One Response to Krishna Tattoo

 

Mehndi.Goddess.Dotwork

 

 

I was studying religion in graduate school. I was into the counterculture; I owned a real pea coat; my hair was, well, longish; my friends were, by and large, hippies. Most of the religion department took me for a real hippie. But my friends didn’t mistake me for one of them: I was, after all, in graduate school.

It was one of my “hippie” buddies who took me to a Hare Krishna temple, and that led, to my everlasting surprise, to my next fashion change. I joined the Hare Krishnas: I wrapped myself in a dhotī; shaved my head, leaving the tuft of hair called a śikhā on the back, and showed up one day like that at the Department of Religion.

This last transformation naturally ignited an uproar with my parents and a somewhat more sedate one with the religion department.

In fact, most of the early disciples of Prabhupāda were drawn from the sixties counterculture, a feature highlighted in the first academic book about ISKCON, Hare Krishna and the Counterculture by J. Stillson Judah. At first, mainstream society took the devotees for a kind of hippie sub-sect.

But those who joined ISKCON in those days were, in reality, double drop-outs: from mainstream society into the counterculture, from the counterculture into the Hare Krishna movement. By going further out, the devotees came back around: they took vows of “no intoxication” and “no illicit sex,” and obeyed a routine that closely resembled medieval monastic life.

Krishna devotees were definitely not hippies, yet their first social niche belonged within the counterculture. Where they were very, very “far out.”

In the counterculture, “far out” denoted a highly valued state. The possession of far-out-ness empowered one to “freak out” ordinary citizens. All the hippies I knew referred to themselves, approvingly, as “freaks.” “Hippie” was an outsider’s word, a journalist’s word.

The mission of the freak, to “blow the minds” of the straight citizens, was supposed to detonate their mental barriers and open their minds to the ecstatic perception of the surrounding world as single vast intelligent living organism, of which we are all part-and-parcel.

The devotees of Krishna recognized that world—it was the viśva-rūpa, Krishna’s “universal form”—and went beyond it, far beyond it.

At my first meeting with Krishna devotees, it was clear to me that they had won the far-out-ness competition hands down. No one blew minds like the American Hare Krishnas. I assumed initially that they knew this, and I basely suspected them of showing off. But I quickly realized that they didn’t even think or care about being far out. They thought they were normal.

I gave some time to thinking about their tonsure. On the one hand, they shaved off their long hippie hair; when shaving their heads, the men used to take the razor across the scalp twice, first with the grain and then against it, thus achieving the smoothness of a ping-pall ball. And they shaved weekly. Even my Army officer father—who waged war on long hair and personally barbered the heads of all his sons—had not been so close, so exacting.

On the other hand, the devotees left the long śikhā at the back. And in those earlier days, they wore their śikhās very long and loose: it was what remained of their former flower-child locks.

This hairstyle expressed to what seemed to me to be the mind-blowing, transcendent synthesis of Krishna consciousness: the devotees were simultaneously further right than the most reactionary conservatives, and further left than the most radical liberals. And both sides achieved integration, a single coherent whole.

This is a tonsure of “expressive concept” with “social ramifications” that Chelsea Rousso should appreciate.

Here’s an ISKCON painting, circa 1969, made for the cover of Easy Journey to Other Planets. Showing a devotee going “far out,” it records how the men wore their śikhās in the early days: