By Bala Krsna dasa ACBSP
A Field Trip
I would like to take you on a journey, and am going to ask you to please fasten your seat belts. We are going to time travel a few years into the future, to a small village, to take a little tour.
As we arrive in the village we are struck by its serenity and cleanliness, and the vitality of its residents, including the children, the women, the elders, and the cows. Oxen pull carts and cows graze within the village, and other oxen pull farm implements in the nearby small fields. We discover that the village is inhabited almost entirely by devotees of Krsna. As we make inquiries we learn that this village was started by disciples of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and that there are even a few of those pioneers still living in the village.
In the centre of the village is a temple, and we are invited to go there first to see Radha and Krsna. After seeing the Deities in the temple we are offered maha Prasad sweets made from milk from cows that live in the community. Continuing our tour, we are taken next to the community school where we see happy children in the playground.
A little further down the road we are shown an anaerobic composting digester that transforms biomass, including both human and animal manure, into high grade compost, methane, and CO2. The compost, we learn, is used to enhance the soil in the fields and gardens, and the methane is used for heating and cooking. The CO2 is harnessed to enhance growth in the adjacent greenhouses. Everything in the village gets recycled, including especially the biomass left from harvested fields, which is seen as a great asset.
We observe solar panels on the rooftops of most buildings. Our guide then shows us the microhydro turbines that are hooked into nearby streams.
Near the border of the village is a parking lot where there are several buses, cars, and small trucks. Two of the buses, we learn, have brought visitors to this now famous self-sufficient village. Another bus belongs to the village, and is used by the community for going to local towns for sankirtana, and for going to Rathayatra festivals in the big cities. Sometimes the bus is used by the village school for taking students on field trips. We also learn that the families in the village cooperatively own several cars and trucks to be used for their occasional trips outside the village. Using the hemp grown by farmers in the village, they are able to produce all the fuel needed to drive these vehicles.
This ends our short tour, and we prepare to return to the present. Hopefully we will return again to find out more about the history and dynamics of this wonderful place, but at least we have been able to observe some of the highlights. One of the deepest impressions we take with us is the presence and importance of cows in the village and how much they are obviously loved by all the villagers.
Having returned from our time journey, let us think about the rural devotee communities in North America. Certainly there will be many things to learn in reviewing the history and examining the present state of Gita Nagari, New Vrndavana, Murari Sevak, New Raman Reti, New Talavan, Saranagati and others, but for the purpose of this paper i want to focus on cows and cars. And since I am a part of the Saranagati community, I’ll use the example of my own village, but from what I have heard, I think my observations are more or less common to all of our rural communities in North America.
At Saranagati there are approximately 30 licenced cars and trucks. There are also at least as many unlicenced vehicles that are used only in our valley. Last year (2008) five brand new vehicles were purchased. Taking together all the costs for purchasing, licencing, maintaining, and fueling, I estimate that Saranagati residents spent close to half a million dollars on cars in that one year. During that same time a negligible amount was spent to take care of the few animals that live here, none of whom are milking cows. This is after Saranagati has been in existence for 27 years. Over this span millions of dollars have been spent on cars and very little on cows.
I want to touch on a delicate subject. Delicate because, more or less, all devotees love milk products and the wonderful preparations that we offer to our Deities and our children. Since we don’t get milk from our own cows, we purchase milk products from the supermarket. Unfortunately, the economics of modern dairies (even the organic ones) demands that the cows be slaughtered. In effect, all the cows’ milk available at the store is subsidized by the slaughterhouse industry. The newborn males are slaughtered when they are very young, and the females are forced to produce babies and milk for several years, and when they can be replaced by a younger healthier cow, they are also slaughtered. Even while they live, the conditions where the dairy cows are kept are often far worse than those where the beef cows are raised. I haven’t tried to calculate how much is spent on slaughterhouse milk products every year by devotees in Saranagati (what to speak of the greater community of devotees), but it is a substantial amount.
Another point to consider is that the processing the milk is required to undergo to reach the supermarket shelves destroys much of the food value available in the fresh milk. I even hesitate to call it milk. There are serious questions about whether it has many health benefits. Perhaps it is even bad for most people’s health!
Think Globally, Act Locally
A major thread running throughout Srila Prabhupada’s teachings – including his purports, lectures, letters, and morning walks is a political, social, and economic analysis of and commentary on the world we live in. Naturally he was extremely critical of the contemporary Kali Yuga demoniac governments and cultures, which have continued their downward spiral since he was present with us several decades ago. Along with his analysis Srila Prabhupada offered solutions. He proposed a revolution – beginning, of course, with a revolution in consciousness of the people. Building on that, he envisioned a resultant revolution in the political, social, and economic fields of human endeavor, which would somehow eventually transform into functioning varnasrama societies. Daivi varnasrama, of course, with Krsna in the center.
