Live From Sri Mayapur Candrodaya Mandir!
Date: February 12th, 2012
Topic: Departure of Lord Krishna to Dvaraka and Leadership
Verse: SB 1.10.26
Speaker: HH Bhanu Swami
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aho alam slaghyatamam yadoh kulam aho alam punyatamam madhor vanam yad esa pumsam rsabhah sriyah patih sva-janmana cankramanena cancati
TRANSLATION: Oh, how supremely glorified is the dynasty of King Yadu, and how virtuous is the land of Mathura, where the supreme leader of all living beings, the husband of the goddess of fortune, has taken His birth and wandered in His childhood.
PURPORT: In the Bhagavad-gita the Personality of Godhead Sri Krsna has expressively given a description of His transcendental appearance, disappearance and activities. The Lord appears in a particular family or place by His inconceivable potency. He does not take His birth as a conditioned soul quits his body and accepts another body. His birth is like the appearance and disappearance of the sun. The sun arises on the eastern horizon, but that does not mean that the eastern horizon is the parent of the sun. The sun is existent in every part of the solar system, but he becomes visible at a scheduled time and so also becomes invisible at another scheduled time. Similarly, the Lord appears in this universe like the sun and again leaves our sight at another time. He exists at all times and at every place, but by His causeless mercy when He appears before us we take it for granted that He has taken His birth. Anyone who can understand this truth, in terms of the statements of revealed scriptures, certainly becomes liberated just after quitting the present body. Liberation is obtainable after many births and after great endeavor in patience and perseverance, in knowledge and renunciation. But simply by knowing in truth about the Lord’s transcendental births and activities, one can get liberation at once. That is the verdict of the Bhagavad-gita. But those who are in the darkness of ignorance conclude that the Lord’s birth and activities in the material world are similar to those of the ordinary living being. Such imperfect conclusions cannot give anyone liberation. His birth, therefore, in the family of King Yadu as the son of King Vasudeva and His transfer into the family of Nanda Maharaja in the land of Mathura are all transcendental arrangements made by the internal potency of the Lord. The fortunes of the Yadu dynasty and that of the inhabitants of the land of Mathura cannot be materially estimated. If simply by knowing the transcendental nature of the birth and activities of the Lord one can get liberation easily, we can just imagine what is in store for those who actually enjoyed the company of the Lord in person as a family member or as a neighbor. All those who were fortunate enough to associate with the Lord, the husband of the goddess of fortune, certainly obtained something more than what is known as liberation. Therefore, rightly, the dynasty and the land are both ever glorious by the grace of the Lord. [End of Srila Prabhupada’s purport to SB 1.10.27]
HH Bhanu Swami: So this is a verse in praise of not only Krishna but His associates in the land of Mathura, Vrindavan and the family of Yadu etc. What is the significance or why I chose this verse simply because it says there is a supreme leader of all beings and I was supposed to speak on that
– leadership. So I thought the supreme leader is Krishna. So He is pumsan rsabhah, the best of all beings – humans or jivas or whatever. So yes Krishna is the supreme leader and we can’t change that. His position is isvara and we are jivas so there is a big difference between us. He is not only the leader in the sense of being isvara but as Krishna He is svayam bhagavan. So even amongst the forms of god He is also God. He is also very special. In any case all the forms of Bhagavan are special.
The word bhagavan itself means possessing bhaga and bhaga is defined as six qualities – the first two being which are aisvarya and virya which are referred to as power. He controls everything. Aisvarya is derived from isvara. Isa means to control. So by his very nature the Supreme Lord controls everything and it can never be changed. It is fixed. That is His svarup or His very nature. Virya means something similar to that. It also means heroism and powers. Our acaryas say that virya is distinguished from aisvarya by the fact that virya means he has got acintya sakti, inconceivable powers. So not only is He powerful but His powers are beyond imagination and beyond logic and even contradictory. All so that these powers as such that They do impossible things. The Lord can do what is impossible. So that is His acintya sakti or His virya.
Usually we associate leadership with power. These virya and aisvarya are naturally in the Supreme Lord so that puts Him in the highest position of leadership. Of course there are some other qualities of leadership. People have different expectations of their leaders. Everybody has a different ideal of what a leader is and of course different people have different types of leaders. There are political leaders. You may expect one thing from that. Then you may have another type of leader or whatever – dancer or singer or whatever. So different people have different types. They may care about the political leaders but they have some other person in their mind as their ideal. Everybody has some sort of ideal but unfortunately it is all material.
