HARE KRISHNAS SEE CHANGES AS 30TH ANNIVERSARY NEARS.

Byline: Gustav Niebuhr The New York Times

Of the new religious movements that came to flower in America in the 1960s, the Hare Krishnas seemed to be the lightning rod.

With their distinctive dress and demeanor - shaven heads and saffron robes, ecstatic dancing and chanting - they attracted fascination and hostility, almost in equal parts.

Many who joined the movement claimed to discover in this strand of Hinduism a spiritual discipline they found lacking in Western faiths. But others saw the movement as a dark presence, using methods close to brainwashing to retain recruits and inflicting psychological harm on some followers by the repetitive chanting.

In the 1980s, the Krishnas suffered setbacks, with organizational rifts that led to the expulsion of some leaders judged to have fallen away from the faith's practices.

Now, after a period in which it has been largely out of the news, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, as the movement is officially known, is about to mark its 30th anniversary, on July 11. Leaders say the movement has undergone changes, especially in how it relates to the society around it.

``We definitely matured a lot,'' said Anuttema Dasa, the movement's North America spokesman.

He has been a Krishna adherent, or devotee, as they are called, for 20 of his 41 years. He said the movement has been developing a system of ``checks and balances,'' giving greater training to devotees who will preach the faith.

``There's a lot of progress. There's a lot of work to be done yet. We're not apologetic for trying to share with people things that we felt have definitely improved our life,'' Anuttema said, but he noted that the movement has apologized for actions of some overzealous members.

The international organization was founded in New York in 1966 by an Indian guru, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. But the organization says its particular tradition of devotion to Lord Krishna, best-known of the Hindu deities, can be traced to a movement in 16th-century India.

Before he died in 1977, at the age of 81, Swami Prabhupada taught that if his followers were to develop a true love of Krishna, they should adopt an ascetic life and shun meat, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and sex outside marriage.

The movement built more than 30 temples in American urban areas, where devotees often lived dormitory-style, shared meals and rose daily at 4:30 a.m. for four hours of meditation, chanting and reading religious texts. There are two New York City temples, a small one in Manhattan and a larger one in Brooklyn.

In 1980, about 5,000 people lived in the temples, by the movement's estimate. The number living at the temples has since declined to about 1,000, but temple congregations have grown, especially with the arrival of many thousands of Asian Indian immigrants in the United States. The Krishnas estimate that 75,000 to 100,000 people may visit their American temples for services in a year.

Anuttema said the movement runs an international relief program, Food-for-Life, distributing vegetarian meals to inner-city neighborhoods and such places as Chechnya, the secessionist region in southern Russia.

The movement also has a chain of vegetarian restaurants and a publishing operation, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, which produces translations of Hinduism's most sacred text, the 5,000-year-old Bhagavad-gita, or Song of God.

But among those outside the Krishnas, opinions are still divided over the movement.

Larry Shinn, an authority on South Asian religions and president of Berea College in Berea, Ky., said the Krishnas ``have matured'' in recent years. ``For one thing,'' he said. ``the group is much less isolationist.''

Shinn, the author of ``The Dark Lord: Cult Images and the Hare Krishnas in America'' (Westminster, 1987), said financial pressures forced Krishna temples to reduce the number of people living within them, so many devotees work and live in secular society. He said contact has grown considerably between the Krishnas, largely converts, and Asian immigrants who are lifelong Hindus.

Shinn also said the movement has learned from its critics and reached out to society, as with the food program.

But others, particularly those in what are called anti-cult groups, take a skeptical view of the Krishnas' claim to have changed. One of them, Marcia R. Rudin, director of the International Cult Education Program, said: ``They want to appear very mainstream. All the cults are very PR-minded.''

Rudin said her organization - affiliated with the American Family Foundation, which studies ``psychological manipulation'' - hears more complaints about other organizations than it does about the Krishnas. But she said that parents still call to report that their children have become deeply estranged from them after joining the movement.