ISKCON, a Community of Book Distributors

By Kaunteya Das

A speech given at the Book Distribution Seminar during the Gaura Purnima Festival 2007

A few days ago, at the GBC meetings, book distribution was a main focus. The GBC members met “privately” with the BBT trustees. And as far as I understand, they really wanted to have an open and frank talk on ways to increase book distribution. Therefore for that session they didn’t want the presence of the GBC deputies. I attended the meeting of the GBC deputies and we also discussed book distribution. The focus was on why in the ’70s there was huge distribution and thirty years later many less books are going out.

Each participant was invited to share. My analysis was that in the ’70s the almost totality (say 95-99%) of the members of ISKCON were temple residents and a good percentage was doing book distribution. But in the last thirty years, the social and demographic landscape of ISKCON changed very drastically. And now we basically have the opposite scenario, with 98–99% of all active devotees being home-based. They are what we might call, technically, congregational devotees, which doesn’t necessarily make them second-class citizens, but simply means devotees who are living at home and are financially self-sufficient—just like Srila Prabhupada was for the majority of his life.

So one of the solutions, or the main aspect of the solution, is to engage everyone—all the active devotees, all the followers of Srila Prabhupada—in distributing books. Now, the way they do it may be different. A couple with children, a job, or more than one job, may not be able to do it six hours a day. But there are other programs, like the Weekend Warriors or the the Sastra-dana, through which even the home-based devotees could be active in the mission.

One example from outside our Society is the Jehovah Witnesses—many of you, I’m sure, know them. How many of you have met the Jehovah Witnesses? [Many raise their hand.] OK. So, basically, they’re very active all over the world. And somehow they don’t even have the concept of clergy, the concept of an ordained minister, because they say it’s not a Biblical concept. So everybody is, in one sense, on the same level; they are all preachers (that is what they mean by “witnesses”).

The vast majority of Jehovah Witnesses live at home, but they all distribute books, they all give out publications. And every two weeks they publish at least two new magazines. You have seen the Watchtower and Awake magazine—I have here [shows them to the audience] copies in English, Italian, and Swahili, for Africa. Last time I checked, every two weeks they would print and distribute twenty-two and a half million copies. That is more than one and half million a day! And this without counting all their other books and brochures.

Anyway, it will require a longer and deeper analysis, how we can come to their level. In the ’60s, when the Hare Krsna movement started, the Jehovah Witnesses were one million, and now they are about six million. In forty years they attracted and enrolled five million people. And among the Jehovah Witnesses, you can’t be a stagnant member, you cannot be an inactive member. If you stop distributing books for six months, you are no more considered a Jehovah Witness. So when we talk about six million, it means six million book distributors, who do a minium or an average of ten hours of book distribution every month. That is sixty million hours of book distribution every month. And therefore we meet them everywhere, we see their publications from the trains of Russia to the airports of the United States of America.

This is the idea I would like to share with you today for your consideration—that the real future for book distribution is to sytematically train every new member of our community, every new member of our congregation, to learn the art of presenting our literature. Not only that, but learn how to cultivate new people so that they can also accept the practice and the philosophy, and they can also become book distributors.