So Krishna is the ideal leader because He meets everybody’s expectations. Whatever you can imagine is in Krishna – everything wonderful. That is of course in the Nectar of Devotion. Rupa Goswami gives sixty-four qualities of Krishna. Of course He has four special qualities but even the fifty qualities are very wonderful. We don’t expect to find all these fifty in any of our leaders in the modern world or whatever. We don’t find all of those fifty qualities which should be there in a good jiva. We don’t find them in our modern leaders at all. They are very wonderful qualities. Then we have the very special qualities of Krishna Himself.
Krishna is the ideal leader and we can never hope to compete with Him. We are doing a leadership conference but we cannot think that we are going to be like Krishna and that is not our ambition. Rather there is a little bit of a difference. In other words as devotees we are trying to be servant of the servant of the servant, humbler than the blade of grass etc. So we are doing the opposite. We are not trying to lead in one sense and compete with Krishna but we are trying to be a servant.
In the material world it is the opposite. We are trying to compete with Krishna. We are trying to compete with Him. That is literal in some cases. For instance we see the story o Paundraka. He was a demon but he was the most foolish demon because he wanted to imitate Krishna in every way. He even wanted His four arms. He wanted His Sanka and His Chakra. He wrote a letter to Krishna, “Please give the Sanka and Chakra to me. It is mine. It is not Yours.”[Laughter]
When Krishna finally came to the battlefield then Paundraka was a little worried. He had two extra hands glued to his back sitting on his chariot. He was a real fool because even in form he was trying to imitate Krishna. But in the material world of course people are not so elaborately or consciously imitating the Lord but they are seeking some position of control and enjoyment which is Krishna’s position.
So anyway Krishna is at the very top and ideal in every way and He meets everybody’s expectations very wonderfully and inconceivably. There is the description of Krishna when he entered into the arena of Kamsa. There is a very famous verse that describes how everyone saw Kamsa… Krishna. One Krishna who entered the arena and everybody looked at Him and everybody saw Him differently. The women saw Him in madhurya rasa. They all fell in love with Him as their consort, the wrestlers saw Him as an opponent in virya rasa and He was as hard as a thunderbolt even though Krishna is actually as soft, that if He touches a leaf it bruises Him. When the wrestlers saw Him He was as hard as a thunderbolt. It is the same Krishna that the women saw as their dear lover.
Vasudeva and Devaki saw Him as a little child unprotected and ready to get crushed by these wrestlers. The yadus saw Him as their worshipable Lord and the yogis saw Him as Brahman. They didn’t see His beauty. The saw this is peaceful. We can merge into Him. So everyone saw Him in a different way. And even the demons, Kamsa also saw Krishna but he saw Him as death in great fear. So everyone saw Krishna in a different way and He satisfied their expectations. Everybody’s expectations were satisfied. Simultaneously everybody was completely happy with Him. That makes Krishna the ideal person because anyone can approach Him and anyone can get the highest bliss and that bliss it eternal.
That doesn’t happen in the material world. Everybody has got limitations and people expect things of them and it is never met. So there is a difference between the jiva and the Supreme Lord. The Supreme Lord is the ultimate.
So how does a devotee become a leader then. It is rather contradictory that he should be a dasanudasanudasa and at the same time be a leader and a leader is like a material person who has got to control others. Of course in the gunas we have the ksatriya who is an ideal leader. He has got raja-guna in him and a little sattva-guna but as devotees we are not trying to cultivate raja-guna. We are definitely not! Maybe a little sattva-guna is good but definitely not raja-guna. So how we become leaders and lead the devotees if we are supposed to be transcendental to all of this and not compete with Krishna?
We see that if we take the example in our sampradaya. We have Caitanya Mahaprabhu, then we have the Gosvamis who followed Him and sat in Vrindavan and wrote books etc. Then we have Jiva Goswami who wrote the Sat-sandarbas and they were all trying to fulfil the mission of Caitanya Mahaprabhu very nicely. Yes they were leaders also and of course they had great respect for everyone. Jiva Goswami also writes in the end of the Sat-sandarbhas where he refers to the Visnu Vaisnava Raja-sabha, the assembly of universal Vaisnavas. That means all the great Vaisnavas within the universe in a big assembly headed by Rupa and Sanatan Goswami. So he mentions this assembly, this organisation so to speak – a group of people in his Sat-sandarbhas.
