stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

314 STRIPPING THE GURUS
A long-time friend of Durga’s later offered her opinion of
Daya’s character, in Russell (1999), as being “weak and idealistic”
in her younger days, but then getting “a taste of power” in India.
One interesting change made by SRF, soon after Rajasi’s passing
and Daya Mata’s corresponding ascension into power, was in
the very spelling of their founder’s name.
Yogananda wrote his title, Paramhansa, without the additional
a in the middle. This is, in fact, how the word is commonly
pronounced in India. The addition of that letter was
made years later, on the advice of scholars in India, according
to whom Paramahansa without the a, though phonetically
true, was grammatically incorrect (Kriyananda, 1979).
That change was apparently made in 1958, coinciding with the
SRF-sponsored visit of His Holiness Jagadguru (“World Teacher”)
Sri Shankaracharya Bharati Krishna Tirtha to America. Tirtha
himself was the “ecclesiastical head of most of Hindu India and the
apostolic successor of the first Shankaracharya.”
Personally, I would never have followed Yogananda in the first
place if I thought that he didn’t know how to spell his own name.
(Similar issues to the above surround the past “Rajasi” versus current
“Rajarsi” spellings of Lynn’s monastic name [Dakota, 1998].)
In any case, under Daya Mata’s governance SRF has weathered
several recent scandals, including one involving the alleged
sexual activities of a highly placed male monastic minister who
was reportedly ultimately forced to leave the order. The handling
of that difficulty allegedly included nearly one-third of a million
dollars in compensation paid to the unfortunate woman involved.
In that same context, however:
[Persons familiar with the details] contend that several top
SRF leaders—including Daya Mata—not only turned a deaf
ear to [the woman in question] after she sought help while
still involved with the monk, but that those leaders attempted
to ruin her reputation within the church even as
they sought to preserve [the monk’s] monastic career....
“They [the church leadership] pretty much destroyed [the involved
woman’s] faith and ruined her life” [a friend said]
(Russell, 1999).
That is all the more disappointing, given the alleged “perfected
being” nature of SRF’s leadership and its Board of Directors: