New Vrindaban's Giant Prabhupada Statue
BY: HRISHIKESH DASA (HENRY DOKTORSKI)
Apr 17, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, USA (SUN) — Since Janmastami and Mahavidya recently wrote about New Vrindaban's Giant Prabhupada Statue (see "Point of Order" and "The Big Bang") I thought I might add my own two cents to the discussion.
New Vrindaban's Giant Prabhupada Statue (at the time the world's largest likeness of Srila Prabhupada) in the large field behind Prabhupada's Palace was one of the most prominent artistic and construction projects during Bhaktipada's 'Interfaith Experiment'.
Bhaktipada recognized in the early 1980's that the good old days of attracting new members primarily from the rebellious counterculture by emphasizing the Indian cultural aspects of Krishna Consciousness was becoming less productive, and he tried to diversify the preaching to reach out to other demographic groups, especially New-Agers, by stressing the factors common to all religions.
The murti was designed and constructed by Soma Dasa under Bhaktipada's direction. Soma had become New Vrindaban's resident sculptor after Bhagavatananda was forced to leave around 1983. Soma was assisted by dozens of New Vrindaban devotees. Many of us residents would go to the construction site in the evenings after regular service and assist in one way or another during the summer and Autumn of 1990. I used to bring an accordion, and along with my musician friends Dhruva and Dutiful Rama, provide kirtan during these marathons. The statue was completed and dedicated on Prabhupada's Disappearance day, November 14, 1990. (See image above; photo by Jayamurari Swami.)
From the beginning, the statue was controversial, even amongst New Vrindaban residents, as Prabhupada was portrayed sitting in a lotus posture (Prabhupada often sat cross-legged, but in a more relaxed and less severe posture), draped in flowing robes, and wearing a crown shaped like a turban. He looked something like a Buddha. Some devotees ridiculed it amongst themselves by calling it "Prabhu-Buddha."
I used to take my two young children there in the summer evenings and climb up onto the pedestal where we would sit by Prabhupada's giant feet and admire the view of the Palace, and also entertain ourselves by clapping our hands and listening for the echo of our claps return from the back of the Palace.
The giant Prabhupada was the first statue for the proposed "Interfaith Garden of the Spiritual Masters," which was intended to eventually have other similar gigantic statues built of Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and other founders of the world's great religions.
After Kirtanananda lost control of New Vrindaban during 1994 and eventually was sent to prison in 1996, most of his disciples who still followed him left the community. The giant Prabhupada murti then became a great embarrassment to most of those devotees who remained at the community and who were sympathetic to ISKCON.
Although I left New Vrindaban in 1994, I was told later that one night, probably in 1995 or 1996, Varshana Swami, at the controls of a powerful piece of construction equipment, crushed the giant thirty-foot-high Prabhupada statue into rubble, with the authorization
of the New Vrindaban Board of Directors. Later I spoke to Varshana Swami about it and he told me, “That wasn’t Prabhupada; that was a maya Prabhupada.” However, he politely declined to describe the details of the demolition to me.
Not everyone was pleased with the demolition. One Palace Tour Guide told me, "Repeat visitors who had been to Prabhupada's Palace before were surprised and even dismayed that the Giant Prabhupada Murti had been destroyed, and they questioned me why it had been taken down."
Some compared the destruction of this statue, which was the world’s largest likeness of Prabhupada, with the destruction of the world’s tallest standing Buddha in March 2001 by the religiously intolerant Taliban regime in Afghanistan. This massive Buddha, which
measured 175 tall (and a smaller 120-foot Buddha beside it), were carved in the fifth century out of an Afghan mountainside in Bamiyan, ninety miles west of Kabul.
The order to destroy the historic statues came from the Taliban’s supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who issued an edict declaring statues - including ancient pre-Islamic figures - an insult to Islam. “Because God is one God and these statues are there to be worshipped and that is wrong. They should be destroyed so that they are not worshipped now or in the future,” Omar said in his edict, published by the Taliban-run Bakhtar News Agency.
During August 2003 I visited the former site of the statue. The ten-foot high concrete pedestal still stands; beside it lies two of Prabhupada’s cracked toes, partially hidden by the long grass. A trail of concrete chunks, some as large as two-feet long, litter the meadow, where cows and deer graze peacefully, and leads to the steep grade at the edge of the high plateau which drops down some five hundred feet to Wheeling Creek. The crushed and mangled remains of Prabhupada lie a short distance from the top of the plateau where its fall was apparently arrested by a large tree.
(Photo by Hrishikesh dasa)
Perhaps Varshana Swami might have somehow cut the steel internal structural support beams with a torch (the murti was strong and built to last), wrapped a heavy steel cable around the neck of the statue, fastened the end to a powerful bulldozer, dragged it off the pedestal, squeezed and smashed it into a twenty-foot long, six-foot-wide, cigar-shaped mass of tangled steel and broken concrete chunks, rolled it across the top of the plateau and pushed it over the edge of the precipice, where it rolled down the cliff and into the forest.
But others who were there at the time remembered hearing a large "boom." Perhaps Varshana Swami might have used dynamite planted inside the hollow statue to assist in the demolition. Large amounts of dynamite were commonly used to level the hill were the proposed "Cathedral of Understanding" was to be constructed.
I was also told that some cows had somehow gotten trapped inside the pedestal. I remember a plywood door that opened inward into the structure. Perhaps the cows pushed the door open, entered the dark and dank interior (why a cow would enter such a black, gloomy and foreboding place is beyond my comprehension), and somehow accidentally pushed the door closed, and were unable to open it again.
This incident may have been the "last straw" which precipitated the destruction of the murti, but it was certainly not the real reason. The cows were not trapped inside the statue, they were trapped inside the pedestal. And, if I am not mistaken, the pedestal still stands today. At least I can say with certainty that the pedestal was standing in 2003, when I took photographs.