We can say that maybe practically speaking they never met as a big group anywhere except the six Goswamis were there in Vrindavan but as a bigger group, to our material vision they didn’t met anyway. But the idea was there that there was a group of devotees together appreciating the philosophy and the pastimes of Krishna and the process of bhakti as a group.
Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura – it is his appearance day today, he mentioned later on in 1919, he mentioned this Sabha. And it is very interesting how they mentioned it because at that time he established his first Matha, the Caitanya Matha in Mayapur. Then he came to Calcutta and he established a Matha there. Then he said we are establishing again this Visnu Vaisnava Raja-sabha which was there in the time of Jiva Goswani and Rupa Goswami and it kind of disappeared a little. It is eternal but it did not manifest. Then it manifested again with the works of Visvanath Cakravati Thakura and baladev Vidyabhusan. Then it kind of disappeared again. Then it started appearing again with the appearance of Bhaktivinode Thakura.
We know the Bhaktivinode Thakura was a very revolutionary preacher. He wrote a lot of his individual works as well as reviving original works. He wrote in Bengali, he wrote in Sanskrit. He preached in different modes, creative modes sometimes as short stories or novels or whatever and he also wrote philosophical works. He preached to all sorts of people. He established the nama-hatta which was originally established by Nityananda. He re-established it as an organisation. He also mentions the Visnu Vaisnava Raja-sabha in some of his lectures. Whether he formed it or not I don’t know but he mentioned it in some of his lectures that our group is like this Sabha.
So that was a revival of this group again and Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati said, “We are establishing this again now.” That is when he established Gaudiya Math organisation. So if we look at the history of the Gaudiya Vasinavas after Caitanya Mahaprabhu, of course Nityananda and Lord Caitanya, Gadadhara, Srivas Pandita etc. they all had groups of followers and their own groups. So there was some sort of organisation. And Lord Caitanya made some provisions for presenting the philosophy by making the Goswanis write works.
Then Jiva Goswami had some plan therefore he got all the works of the Goswamis and sent it from Vrindavan to Bengal so they could take advantage of all this and then spread it there – get the philosophical basis straight. There was a huge gathering during Jahnava Matas time. Under her auspices they gathered all the prominent Vaisnavas of that time, including Narottam Dasa Thakura. They gathered together and had a hug festival in Kheturigram and they installed a lot of deities at that time. They had kirtans and discourses etc. there was some organisation there – getting together and discussing things, preaching and making plans.
After than point in time we see that a lot of the preaching took place with individuals rather than groups and this becomes what we know as the caste Goswami line. People were initiated in lines of hereditary gurus like this. In different places in Bengal and Vrindavan and Orissa. So that continued until the time of Bhaktivinode Thakur. Then he decided he wanted to preach really vigorously not within the lines of this caste Goswami groups with their temples but rather to the public at large. And carrying on that vein Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura therefore established the Gaudiya Math. In sixteen or seventeen years he had established sixty-four Maths in India which was remarkable and a few centres abroad also. He did this with determination.
So we take Bhaktivinode Thakur and Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakur as great leaders in preaching and particularly with Bhaktisiddhanta Sarsavati Thakur we see him very, very carefully finding out how to spread the mission of Caitanya Mahaprabhu. Then he thought we have to have an organisation. So he made this whole structure of Maths with brahmacaris and sannyasis to do preaching work and carry it on. So he was a leader but we should not equate this type of leadership with material leadership. Of course we have gross material leadership in the modern world and then we have the varnasrama leadership with the ksatriya who is in raja-guna or sattva-guna or whatever. So the Vaisnava leadership is a little different.
It is not that Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati strove to be a leader or chose to cultivate raja-guna or sattva-guna or whatever. He was just a Vaisnava. We look in the Caitanya-caritamrta orSrimad-Bhagavatam and we will find the list of the characteristics of a Vaisnava such as tolerance and compassion, sense control etc. we will see many list of qualities of devotees in the twelfth chapter also in Bhagavad-gita but what is the main quality? The main quality is surrender to Krishna. This is the primary quality of the devotee and every other quality follows after that. If you have every other quality but you don’t have that – useless – it is all material. So if you cultivate all these material qualities but if you don’t have surrender for Krishna what is it? Nothing! On the other hand if you cultivate surrender to Krishna as a devotee automatically the qualities follow So that is the principle.
