To San Francisco and Beyond.

Early in 1967, several of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s disciples left New York and opened a temple in the heart of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, home for thousands of hippies and “flower children” from all over the country. Within a short time, Śrīla Prabhupāda’s temple there had become a spiritual haven for troubled, searching, and sometimes desperate young people. Drug overdoses were common, and hundreds of confused, dazed, and disenchanted young Americans roamed the streets. 

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Haridāsa: The hippies needed all the help they could get, and they knew it. And the Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa temple was certainly a kind of spiritual haven. Kids sensed it. They were running, living on the streets, no place where they could go, where they could rest, where people weren’t going to hurt them.

I think it saved a lot of lives; there might have been a lot more casualties if it hadn’t been for Hare Kṛṣṇa. It was like opening a temple in a battlefield. It was the hardest place to do it, but it was the place where it was most needed. Although the Swami had no precedents for dealing with any of this, he applied the chanting with miraculous results. The chanting was wonderful. It worked.

Michael Bowen, an artist and one of the leading figures of the Haight-Ashbury scene, recalled that Śrīla Prabhupāda had “an amazing ability to get people off drugs, especially speed, heroin, burnt-out LSD cases – all of that.”

Every day at the temple devotees cooked and served to over two hundred young people a free, sumptuous multi-course lunch of vegetarian food offered to Kṛṣṇa. Many local merchants helped to make this possible by donating to the cause. An early San Francisco devotee recalls those days.

Harṣarāṇī: People who were plain lost or needed comforting ... sort of wandered or staggered into the temple. Some of them stayed and became devotees, and some just took prasāda [spiritual food] and left. Just from a medical standpoint, doctors didn’t know what to do with people on LSD. The police and the free clinics in the area couldn’t handle the overload of people taking LSD. The police saw Swamiji [Śrīla Prabhupāda] as a certain refuge.

Throughout lunch, devotees played the New York recording of Śrīla Prabhupāda chanting the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra. The sacred sound reinforced the spiritual mood of the temple and helped to ease the tensions and frustrations of its young guests.

Sunday, January 29, 1967 marked the major spiritual event of the San Francisco hippie era, and Śrīla Prabhupāda, who was ready to go anywhere to spread Kṛṣṇa consciousness, was there. The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service – all the new-wave San Francisco bands – had agreed to appear with Śrīla Prabhupāda at the Avalon Ballroom’s Mantra-Rock Dance, proceeds from which would go to the local Hare Kṛṣṇa temple.

Thousands of hippies, anticipating an exciting evening, packed the hall. LSD pioneer Timothy Leary dutifully paid the standard $2.50 admission fee and entered the ballroom, followed by Augustus Owsley Stanley III, known for his own brand of LSD.

At about 10:00 PM, Śrīla Prabhupāda and a small entourage of devotees arrived amid uproarious applause and cheering by a crowd that had waited weeks in great anticipation for this moment. Śrīla Prabhupāda was given a seat of honor onstage and was introduced by Allen Ginsberg, who explained his own realizations about the Hare Kṛṣṇa mahā-mantra and how it had spread from the small storefront in New York to San Francisco. The well-known poet told the crowd that the chanting of the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra in the early morning at the Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa temple was an important community service to those who were “coming down from LSD,” because the chanting would “stabilize their consciousness on reentry.”

The chanting started slowly but rhythmically, and little by little it spread throughout the ballroom, enveloping everyone. Hippies got to their feet, held hands, and began to dance as enormous, pulsing pictures of Kṛṣṇa were projected around the walls of the ballroom in perfect sync with the beat of the mantra. By the time Śrīla Prabhupāda stood and began to dance with his arms raised, the crowd was completely absorbed in chanting, dancing, and playing small musical instruments they had brought for the occasion.

Ginsberg later recalled, “We sang Hare Kṛṣṇa all evening. It was absolutely great – an open thing. It was the height of the Haight-Ashbury spiritual enthusiasm.”

As the tempo speeded up, the chanting and dancing became more and more intense, spurred on by a stageful of top rock musicians, who were as charmed by the magic of the mahā-mantra as the amateur musicians had been at the Tompkins Square kīrtanas only a few weeks before. The chant rose; it seemed to surge and swell without limit. When it seemed it could go no further, the chanting stopped. Śrīla Prabhupāda offered prayers to his spiritual master into the microphone and ended by saying three times, “All glories to the assembled devotees!” The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood buzzed with talk of the Mantra-Rock Dance for weeks afterward.

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