Social activists have popularized the slogan: “think globally and act locally.” This principle is inherent is Srila Prabhupada’s teachings. He saw the possibility of a peaceful, united world through the spreading of sankirtana, and to support this he put forward a dynamic action plan for the establishment of local self-sufficient communities like the one we just visited in the future. This cultural development is an essential part of Srila Prabhupada’s plan. So much so that shortly before Srila Prabhupada entered his eternal samadhi, he stated that only 50% of his mission was completed. The completed 50% was the establishment of book distribution and Deity worship worldwide, and the balance 50% was the development of self-sufficient varnasrama villages. In the summer of 1977 Srila Prabhupada surprised many of us when he decided to go to his Gita Nagari project in Pennsylvania, despite his grave physical condition, intending to guide his followers in developing it as a model varnasrama village. But Krsna had other plans.
Sometimes I hear from friends various reasons why they think it impossible to implement varnasrama in the modern age. Rather than take time here to answer all the arguments, I will just pose the question. Doesn’t the instruction of the spiritual master carry with it the power to carry it out? Srila Bhaktisiddhanta asked his followers to establish Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu’s sankirtana movement in the western countries. Some of them thought it was impossible, but someone else understood it was inevitable because it was the Lord’s plan. I think this is a similar situation.
Consequences
I would like to point out that the villages Srila Prabhupada wanted us to develop and the village culture that Mahatma Gandhi promoted are very similar. “Simple living and high thinking” was a slogan Gandhi attached to the Indian independence movement, and Srila Prabhupada had been a supporter of Gandhi’s movement before meeting his spiritual master. In light of this I would like to point out another interesting similarity between India’s Independence Movement and our Krsna Consciousness Movement. Gandhi dedicated his life to establishing this village culture and the value system of simple living and high thinking that it supports. He thought this would save India. Indian Independence would be meaningless to him if the village culture couldn’t function independently and self-sufficiently. Furthermore, Gandhi understood the importance of cow protection. He said that “cow protection is more important than Indian Independence.” Gandhi was a proponent of community based on local sustainable agriculture and economics, and of local village autonomy and decentralized politics,values that Srila Prabhupada also championed as essential to the health of a community.
But Gandhi’s prominent protégé, Jawaharlal Nehru, (who worked closely with Gandhi in the fight for Indian independence) after becoming India’s first Prime Minister, turned his back on the village and took the country down the path of western industrialization, more or less crushing Gandhi’s dream for a truly Indian independence. Ten to fifteen years later, Srila Prabhupada, prior to coming to America, wrote articles decrying Nehru’s policies and the consequent cultural and spiritual breakdown in India.
One of the consequences of Nehru’s betrayal of Gandhi’s vision is that in recent years more than a hundred thousand farmers in rural India have committed suicide, many of them by walking out into their fields and drinking the liquid chemical fertilizer that was part of the package deal they were conned into accepting by the Indian government and multinational corporations like Monsanto on the promise that it would bring them great prosperity. Instead the changeover destroyed their soil and put them hopelessly in debt.
Another consequence of Nehru’s betrayal of Gandhi’s principles is India’s current hot pursuit of the motorcar. A main political issue during the last general election was the building of a vast superhighway network throughout the entire country. These roads will be required to accommodate the vast increase in vehicles that are expected to enter into circulation. In 2007 the prime minister of India announced a 10 year Automotive Mission with the plan of making India the global hub of vehicle manufacturing. Currently India is already making over 12 million cars a year but the aim is to be making over 50 million per year by 2016. Needless to say, this car frenzy is devastating to the environment, and destructive to the cultural and spiritual lives of the people.
The Ford Motor Company, with the government’s help, has recently expropriated by corrupt means one thousand acres of prime agriculture land, including several villages. The villagers and small farmers were forced off their land so that cars can be manufactured. This same scenario is playing out in different ways all over the country, as many giant car manufacturing companies, such as Toyota, Mazda, and GMC take advantage of the opportunities created by the unholy union of politics and finance.
India is emerging as the new global king of the road – the sacred car capital of the world! The traditional role of the cow, as in the Vedic culture, is being lost to the motorcar culture. I believe that cows and cars do not go well together, but that rather they are symbols of two diametrically opposed world views and value systems.
Please consider this. After Srila Prabhupada departed from this world, the leaders among his followers, similar to the way that Nehru abandoned Gandhi’s vision, seem to have turned their backs on the self-sufficient community development that was so dear and important to him, and have taken the movement in another direction. The village has been moved to a back burner and nearly forgotten.