In the ‘Nectar of Devotion’ Rupa Goswami says what is the second quality of bhakti – subadha – bestowal of auspiciousness. And what is tha auspiciousness? All good qualities appear. So with the cultivation of bhakti then all wonderful necessary qualities for bhakti, for preaching, for leadership etc. manifest themselves. So it is not a separate cultivation. It is something that automatically goes along with the process of bhakti.
These are not therefore material things as long as they are used for the service of Krishna. They become spiritualised. If we look at Krishna’s qualities we can’t call those material qualities. He has sense control, He is gentle and compassionate. Those aren’t material qualities. Those are spiritual qualities. By doing bhakti we associate with Krishna. Bhakti is also the svarup sakti of Krishna so it is non-different from Krishna. Krishna is full of all wonderful qualities. When they associate with Krishna the jiva also develops all good qualities, at least fifty out of those sixty-four. In this way by doing bhakti spiritual qualities should naturally develop. These are different from material cultivation of qualities in the gunas either sattvi, rajasic or tamasic qualities. They are beyond that. They are actually spiritual qualities. They may look like material qualities but they are not. They are spiritual qualities. So those are the real qualities that a devotee will develop in the process of his bhakti.
Therefore we strive to be the devotee – a wonderful devotee or a good devotee of the Supreme Lord and in that process then Krishna manifests in us whatever is necessary for our particular service in our particular mission. For instance Prabhupada said, “What did I do? I simply followed the order of my spiritual master. I wasn’t trying to do this or that. I was just following his order.” That order of his spiritual master was his life and soul. That was his mode of bhakti. “I should preach to everyone. I should preach to intelligent people in the western world. I should somehow deliver the fallen souls of the material world.” That was his mission. That was his mode of bhakti and Krishna supplied everything. I am just like a puppet in Krishna’s hands. He pulls the strings and I do. He wasn’t separately striving for anything – this or that. But rather he concentrated on his goal and he got the intelligence and whatever else was necessary to fulfil that goal.
So as Gopal Bhatta has related the story of Giriraj Sami when he was a brahmacari. He went to Prabhupada one night and Prabhupada was very worried how this movement will continue. Giriraj said, “Well if we follow the regulative principles and chant sixteen rounds then it will continue.” It is a good answer of course. If we are steady in our bhakti then the movement continues. Prabhupada thought for a moment. He was on the bed and then he said, “Organisation and intelligence.” That doesn’t mean we don’t do the bhakti but we also do something else along with the bhakti to help us.
In the sankirtan movement I said the movement expanded in different ways. We had Nityananda preaching and others preaching and they were thinking of how to do things. So they were using their intelligence to write scriptures and to deliver those scriptures from Vrindavan to Bengal to have meetings to unify the philosophy, unify the different groups of Vaisnavas together and different principles etc. They were thinking in that way. It is not that they just did bhakti.
Then we see with Bhaktivinode Thakur and with Bhaktisiddhanta Saravati Thakur again they very systematically began to plan out how to preach to people in the modern world not just in a limited way but to go to different places, different groups and different countries all over the world. And the further manifestation of that was the vision and work of Srila Prabhupada. So he carried them even a step further.
Prabhupada established the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. That was his organisation. It became quite a formal organisation unlike the lose organisations of previously where they had groups of people following a particular leader or the caste Goswamis with the families. That was their organisation. So Bhaktisiddhanta established the Gaudiya Math. Unfortunately it broke up into many pieces. Prabhupada established the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. There are many centres in many parts of the world. This is a little bit different and may be a little more difficult than Bhaktisiddhanta with sixty-four centres in India. So we have five hundred centres around the world in all sorts of countries. So how to keep that together? If sixty-four in India are going to break apart if you got five hundred around the world in different languages. How is that going to survive? That was Prabhupadas’ worry – how is that going to continue. When Prabhupada was here on the planet it wasn’t such a problem because Prabhupada was the unifying force behind it all. Everyone was loyal to Prabhupada. He was the leader and everyone followed him. So what do we do when Prabhupada disappears? That was his worry. So he said organisation and intelligence.
