What we chant in ISKCON’s daily program

“Śrīla Prabhupāda’s Kīrtana Standards,” installment 28

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Here let’s look at some specific features of what we chant every day. (We’ll have more in coming installments.)

More about the morning tune

As mentioned before, there is a particular tune Śrīla Prabhupāda wanted us to chant for the maṅgala-ārātrika. One can hear Śrīla Prabhupāda sing this tune on the recording here, where he says, “This is the morning tune.” The tune appears in Western musical notation in The Hare Krishna Music Book by Joan Wilder, published by the BBT, and in Bhakti Gauravani Goswami’s Sacred Song Symphony.¹

In Prabhupada in Malaysia Janānanda Mahārāja offers this remembrance from 1971:

In the morning Prabhupāda came out of his room and sat on a dais in an adjoining room. Śrīla Prabhupāda asked Amogha to sing the Saṁsāra prayers (Gurvaṣṭakam), but he wanted him to learn the “morning melody”.

Bali Mardan:

“Prabhupāda spoke to me in his room that he was upset with devotees in India inventing some other melodies to sing. He said morning melody means singing this melody. And he taught me.” [Bali Mardan then taught Amogha.]²

In The Great Transcendental Adventure, Kurma Dāsa quotes Gaura-maṇḍala-bhūmi Dāsa:

A devotee had begun to lead the chanting of Gurvaṣṭakam—the eight prayers to the spiritual master—in a nonconventional tune. I was feeling uncomfortable because I knew Śrīla Prabhupāda liked us to sing “the morning melody” during mangala ārati. Suddenly Śrutakīrti entered the temple and stopped the kīrtana. He whispered something to the devotee leading, who then started up again singing the correct melody. Later we found out that Prabhupāda had heard the singing from his room and had sent his servant down to make the necessary corrections.³

Harikeśa writes:

Śrīla Prabhupāda was very strict in the melody sung during the mangala–aratika. He wanted the morning melody and nothing else. He would sometimes stop kirtans if other melodies were sung in the morning. Of course he was not always doing that, but when he was nearby and there was someone to appreciate the point, he would correct the mistake.⁴

Yadubara Dās also remembers that Śrīla Prabhupāda once stopped a maṅgala-ārātrika kīrtana in the middle when the leader changed the tune.⁵ And Bhavānanda Dāsa gives this example:

I was sitting with Prabhupada in his rooms at Mayapur during mangala aratika. Gurukripa and Yasodanandana Swami were leading the kirtan when suddenly they switched over to that staccato chanting of Hare Krishna. I am sure you know the one—it is not a melody but a sharp bulletlike chanting. It is done so quickly that it is very difficult to respond to and dance along with. Anyway Prabhupada looked at me and told me to go downstairs and stop the kirtan and tell everyone to only chant the morning melody.⁶

Sometimes kīrtana leaders chant the morning tune for the Gurvaṣṭakam and hold to it for perhaps as long as the first few back-and-forths of Hare Kṛṣṇa, and then they switch to another tune, perhaps several. That’s contrary to what Śrīla Prabhupāda instructed. Throughout the maṅgala-ārātrika one should stick to the morning tune. As Śrīla Prabhupāda told Harikesa, “The morning melody must be sung throughout the mangala aratika and no other melody should be sung.”⁷

There’s a particular tune from Vrindāvan, with lovely extended notes, that some kīrtana leaders switch to after the first few repetitions of the mahā-mantra. That melody is usually a signal that the leader is done with the morning tune–and for the rest of the kīrtana anything goes. The kīrtana will now be “free form,” and we can expect a variety of tunes, one after another.