More than thirty years have passed since Srila Prabhupada was promoting the simple living and high thinking of self-sufficient model spiritual communities as a major platform in his mission. Yet we have hardly one model village that clearly demonstrates the efficacy of his teachings. It is my observation that in many respects Srila Prabhupada’s Movement has come to resemble a mainstream, middleclass, sectarian religion, integrating happily into the dominant car culture. Cow protection has become car protection. Perhaps one criterion for measuring the success of a temple nowadays is how many BMW’s there are in the parking lot during the Sunday feast program. In the meantime, the necessity of cow protection has become obscured and the use of slaughterhouse milk products doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Even our surviving rural communities resemble, in many respects, the suburban motorcar culture, with little or no cow protection.
Time
Has Prabhupada’s vision of world-wide self-sufficient, varnasrama communities burned to a crisp on the back burner? Is there hope for making a transition from the custom of keeping two cars in the garage and no cows in the barn, to the custom of keeping two cows in the barn and no cars in the garage? When will we be able to stop serving slaughterhous milk to our Deities and children because we have enough milk from Krsna’s protected cows? When will we be able to provide our children with a thorough education that also prepares them to happily participate in the village culture, rather than a having to gear a significant part of their education preparing them only to fit in as cogs in the wheel of the motorcar culture?
Certainly Srila Prabhupada wanted for us to be able to live in these self-sufficient villages centered on Vaisnava culture and cow protection. He wanted this for the protection of his followers’ spiritual development and for setting an example of simple living and high thinking that could open the possibility for spiritual development to many other people. What will it take to move us in this direction? How soon will we be able to visit or even live in one of these real villages? How long will that village be accessible only by a fantasy journey into the future?
“[S]hortly before Srila Prabhupada entered his eternal samadhi, he stated that only 50% of his mission was completed. The completed 50% was the establishment of book distribution and Deity worship worldwide, and the balance 50% was the development of self-sufficient varnasrama villages.”
When I was in Orissa recently I was challenged by a devotee to show where Srila Prabhupada ever made such a statement. I did not really know. Could some of our researchers with Folio at their fingertips come up with a citation, please?
The best I could do was recall one of the principles of the charter of ISKCON in 1966 in New York was to promote a “simpler, more natural way of life.” The complete list, as reproduced on the ISV website, is as follows:
“1. To systematically propagate spiritual knowledge to society at large and to educate all people in the techniques of spiritual life in order to check the imbalance of values in life and to achieve real unity and peace in the world.
“2. To propagate a consciousness of Krishna (God), as it is revealed in the great scriptures of India, Bhagavad-gita and Srimad Bhagavatam.
“3. To bring the members of the Society together with each other and nearer to Krishna, the prime entity, thus developing the idea within the members, and humanity at large, that each soul is part and parcel of the quality of Godhead (Krishna).
“4. To teach and encourage the sankirtana movement, congregational chanting of the holy name of God, as revealed in the teachings of Lord Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu.
“5. To erect for the members and for society at large a holy place of transcendental pastimes dedicated to the personality of Krishna.
“6. To bring the members closer together for the purpose of teaching a simpler, more natural way of life.
“7. With a view towards achieving the aforementioned purposes, to publish and distribute periodicals, magazines, books and other writings.”
Development of self-sufficient varnasrama villages (covered in item #6) is a wonderful and lofty goal. Yet, sometimes in the allocation of scarce resources there may seem to be tension between this goal and other goals, such as (#4) teaching and encouraging the sankirtan movement (to a largely urbanized world population), and (#7) publication and distribution of books and other writings.
Ideally, those devotees inclines to develop varnasrama villages should do so close enough to urban population centers that the general public can visit and appreciate the example.
Cows and the Earth
I applaud Bala Krsna’s article. The statistic about Indian farmers committing suicide is particularly shocking (I would like to know the source of this information for my own research). Here in the UK farmers are also under pressure. Their suicide rate, according to government stats, is roughly twice that of the wider population.
At Bhaktivedanta Manor we are on the way to demonstrating Cow Protection as a viable alternative to intensive industrial farming. We have the advantage of a generous congregation who have subsidised the effort so far. More importantly, a succession of dedicated cowherds have done the hard work, milking the cows at 4 every morning for 35 years, inlcuding the present farm director, Syamasundara Das.
I have detailed our journey with the cows at Bhaktivedanta Manor, and the vital role Cow Protection has for all our futures, in my recent book ‘Cows and the Earth.’
In response to Akruranatha’s question, did Prabhupada really say that? I can report that when Prabhupada made his last visit to the Manor in 1977, it was well-known that he had said 50% of his mission, namely varnasrama, was yet to be established. We all knew that was why he was planning to go to the Gita-Nagari farm community. I am sure there are others who can confirm this.
Ranchor das (Ranchor Prime)
To answer the question, “Where did Srila Prabhupada make such a statement,” I can refer to numerous lectures in which His Holiness Bhakti Charu Swami recalls a night in Vrindavana spent with Srila Prabhupada in his quarters. As Bhakti Charu Swami explains, Srila Prabhupada could not sleep on that night, and so he began to speak to Bhakti Charu Swami. He told him those exact words, among others, “I have done only 50 percent. The remaining 50 percent is establishing Varnasrama.”