So yes we have the bhakti and we have the organisation the Prabhupada gave us. In that organisation we have the GBC – ultimate managing authority and the whole system of temple presidents and devotees, congregation etc. We have the process, chanting the holy name, festivals, worshipping the deities, prasad distribution etc. Everything has been given to us. So what do we do? We follow that process. We follow the bhakti path very importantly and then we have to see also how to expand. In other words Iskcon is not for sitting there.
The whole purpose of the organisation is not to simply preserve but to expand the preaching. That is the whole purpose – not simply to have a building but rather to expand the preaching. These are the principles. We have to safeguard our spiritual lives as a devotee and then we have to give devotion to others. This of course is summarised in the phrase namaruci jiva doya – that you develop a taste for the name. That is our saddhana. Our personal development. We have to do that as leaders also. And then giving out the mercy – that is preaching to others. These are the two elements of Lord Caitanya’s movement. So it is dual. It is not just personal but it is also going out. The two go together. You can’t give out mercy unless you develop your own personal taste for Krishna and do your bhakti.
Therefore how do we give it to everyone? We can do it individually but Prabhupada established an organisation as a more effective way of doing it as did Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakur. They established organisations to do it so we have a little assistance. We don’t have to do it by ourselves. We have the whole organisation, all the facilities that go with that so it makes it a little easier. Not only that but the organisation also tries to act in such a way that it acts not only now but it also goes into the future. The whole idea of establishing an organisation like Iskcon is to put it in the future. So that was Prabhupada’s worry – how are we going to continue in the future – generation after generation. So the organisation helps. If you have an organisation fine and it you don’t have an organisation it tends to disperse.
We see that after Lord Caitanya there were no concrete organisation but family units. So things got dispersed very easily and very quickly. So Prabhupada was very intelligent. He used his intelligence to make an organisation. And he made it in a particular way to spread all over the world and still have unity there under the Governing Body Commission. So he has given us just the skeleton for it or the frame work for not only preaching in the present but going into the future.
Going into leadership – how do we cultivate leadership, how do we become leaders? Basically it is very simple except for these two principles we have to follow – develop your taste, do your own saddhana and then somehow or the other use your intelligence to give it out to others. So that is also summarised in another way which is the slogan of this festival – more devotees and happier devotees, not only happier devotees but the leader should also become happier. They are devotees also. We have to cultivate properly and develop a taste for the name and for Krishna and for all the aspects of bhakti and we try to give that to everybody else. By that sincere effort anything can happen.
As we see Srila Prabhupada said, “I simply tried to subserviently follow the order of my spiritual master – take it as my life and soul.” We should also try to think of that as our life and soul. Prabhupada thought how to preserve the movement now and in the future, how to spread Krishna consciousness everywhere, how to firmly establish it within ourselves. And if we take these two principles then definitely we get the mercy of Srila Prabhupada, we get the mercy of the previous acaryas and Caitanya Mahaprabhu. We simply follow very basic principles and then we succeed.
Therefore though we can use many different techniques or whatever very good! But ultimately it is based upon our surrender to the Supreme Lord. That is the main element and following after the order of our spiritual master, founder acarya Srila Prabhupada. If we do that then we can be successful. Hare Krishna.
Prabhu: thank you very much maharaj. That was very nice, very inspiring. In regards to Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati we can all consider that we are within his saraswat, in the shelter of his teachings and vision which Prabhupada has perfectly delivered to the whole world. Can you describe in a specific way how he packaged or made the great Gauravani or the great teachings or Lord Caitanya especially suitable for this exact modern age. Will that just be simply Bhaktisiddhanta’s genius that Prabhupada inherited? Can you give any… HH Bhanu Swami: How Srila Bhaktisiddhanta did it? Well he was an individual. Bhaktivinode Thakur had an individual way of doing that through his writings particularly and of course he would see how he approached different types of people – intellectuals in one way and maybe Sanskrit scholars in another way or whatever. So he adapted to his audience. He spoke in different ways – took the basic philosophy and then presented it in different ways to different people and even preached from different angles using different philosophies, even western philosophies.
