The tradition
The practice on this site is not a mood or an aesthetic. It belongs to a specific tradition, with a founder, a date, a line of teachers and an address in West Los Angeles. This page is that context.
Who began it
Born in 1486 in Nabadwip, in Bengal, and died in 1534. He is the figure the whole of Gaudiya Vaishnavism traces back to — Gauḍa being the old name for Bengal, so the name of the tradition is simply “the Vaishnavism of Bengal”.
What he actually started was a practice rather than a doctrine: saṅkīrtana, the congregational chanting of the names of God, done in public, in the street, by anybody. In sixteenth-century Bengal that was a social act as much as a religious one. It took a practice that had belonged to the initiated and the literate and handed it to people who were neither.
That is the thread worth holding on to on a site like this one. The tradition's own founding move was to make the practice available. Nothing about it requires a temple, a teacher or a name. It requires that you say the words and hear them.
The five
Chaitanya is not counted alone. The tradition names five together — Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Nityānanda, Advaita Āchārya, Gadādhara Paṇḍita and Śrīvāsa Ṭhākura — and a mantra made of their names is commonly chanted before the maha-mantra itself. Śrīvāsa's house in Nabadwip is where the first kirtans were held.
How it reached California
For four centuries this was a Bengali tradition. It became a global one through one man and one voyage: A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who arrived in New York in his late sixties and founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness there in 1966.
Los Angeles came next, and quickly. By 1969 he was installing deities at a temple on La Cienega — the first installed as the society moved beyond New York. In February 1970 the community acquired a property on Watseka Avenue, and that Janmashtami the larger deities were installed there. The place took the name New Dvaraka, and Prabhupada made it his headquarters in the West, staying for months at a stretch and running it as the model the other centres were meant to copy.
That temple is still at 3764 Watseka Avenue. It is the one Kevin Wu was talking about. The temple page has his words about it.
What it asks of a person
Navadhā-bhakti. The list is given in the Srimad-Bhagavatam at 7.5.23, spoken by a boy called Prahlada to his father. It is the tradition's own answer to “what does devotion actually consist of”, and it is strikingly ordinary — mostly listening, saying, remembering and turning up.
01
Hearing
Listening to what is said about God — the oldest practice, and the one all the others rest on.
02
Chanting
Saying or singing the names aloud. Not performance: the point is that you hear them.
03
Remembering
Carrying it through an ordinary day, when nothing is being chanted at all.
04
Serving
Service at the feet — attendance, the small practical acts, showing up.
05
Worship
The formal offering: lamps, water, flowers, food. The body does it, not only the mind.
06
Prayer
Addressing God directly, in your own words, including when you have nothing good to say.
07
Servitude
Taking the position of a servant rather than an owner of the relationship.
08
Friendship
Taking the position of a friend. The tradition holds both at once without embarrassment.
09
Surrender
Giving over the whole of it. Listed last because it is hardest, not because it is optional.
The tradition holds that these are nine doors into one room, not nine stages in order — and that one of them done properly is enough. The first two, hearing and chanting, are the ones this site is built around, because they are the two a person can begin today with nothing.
The vows
Within ISKCON specifically, an initiated devotee takes on four abstentions — no meat, fish or eggs; no intoxicants; no gambling; no illicit sex — together with a daily vow of sixteen rounds of japa. Sixteen rounds is 1,728 repetitions of the maha-mantra, which takes most people somewhere near two hours.
Chaitanya-charitamrita (Madhya 22.113) is cited for the vow being the most essential of the regulative principles: the four abstentions clear the ground, and the chanting is the thing itself.
Where the tradition is not one voice. This framing — four principles plus sixteen rounds — is ISKCON's. Gaudiya Vaishnavism is older and wider than ISKCON, and other lineages within it put these differently or do not formalise them at all. Nothing on this site is asking anyone to take a vow. It is set out because the numbers on the practice page mean nothing without it.
The books
Seven hundred verses inside the Mahabharata: a conversation between a soldier who does not want to fight and his charioteer. The shortest way in, and the one most read outside the tradition.
The Bhagavata Purana. Much longer, and the source the tradition leans on hardest — the nine practices above are one verse of it.
The life and teaching of Chaitanya himself, written in Bengali in the sixteenth century. Where the tradition keeps its account of its own founder.
These are living texts with many translations, and the translations differ sharply in what they emphasise. This page names them rather than quoting them, because a verse pulled out of a commentary and dropped on a web page usually says more about whoever pulled it than about the verse.
The mandala is a drawing, not a symbol with a fixed meaning. Concentric rings and a lotus at the centre: the shape the tradition's own diagrams tend to take, used here as ornament.
About this page. It sets out what Gaudiya Vaishnavism teaches about itself, with its own references named so you can check them. It is not a statement of what Kevin Wu believes today — that is his to write and this site leaves the space for it — and it is not asking you to believe any of it. This site is not affiliated with ISKCON and does not speak for the temple or the tradition.