When I gave my “Kīrtana Standards” seminar in Māyāpur in 2019, I asked my fifty or so students, “Who can remember the last time they attended a maṅgala-ārātrika kīrtana where only the morning tune was chanted?” Only two men could remember. One remembered maṅgala-ārātrika at ISKCON’s center in Soho Street, London, where singing the morning tune throughout the maṅgala-ārātrika is the standard practice. The other remembered maṅgala-ārātrika in Salem, Tamil Nadu, where again this is the standard, under the direction of Bhakti Vikāsa Swami. One man said that in ten years he had never heard a kīrtana led the way Śrīla Prabhupāda had instructed, with only the morning tune.

The morning tune has a low part and a high part and even a third, higher part, all traditional. In each part we may hear small variations (as we do when Śrīla Prabhupāda chants it), yet the tune is still essentially the same.

By the way: The morning tune is not to be sung in the evening.

Bhakti Vikāsa Swami further writes about the maṅgala-ārātrika kīrtana:

In accordance with Śrīla Prabhupāda’s instructions, the mangala arati kirtana should be kept simple. Mangala-arati is meant for giving a powerful spiritual charge at the beginning of the day. All in attendance will certainly feel purified and enlivened in Krsna consciousness if the prayers are sung to the correct raga, and with devotion and reverence. If mangala-arati is led in this way, by a devotee whose only motive is to satisfy guru and Krsna, the effect is most enchanting. The minds of all present are captured and drawn to the lotus feet of guru and Krsna. There can be no better way to start the day.⁸

Tunes, tunes, and more tunes

Some leaders of maṅgala-ārātrika seem to think that just sticking with the morning tune would be monotonous. After that, we’re not getting juice from the tune. Then where are we going to get our juice from? We’d have to listen to the sound of the mantra – which of course is what we’re supposed to do. The juice doesn’t come from the tunes. Kīrtana is not “all about the tunes.” How long does maṅgala-ārātrika last? Perhaps twenty-five minutes. Yet we think that the devotees can’t go twenty-five minutes without a change of tune or they’ll get bored.

Back when I was a kid there was a television show called “The Original Amateur Hour.” Amateur performers would come on stage to sing, tap dance, do magic tricks, or what have you, each for perhaps two or three minutes. And this sometimes seems what maṅgala-ārātrika has become: two minutes for a tune, or three minutes, because we don’t want the chanters to get bored. We’ve got to keep changing the tune, changing, changing, changing, the result being that if anyone had any hope of getting absorbed in the mantra—forget it, because as soon as you start to get focused the leader will change the tune again so you don’t get bored.

In contrast, at Tompkins Square Park Śrīla Prabhupāda chanted the same tune for an hour. And if you hear his kīrtanas at 26 Second Avenue—one tune. The much-appreciated kīrtana leader Mādhava Dāsa sticks with one tune for an hour or more, and people don’t seem to get bored. But some leaders seem to think they have to do something to “keep people going.” So: this gimmick and that gimmick and this trick and that trick. And the result is that we’re left hungry. We don’t get what we most need, which is to hear the mahā-mantra and absorb our minds in the sound of Kṛṣṇa’s holy name. Instead we get all these tricks, and we starve.

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Notes:

1 Badrinarayan Swami remembers that when the Los Angeles temple on Watseka Avenue had just been acquired and was being renovated, what is now the temple room still had a pipe organ in it, and Śrīla Prabhupāda played on it (with one hand, as with a harmonium). He played the same melody and said, again, “This is the morning tune.” https://vimeo.com/111967048.

2 May 7, 1971. Bali Mardana also said: “Prabhupāda told me that every morning we should sing the Saṁsāra prayers to the spiritual master with all the love that we can feel.” (Prabhupada in Malaysia)

3 Kurma Dāsa, The Great Transcendental Adventure, p. 523.

4 Harikeśa Swami, “Important Kirtan Instructions from Śrīla Prabhupāda.”

5 Personal interview.

6 Bhavānanda Dāsa, personal communication, October 17, 2021.

7“Important Kirtan Instructions from Śrila Prabhupada.”

8 Bhakti Vikāsa Swami, “Kirtana,” p. 12