The so-called “Ṛtvik Philosophy” is actually a straw man

This is a forbidden subject.

If you think or talk about it—and you do not say the lines—you will provoke what I call the Agent Smith Effect. Just like in The Matrix, as soon as the programming is threatened, people who were otherwise thoughtful and calm will suddenly react as if on autopilot. They’ll shout slogans. They’ll psychoanalyze you. They’ll accuse you of pride, offense, or ego. Anything except deal with the content of the argument.

This isn’t accidental. It’s what psychological operations are designed to do: make the subject feel radioactive. Make honest inquiry feel dangerous. Make the price of clarity feel like social exile.

But here’s the problem: when the real issue is avoided, a ghost siddhānta moves in. The form remains, but the meaning is hijacked.

So before we even begin, pause for a moment. If you feel agitation rising, ask yourself: What just got touched in me? Who taught me that it’s wrong to think about this? What am I afraid will happen if I simply follow pramāṇa where it leads?

If you can stay in that question, instead of fleeing from it—you might begin to see something new.

I’ll be completely authentic with you: I don’t know how to create the space to have this conversation. My experience of examining this issue has been similar to talking about the issues around the pandemic in 2021. There are prepared positions that you are allowed to think, but anything outside that is erased — and violently.

Anyway, I am going to share with you my discoveries in this area, without attachment to the outcome. If you are willing to listen, to hear something that I haven’t heard expressed in the conversation up to now, and to consider things with an open mind — read on.

The so-called “Ṛtvik Philosophy” that you are programmed to attack or defend is actually a straw man.

If you rigorously analyse it, it falls apart to reveal what’s actually behind it — and what is really being attacked by all the doctrinal programming.

Śrīla Prabhupāda created the Ṛtvik system of initiation, authorised it, and formalised in 1977— and crucially: he did not limit it to his physical presence.

It’s this last point that has become a battleground. Not by those who want to continue using the system—but by those who want to deny that it can be used.

Those who wish to constrain it to his physical presence cannot do so with an empirical claim. There is no instruction from Śrīla Prabhupāda stating: “this ends with my physical body”.

In order to box it in to Prabhupāda’s physical presence, proponents have to deploy a philosophical case. Thus: the so-called Ṛtvik “Philosophy” is stood up to obfuscate that what is actually being attacked is Śrīla Prabhupāda’s Ṛtvik System and most crucially: Śrīla Prabhupāda’s authority and ability to authorise it.

Let’s just go very slowly here — because there is a significant psychological operation to suppress thinking about this. Just by considering and discussing this topic, people immediately begin yelling at me, psychoanalysing me, shouting slogans and canned arguments, and trying to shut down any thinking.

Redefining Ṛtvik — erasing śabda, rebasing the conversation on an illusion

The first thing to analyse is the redefinition of the word ṛtvik.

This is a crucial move in both obfuscating what is really going on, and conversely in unwinding the complexity and confusion to bring clarity to the issue.

I will give a parallel here to help you think about this. In 2021, the definition of the word “vaccine” was changed. Prior to 2021, a vaccine was defined as “a medical treatment that prevents you from getting a disease”. In 2021, the definition was changed to make it “a treatment that either stops you from getting a disease or lessens the impact if you do get it”.

And just like that — by redefining the word — the entire domain of discourse was shifted. You could no longer say: “This is not a vaccine”. And if you pointed out that a novel, untested experimental medical therapy carried a risk profile that outweighed the risk from the disease, you were now an “anti-vaxxer”.

If you control the language that people use, you control the thoughts that they can have and the ideas that they can express and effectively communicate.

This is just for ordinary materially-conditioned śabda. If you overwrite transcendental śabda-brahman with material śabda the effect is even worse. Correct reasoning (anumāṇa) proceeds from śabda (—Tattva-Sandarbha, Śrīla Jiva Gosvāmī). If you overwrite śabda-brahman with materially-conditioned śabda, you make it impossible to arrive at correct siddhānta (conclusion).

The word ṛtvik in a transcendental context — faithfully reproducing the śabda of His Divine Grace Śrīla A.C. Bhaktivedānta Swāmī Prabhupāda — means “an officiating ācārya who initiates on behalf of His Divine Grace”.

I want you to look right now: do you have an emotional reaction to this word? Are arguments already arising in your mind? A sense of “us and them”? Just notice it. We’re doing nothing more right now than locating ourselves in the transcendental śabda of His Divine Grace. This is a word that he used, and this is the meaning that he used it with. This is the authorized meaning in disciplic succession.

When we vibrate the transcendental śabda faithfully in disciplic succession, when we ask the question: “Are you a ṛtvik?”, we are asking: “Are you an officiating ācārya who initiates on behalf of His Divine Grace?”

What has been done with this word is that another word that sounds the same has been deployed to obscure this word and its meaning. In conversations with devotees, I have noticed that this overwriting is defended by devotees. “It’s a well-known meaning,” they say. It’s an overwriting of an authorized sound vibration with a materially-conditioned śabda that makes correct reasoning impossible. Just get the point theoretically, and do the work of distinguishing the word to go back to first principles.

This may seem like nitpicking or being legalistic, or being difficult or being “smart”, or “semantics” or “word jugglery” — or any other of a number of philosophically distorting narratives. But it is nothing more than locating ourselves in the transcendental śabda of His Divine Grace to see what is revealed when we look from there, and not a shifted ground of social śabda.

