. Yes, despite ISKCON’s sympathizers always saying since 1978 that “no one listens to us and we are 9999.99 percent finished,” we are now getting about 1.5 – 2.0 million hits a month on our harekrsna.org site. Its growing, it hardly “9999.99 percent finished” at all. We constantly get e-mails from all over the place asking about all kinds of things, and letters of appreciation, and in fact people thanking us for saving their lives etc. Moreover our sites are being linked to other sites and so our program is expanding. These bogus GBC folks always think we are finished ever since 1978, when we are instead gaining all the time. I just saw an article on the GBC’s web site oneiskcon where a devotee is starting to ask all the same questions we are asking, he admits to reading other sites (ok ours) so our influence is spreading even inside ISKCON. Sorry, the people who say we are finished are having their whole empire in a state of collapse (as the oneiskcon article proves).
What happened in brief in regards to the May 28th appointment tape was: it was not being circulated at all. I got a few sentences on a paper in 1979 after badgering Vicitravīrya dāsa in England, but it was barely more than a little snippet. Then in 1984 Sulochana dāsa got a copy of the “appointment tape” by bribing a member of the archives. We listened to it together, over and over, and thought it had been spliced due to many strange clicks, changes in background noises, changes in voice volume levels, and the general chaotic nature of the conversation.
Incidentally, Gopal Vrndadapal dāsa confirmed to me that Rāmeśvara had spliced some “samkirtana tapes.” And so we made copies of the tape and began to circulate them, and then many others felt the same thing, that the audio was a bit dodgy. How did you guess, even then many folks said we were 9999.99 percent finished and no one would accept our proposal that the tape had been spliced. So we basically started the idea that the tape had been spliced.
Later on Mṛgendra prabhu was deputed to squash our rumor of a splice job, so he was deputed by the GBC to have the tape analyzed, and he did. And as we suspected, it was “consistent with tampering.” So it was basically confirmed to have been spliced, by the GBC! And despite that our ISKCON friends thought we were 9999.99 percent finished, what happened instead was — many hundreds of others began to say, hey this tape is a splice job, and more people accepted that, and more are continuing to do so all the time. I just got a letter from India from a person saying that Śrīla Prabhupāda could not have appointed bogus people as his successors and so on and so forth, just after he read our site, in short people agree with us that the tape has audio defect problems.
There are some other important things to notice.
(1) In the alleged “appointment of gurus” conversation, Tamal Krishna swami interrupts Śrīla Prabhupāda over and over, and does not allow him to continue the sentences. It appears that Tamal is trying to control the conversation.
(2) The alleged May 28th tape is a spliced job, as was confirmed by an audio forensic lab. Various conversations were spliced together to make it appear as if an appointment of gurus was taking place. Tamal Krishna swami also refers to “five or six of us” having previous discussions on the topic of future initiations, but where are the “missing tapes” of these conversations?
There are in sum many glaring “gaps” in the 1977 tape sequences (ok, these tapes are either lost, stolen, missing or destroyed). According to Śrīla Prabhupāda’s personal servant “Gaurīdāsa Pandit” (who was present with Śrīla Prabhupāda in 1977) there were other 1977 conversations where Śrīla Prahbupada had said the leaders would be ritviks, and those tapes are mysteriously “missing.”
(3) Why are so many tapes missing from the sequence?
(4) Why was the existing tape not circulated?
(5) Why is the later release of the tape spliced, and who spliced it?
(6) Why is the May tape accepted as an appointment of 11 gurus — when it appoints no one, and there is no evidence anyone’s name was ever given on the tape at all?
(7) The tape was not discussed until after 1978, when it could not be confirmed with Śrīla Prabhupāda.
8) The tape was not even circulated up to the mid-1980s. Sulochana dāsa got a copy by bribing a member of the archives in 1984. The tape was never circulated by the leaders to the rank and file. Why was this tape kept hidden?
9) In December of 1980 (in Topanga) Tamal admits there was no appointment of gurus anywhere at any time, he says “you cannot show me anywhere on tape or in writing where Śrīla Prabhupāda appoints gurus.” Hansadutta dāsa was present at this meeting and he confirms this statement, there never was any appointment of gurus.
10) Kīrtanānanda said that the guru appointment was a bogus idea since the guru is self-effulgent. (Of course he was saying he was the self effulgent one)
So the May 28th tape was not being circulated until Sulochana bribed someone to get a copy, the July 9th letter was barely circulated, “The Will” was not being circulated until I got someone to break into a safe and get a copy, the letters were not being circulated, and anyone who did was told they were dead meat on a hook (like me and Sulochana were told), the entire 1977 conversations were not circulated until 1990 and then only 1,000 copies, the January “no more sannyāsa” conversations were forbbiden to be discussed, ad infinitum. In sum, henceforward, hide all the documents.
Despite all these attempts at changing the tapes and so forth, the original point is preserved:
Satsvarūpa: Then our next question concerns initiations in the future, particularly at that time when you’re no longer with us. We want to know how first and second initiation would be conducted.
Prabhupāda: Yes. I shall recommend some of you. After this is settled up, I shall recommend some of you to act as officiating ācāryas.
Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: Is that called ṛtvik-ācārya?
Prabhupāda: Ṛtvik, yes.
I think this is the most essential element and it’s still there. As for the rest of it, its choppy to say the least. The next “missing tapes” imbroglio was the poison tapes. I read that there was a “conversation in Hindi about poison” in the 1977 Conversations archives books. I prayed to Krishna to get a copy, for 7 years actually, and so in 1997 a devotee in LA walked up to me and handed me the tapes, saying to me “these are the tapes you wanted.”
Krishna certainly answered my prayers. A Bengali friend helped me translate them. So I made an audio tape of myself speaking with an analysis, and put in some sections of the Hindi audio, and made 120 copies at a copy shop in LA, and handed them out around the LA temple. Again, the same doubters came up to me and said, hey 9999.99 percent of us think you are nut. OK, except that issue has come to be accepted all over the place as well. But that is another topic, however it relates to this topic because it is another tape that was hidden from the devotees. It’s a pattern? ys pd