Your servant,
Chandrashekhara acharya dasa
To all devotees:
Just look around us, we live in filthy polluted cities , we drink slaughterhouse cow’s milk, we eat food which is grown using artificial fertilizers and toxic pesticides, we send our children to modern schools where the only goal is economic development.
Yet, we claim that we have the way..the best way to reach out to God.
How on earth do we get people to take us seriously?
what makes us different from so many other fanatical religious groups?
Can we honestly claim that we practice what we preach?
“Simple living and high thinking” has been reduced to “Simply living and hardly thinking”
“Avatar” the Cameron movie proved that Ecology is the religion for todays thoughtful youth.
Can we really raise our hand and say that we can show the way out to the world’s ecological problems ?
To truth us, we have sold out to this modern demonaic civilization. Myself included.
Thank you Bala Krsna Dal for waking me up.
Thanks to Ranchor Prabhu and Candrashekhara Acarya Prabhu for answering my question. When I was put “on the spot” I did not have a ready answer.
More particularly I was wondering whether there was an exact quotation, because “establishing varnasrama” is not necessarily synonymous with encouraging devotees to move to self-sufficient rural villages. For example, devotees who are distributing books and establishing educational institutions in which Srila Prabhupada’s writings on varnasrama dharma are carefully studied and discussed could also be seen as contributing toward “establishing varnasrama”, even if they do so in an urban or suburban environment.
When we look at the historical trend of ISKCON communities from, say, 1977 to today, we see the development of congregations with more contacts and interaction with the “outside” economy.
In the 1970s, there was a greater duality between those who joined ISKCON (“us”) and those who didn’t (“them”). Devotees were expected to live communally inside ISKCON ashrams (whether urban or rural) in a way that was highly dependent on the ashram management. We generally did not have our own jobs or own our own cars. Few ISKCON devotees were over 30-years-old.
For better or worse, in many countries (like U.S. and Canada) we seem to have fewer devotees “living inside,” and our temples have a more accepting and accommodating relationship with larger congregations who often practice Krishna consciousness in a less committed way, deciding for themselves how to squeeze sadhana like japa, kirtan, arati, class into their daily schedules of work, school, family, home, recreation.
In one sense the old model appears to have been aimed at creating a class of highly-committed brahmanas and sannyasis, and the current, more congregational model seems more accepting that devotees will serve within different varnas and asramas.
Many devotees found that they could not sustain the lifestyle of dependence and communalism and lack of boundaries found in temple life, especially when married. Living in an ashram (esp. as brahmacaris) could be seen as a kind of intense training period that prepared them better for remaining Krishna conscious in a more economically autonomous (from ISKCON, not from Krishna of course) stage of life as lay congregation.
What, if anything, does this trend from “inside v. outside” to “congregational” organization have to do with “establishing varnasram”?
There is a document entitled “Constitution of Association”, dating from the same 1966 time period of the original articles of incorporation of ISKCON in New York, containing many of the same “purposes” of ISKCON as that corporate charter, but more of them, in greater detail.
It was signed by Srila Prabhupada and four other devotees including Michael Grant (Mukunda Maharaja), and is kind of an elaborate mission statement or strategic outline of ISKCON, containing more than the famous seven purposes.
It is divided into primary objectives and secondary objectives. Among the secondary objectives, I thought two were especially relevant to the varnasrama dharma topic:
“(N) Among the secondary objectives of the Society, it shall undertake the following activities:
“1. To revive the scientific system of social orders of classification based on intelligence, martial spirit, productivity and common assistance, generally known as the four castes with reference to quality and worth for the common cause of world society.
“2. To discharge as a matter of course the vitiated system of supremacy of one man over another by false prestige of birthright or vested interests.”
I think it is particularly noteworthy that reviving the scientific system is, by its very nature, to be opposed to the “vitiated system of supremacy of one man over another by false prestige.”
In other words, real varnasrama dharma is presented as a way to engage everyone in one common cause according to their natural qualities, and thus promotes the true vision of equality and harmony of all people and indeed of all living beings.
Part of the job of reviving the real scientific system of varnasrama dharma is to do away with the system of exploitation based on false prestige (whether through social systems of hierarchical privilege based on birthright — such as the modern Hindu caste system or the remnants of feudalism and slavery — or unjust economic domination of the poor by the rich in market economies).
The language, “To discharge as a matter of course…” is interesting. Why did Srila Prabhupada use this particular language?
Does he mean that ISKCON need not be involved in direct campaigning in opposition to social and political evils, but that by reviving the scientific system of social orders (and by engaging in the other activities of ISKCON, propagating sankirtan, etc.), the vitiated system will almost “automatically” disappear?
Thoughts anyone?