The unauthorized socially-conditioned word that has overwritten it is “ṛtvik — a person who believes in a deviant philosophy that Prabhupāda’s system of Ṛtvik initiation is authorized post-1977”.

The referent has been shifted. Now, if I ask: “Are you are a ṛtvik?” my words no longer mean the say thing that the sentence means when Śrīla Prabhupāda says the same sentence. This is not a social detail — this is a step into a parallel universe. Actual word jugglery has just started — the word is no longer rooted in transcendental śabda. It is now ungrounded — in the air.

Let me ask this question, echoing Kṛṣṇa’s question to his father Nanda Mahārāja during the Indra yajña: “this transformed term that you are using — is it based in śabda, or is it merely a social convention?” Who authorized this term and its meaning — and more importantly, who authorized overwriting Prabhupāda’s śabda with this?

No-one can point to the sage who did this. It is the first ghost siddhānta that we encounter. Someone did this. But who did it is obscured, and it now lives as a social convention. That is neither authoritative, nor is it sourceful. Someone did this. And what they did is overwrite the śabda of Śrīla Prabhupāda in order to reshape the conversation to drive it to conclusions that contradict Śrīla Prabhupāda. I will demonstrate this, and the first step in that reasoning is this:

We are going to reject this redefinition.

This is the first, important move. We reject the unauthorized redefinition of this word away from the transcendental śabda of His Divine Grace, and stay faithful to reproducing his sound vibration. We reason from his śabda, not from social convention.

A Philosophy to Make Up for a Missing Empirical Premise

Let’s go back to the original set of premises:

1. Śrīla Prabhupāda created and authorized a system of Ṛtvik initiations.

2. He formalised it and it was documented in 1977.

3. He did not limit it to his physical presence.

These are empirical claims, not philosophical claims.

It is this last premise that is problematic for opponents. There is no empirical case that can be made to limit it to his physical presence. It must be done philosophically.

It is the claim that “this system is only authorized to November 14, 1977” that requires a philosophy.

Try to understand this point — Śrīla Prabhupāda’s Ṛtvik system is empirically established by His Divine Grace.

The case that it must end on November 14, 1977 is not empirically stated by Prabhupāda. It must be asserted using a philosophical case.

So, it is actually the case against Śrīla Prabhupāda’s Ṛtvik system that is a philosophy, not the statement that “Prabhupāda created and authorized it and did not state that it ends on November 14, 1977”.

Can you see that? Even the idea that people are arguing against a “Ṛtvik Philosophy” is not at all accurate.

What is happening is that in the absence of empirical evidence that the system is authorized only to November 14, 1977, a philosophy is created to make that claim philosophically.

Part of the psychological operation is to pretend that there is a deviant philosophy called “Ṛtvik philosophy”. There is not. There is the empirical claim made up of the three premises at the start of this section. I acknowledge that it has interesting, maybe counter-intuitive —definitely inconvenient, today— implications. And there is a philosophy that attempts to introduce a constraint on Śrīla Prabhupāda’s ability to authorize it beyond November 14, 1977. This philosophy pretends to attack another philosophy, but it is an attempt to create an empirical constraint, philosophically. The target of that philosophical constraint is Śrīla Prabhupāda.

I can see how even this basic reasoning will be difficult to grasp. If you have internalised it, you will say: “Well, he can’t authorize it beyond November 14, 1977”.

Let’s just say this: maybe, maybe not. But be clear on this: the claim that he can’t authorize it is a philosophical claim. And it is used because there is no empirical claim, i.e. there is no empirical premise: “He said it was authorized only until November 14, 1977”.

The entire enterprise is a psychological, social engineering, and philosophical endeavour targeting the direct reading of the empirical claims — not targeting a deviant philosophy:

He didn’t limit it to November 14, 1977 — so we are going to do that, philosophically.

The supposed target is a deviant “Ṛtvik philosophy” straw man. The actual target is the missing empirical premise, and they want to create that by directly attacking Śrīla Prabhupāda’s ability to authorize it post-November 14, 1977. And they do that by building an actual philosophy.

The so-called “Ṛtvik Philosophy” is a straw man. It acts as a proxy target for a philosophical assault on Śrīla Prabhupāda.

In the next post, I am going to look at the axioms of this actual philosophy. It contains serious philosophical errors, and even includes arguments smuggled in from the Gaudiya Math that were used in the aftermath of the disappearance of Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī.

At this point, if you are wondering: “Is Sītāpati a ṛtvik?”, you need to read this article again — maybe several times. I am not an officiating ācārya initiating on behalf of His Divine Grace Śrīla A.C. Bhaktivedānta Swāmī Prabhupāda.

Did Prabhupāda create and authorize his Ṛtvik system. Undeniably. Did he intend it to be used on November 15, 1977?

I don’t know for sure — but he might have. He certainly didn’t say that he did not.

That “he did not” (and “he could not”) is the conclusion of the unnamed philosophy that claims to be refuting the (non-existent) so-called “Ṛtvik philosophy” — and it’s a covert philosophical assault on Śrīla Prabhupāda.

Jaya Śrīla Prabhupāda!