In a recent live stream (see YouTube) a short exchange happened with a member of the audience. The text – on Naranarayana, from Srimad Bhagavatam 5.19.9-15 – was showing how important knowledge (jñāna) is to devotion (bhakti). An audience member named Andrew commented in live chat:

My Gurūdev says that reading books is only meant to awaken inner Transcendental Knowledge & realizations, not that we should depend only on books and bookish knowledge.

Andrew when on to name and glorify his guru (which, however, is irrelevant to the essence of what I would like to discuss here). I replied to the effect that I don’t fully agree. Andrew replied:

The reason I mention like that is because the “gurus” at ISKCON rely on bookish knowledge.

Andrew felt that ISKCON relied too much on book-knowledge, and I gave my opinion that the exact opposite was true. I firmly and deeply believe that much of ISKCON’s problem is that they do not study source texts enough at all.

Another person from the stream privately contacted me saying that I had committed a grave offense against Vaiṣṇavas by stating that ISKCON Gurus “Have no Knowledge,” stressing that it is very impossible that all ISKCON gurus literally have no knowledge whatsoever.

I believe this is an extremely artificial way to digest what I actually said. I think that anyone familiar with common idioms of English would understand that I was telling Andrew that I felt exactly opposite to the way he felt. He felt ISKCON studied too much. I feel they don’t study enough. Even when they do study, they mostly explore only the commentary of their founder, and seldom if ever resolve any issues with source texts, or even become aware of conflicts with source texts, since they do not pay enough attention to those source texts and to explanations of those texts by ācāryas previous to their own.

This is my belief. I hope it is now clear.

If anyone felt that I literally meant that literally zero gurus in ISCKON literally have anything more than literally zero knowledge of source-texts in Bhakti and the surrounding Vedic schools of thought, hopefully this clarifies that such phrasing was employed in typical idiomatic manner. To be clear, of course I am aware that some ISKCON gurus have some valid knowledge. However, I believe that for someone to say “they have too much” is completely backwards.