(Automatic translation)
Good morning to everyone, I am Massimo Introvigne, sociologist, co-founder and director of the Cesnur study center on new religions in Turin and I am here to replace Professor Pierluigi Zoccatelli whose name appeared in the original program of this conference and who unfortunately left us last week in following a sudden cardiac arrest, leaving a great void among his friends and family and among scholars of religious pluralism in Italy, Zoccatelli had studied with great passion the Iscon movement, popularly known as the Krishna movement, and we had spoken several times about the movement. of a curious circumstance Certainly between us, between me and Zoccatelli and the movement, there was a decades-long relationship of sympathy, mutual esteem, friendship and However, we had realized that the representatives of the iscon Only occasionally and reluctantly participated in our annual Cesno conferences, in practice we we have been holding these conferences for over 30 years and the liscon representatives have participated occasionally and mainly in England in the United States it is not at all a lack of esteem for our conferences but there is a profound reason that I believe can be put at the center of today’s our brief reflections and that is that we are the center for studies on new religions and that Lisbon is not a new religion. This is an old misunderstanding because in reality Lisbon fully belongs to an Ancient Hindu Hindu Tradition, that of Citania whose devotional movement focuses on figure of di develops in Bengal in the 10th century, we are therefore talking about a movement that has existed for many centuries and which, as happens with all the great currents that exist within the sphere of the great religions, let us think of the monastic tradition in the Catholic sphere. It reinvents itself and is restructured over the course of of the centuries and yet it remains the same between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The Gaudila current The Citania current is somehow rediscovered and restructured thanks to Btiv Vinoda and his son Bakti Sdanta who founded the Gaudila Matt and is with the gaudila Matt who in 1920 came into contact with abai chande who would later be initiated into the sanassa to the renounced order with the name of Suami btiv Danta who is none other than the figure we know as strila prab upada the founder of the iscon movement but at the beginning abai chande is not yet prab pada is a young industrial manager from Calcutta who received a western education although in a family where the father is a devotee of Krishna And this devotion will become more and more important in his life until in 1936 shortly before he died in 1937 and baktis Sid Danta leaves him as a mission to spread Krishna consciousness in the West and the process is long abai chande tries to spread it in India A league of devotees Dedicates himself full time to Krishna consciousness as a Monk in the town of vrindav and then the big decision that many know about in 1965 he moves to New York he knows practically no one he has a very limited knowledge of English And so what he does goes to places frequented by young people and starts singing the name to himself of Krishna And yet in this man there is something special context It certainly helps because these are the years of the counterculture of the fascination for the East of the turning point of the East that the Christian theologian Harvey Cox spoke about and young people begin to approach this solitary Singer allowing him in the year following 1966 to found the international society for Krishna consciousness in New York and in the following 11 years before his death in 1977 to defend and spread it through a hundred offices practically all over the world and I probably ended here I preached to the converts and told a story that many in this room know but I told it with a purpose and the purpose is to show the red thread the continuity that exists between the tradition of citania through the gaudila Mat up to the iscod therefore he is right and liscon tells us that it is not a new religious movement that it is not a new religion but that it is part of an Ancient religion of one of the great strands of one of the great traditions of Hinduism Certainly with new organizational aspects But this is true in all the great religions, even in the Catholic Church, today there are associations, movements, religious orders that have an Ancient root but at the same time have a new structure. We could reach the same conclusion and Pierluigi Zoccatelli did so, moving not from the history of the Iscon movement but of its main doctrinal characteristics that the founder had already outlined, insisting on the fact that at the end of all the rites at the end of everything that the faithful of the movement does there is the idea of re-establishing the relationship with the Lord Krishna, the relationship with the Sacred with the divine with the original world which had been lost and which was hidden under the veil of Maia the veil of temporariness and illusion so what is the iscon movement for the sociologist and for the scholar the iso movement is a legitimate original but not traditional declination new to Hinduism as such But it was more of Professor Zoccat’s field, he also deserves legal recognition. Thank you