So Bhaktisiddhanta also did the same thing. And as we know he was highly intelligent, very intellectual on one level. So intellectual that sometimes you can read his works and you can’t even understand them but on the other hand he was also very practical. Though he had very high intellect aand he would sometimes express himself in that way on the other hand you will find him very practical. Particularly if you read his letters for instance instructing different devotees what to do or whatever – very, very practical. He took the basic principles of the philosophy and applied it to the lives of those devotees and gave them particular instructions. That is one thing.
The other is i would say how he preached to the modern world. He actually saw the pluses and minuses of the modern world. For instance the printing press is good – we can print books and distribute them in mass, so that is good. Then we can use a vehicle, we can drive in a car, airplanes or whatever. It doesn’t matter even though previously people used to say sadhu cannot ride in a vehicle or go in an aeroplane and some people still have that idea. The Madhava’s say you can’t go across the ocean – Sri sampradaya says that you can’t go across the ocean. Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati said, “What wrong with that? Go to England, go to Burma or go anywhere.” In the details he was not so much interested but in the main principles and he wanted to just preach everywhere. So whatever facilities were available he tried to use those for spreading the movement and adapting things according to the situation – being very practical.
So Prabhupada of course did the same thing. He used things for Krishna’s service very practically and very simply. According to the audience he would explain things in different ways and practically give instructions to the devotees.
Prabhu: Maharaja you mentioned the Bhaktisiddhanta… HH Bhanu Swami: So the question is that Bhaktisiddhanta established an organisation of much more formal than previous organisations but still it fell apart. So what is the reason? Well we all know what Prabhupada said. They didn’t establish a GBC. They put one person in control and then that created some conflicts and eventually they all went off on their own and they established individual Maths. Something survived in the sense that they were groups surviving but they were all individuals rather than a group. In other words we have sixty-four Maths altogether under Bhaktisiddhanta and afterwards it tends to separate to maybe thirty or forty groups or something like that. So that was the problem because of individuals.
Prabhupada said they did not follow Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakura’s order and establish not one manager but a group of managers as the Governing Body Commission. So that is why they failed he said. That is why Prabhupada established the GBC.
Prabhu: Hare Krishna Maharaj. Thank you for the wonderful class. Maharaj we were hearing how the leader is in nama ruci and jiva doya. HH Bhanu Swami: Not only leaders but everybody. Prabhu: In regards to Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakur can you give some examples of his expressions of jiva doya – not only externally preaching to the outside world but internally to the members of the organisation expressing care to them. HH Bhanu Swami: Oh I see. Well for instance he would inspect the asramas very nicely and he didn’t want people criticising other devotees because generally criticism people take it and they feel uncomfortable. He would always find something to praise in a person even if they had faults. He would be very compassionate in that way. So he was caring for the devotees in the Maths in this way. Written question: You mentioned how we have to develop taste for the name and preach but it takes time to get ruci. Then should we understand that if we preach without getting ruci e can’t get the desired result? HH Bhanu Swami: This is just a matter of quantity I suppose we can say. We can’t wait until we get to the stage of ruci after nista and just don’t do anything. After we get to prema that is the real ruci. So the idea is that if we practice sincerely the process of bhakti, chanting, associating etc. this whole actually develops because of an inclination called sraddha or faith. And the faith is not something in your mind. The faith is in the jiva. We become antarmukha, we turn towards Krishna instead of away from Krishna. So that is the jivas decision and his inclination.
When he is inclined towards Krishna, the jiva has faith and then that develops into bhakti. So that is the initial taste. Sraddha is a little bit of taste and that turns into bhakti when we meet devotees and we get some scriptural knowledge and we begin to practice. So the atma begins to practice the process of bhakti and bhakti is non-different from Krishna so therefore we are getting the association of Krishna and naturally we develop more and more taste. So that is the ruci. It may not be the technical stage of ruci but it has some taste for the Lord. So that has to remain intact. If we don’t have that and we go through all the external activities without any faith it is not bhakti. We don’t call it bhakti. That is always the qualification. Bhakti always has faith. Something happens in the jiva and then it develops. So further development we can say is the ruci until it reaches technical ruci state after nistha. If you have a little faith and that develops into a little bhakti that little ruci is there and that helps you in delivering the messageof Caitanya Mahaprabhu. If you don’t have that at all, you don’t have faith in your preaching, what is it? No potency at all. If you have a little taste, that little faith in the Lord that potency goes into your preaching. That is the sakti in your preaching, whatever bhakti you have. And if there is no bhakti there and there are all the words then there is no sakti. So it is a matter of degrees that that taste or whatever taste you have with that you will preach. No taste, no preaching or preaching something else. Prabhu: [Inaudible] HH Bhanu Swami: Yes. Whatever position we are at we don’t say that, “I have to get to a higher stage before I can start preaching.” We can start preaching from the beginning stage provided we do have some qualification and faith and little bhakti and some guidance from the devotees. Then we can do something. It may not be the highest potency but there is something there.
