Harikesha Swami Vishnupada

Harikesha Swami was the first initiating guru among Bhaktivedanta Swami’s Western disciples that I came in contact with (in 1980). He relinquished his formal guru and sannyasi position in the late 1990s, but is still active, as a less traditional spiritual teacher and as a musician, and has several websites devoted to those activities. I found him to be often a forceful speaker, and a skilful expounder of the Vaishnava doctrines in his strict vyasasana teaching. He is known for emphasizing the relevance of the varnashrama system, even in the present and in the West, in his book The Varnasrama Manifesto for Social Sanity (1980?); and for the considerable risks he seems to have taken in teaching in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Wikipedia

René Guénon

Wikipedia

I disagree with much of Guénon’s historical understanding of Abrahamism (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and with parts of his view of the Renaissance and aspects of Western modernity. But I agree with much in his general conception of tradition, as formulated in Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines hindoues and elsewhere.