We have one guru as the vartma-pradarsaka guru. He may not even do anything but he just meets the person and that does something to your atma and you start getting some little faith and bhakti out of that. So that person doesn’t do anything really. He may not be qualified to do anything but just that contact produces some effect on the person which stimulates bhakti. So that is another type of preaching… we hope that it is higher than that. We have some knowledge and some bhakti which we can impart to another person but even if it is not on that level there is effect but perhaps some sort of faith has to be there. Prabhu: hare KrishnaMaharaj. In your lecture you mentioned that Srila Prabhupada mentioned that, “I tried to sincerely follow my spiritual master’s orders.” So sometimes in our movement we find that saying that this is how Srila Prabhupada said that this is the way it has to be followed and that creates more issues rather than taking us forward or things like that. So how we can understand that in this context as you said sincerely following the spiritual masters order? HH Bhanu Swami: I think you are referring to the fact Prabhupada did not do like that, he did like that. And this is not just one service but in general we have to do it only this way and not that way. Is it? Prabhu: Yes. HH Bhanu Swami: When Prabhupada says follow the order, he got a particular order from Bhaktisiddhanta that was one thing that you preach to the intelligent people in the English language. So that was a particular order. The other order of course which is actually it’s an inspiration. In the Bhagavad-gita, in the commentary of Srila Visvanath Cakravati Thakura on vyavasayatmika buddhir [Bg 2.41] or one track intelligence, very concentrated intelligence. In there, Visvanath Cakravati says that you take the order of your spiritual master as the life supporting medicine.
Generally if you don’t take you medicine you die. So if we don’t follow the order we are finished – like that. And what was the order? The order was actually to serve the lotus feet of Radha and Krishna. That is of course the ultimate order while the spiritual masters instructions are if you serve this way or that way ultimately it’s some engagement in the service of the Lord to please the Lord. So basically he is trying to engage us in bhakti and keep us at the lotus feet of Radha and Krishna. That is the main order.
So Prabhupada gave many instructions to many people and we have to be very careful of course that some of the instructions are for particular persons at particular times and that another time he may give another instruction to another person which is different. So there may be contradictions there. So we can’t take just one instruction and see it in isolation. Other instructions he gives are general like follow the four regulative principles or whatever. That is common for everybody. We can’t interpret those things. So we have to have a little bit of intelligence to see which instructions are particular for particular persons and may be relative in that sense and others which are for everyone are fundamental instructions.
So that of course takes a little work and it is also the responsibility of let’s say GBC or whatever to figure out what the fundamental instructions are. So we follow those and the others we may or may not follow according to the circumstances. Prabhu: Prabhupada was saying that to get a bona fide guru it is very, very difficult. You are very fortunate a soul who gets. But explain that it is even harder to find a bona fide disciple. So can you speak a little on this? HH Bhanu Swami: We can take it in the extreme way that nobody is qualified at all but obviously in the material world the Vaisnavas are very merciful and therefore they try to help everyone even people who are not so-called qualified and bring them up to qualification. But of course what is qualification? Qualification got many level also. We are qualified to begin bhakti, we are qualified to be on this level of that level – higher and higher levels. There are different qualifications. The qualification for bhakti is not too demanding it is simply… inclination towards the Lord. If that is there in the jiva, that is the qualification to develop.
So that is not so difficult but we have to look for that in persons and see what is real sraddha and who doesn’t have. The point I suppose the guru has to see who has real sradhha and who has maybe fake sraddha and they are trying to be disciples for the wrong reasons. So that has to be seen. Prabhu: [Inaudible] HH Bhanu Swami: Yes of course we have to see the statement and the context as well. That is right.
We are over time and we have half hour to get to our seminars. I think we should end here because of the seminars on time. Hare Krishna![Applause] [To receive Mayapurlive lectures by email, write to mayapurlive@pamho.net]