Pious, Polite mormons

By Caru Das

Sunday evening we hosted about 50-60 students from a Brigham Young Unversity World Religions Class at the feast, from 5 pm until 8 pm. Each and every one had called during the week according to the following template. I am_____, a student in a World Religions class at BYU. I would like to have your permission to come to the services this Sunday. What is the recommended mode of dress?

Because they were all so polite and courteous, we were forewarned to cook a lot extra. In the past some of the BYU students have been shy to stay and eat. This evening I made sure they knew we had cooked extra for them and they were to stay. I explained that part of attending a religious service in India is to take some sacred foodstuffs, called prasadam. If anyone would leave early without taking any of the meal, I joked that I would note their physical description and report to the teacher that particular student did not complete the assignment. They all stayed.

Alonzo Gaskill, the teacher, is a good friend, has been to the temple several times, taken the tour, and purchased a large graphic of the ‘Changing Bodies’, which hangs in his classroom.

I thought the ‘Changing Bodies’ would be a good subject matter for the talk. I mentioned that on Saturday evening, the night before, Jai Krishna and Kim had hosted the devotees at their Orem home on the occasion of my 60th birthday. I was musing on this and shared with the students the thought that, as every cell in our bodies changes each 7 -10 years, there is no way anybody could have a 60 year old body. Minute parts of my present body may be as old as ten years, and other minute parts of my body may be as young as 10 seconds, with all the interim time periods represented.

In so far as reincarnation means the body is changing, we are reincarnating at each and every moment. The body we have today is not exactly the same body we had yesterday, and the body we’ll have tomorrow will slightly differ from the one we have today.

Yet there is one thing in my current body which has been present in all my previous bodies, and will continue to be present throughout future changes of body in this lifetime. It is the soul, or ME.

“As the embodied soul continually passes, in this life, from boyhood to youth and then to old age, similarly the soul passes to another body at the time of death. The self realized soul is not bewildered by such a change.”

Bhagavad Gita 2/22

After about a half hour talk there were a number of excellent questions. By their questions the students showed how well they had grasped the concepts in the Gita, and were working out in their minds the sequences. During dinner I circulated around to all the tables, and fielded at least another three or four good questions from each. Upon departing, all the students were so appreciative and faultlessly polite in thanking us for “letting” them come.

One of the reasons Vaibhavi and I decided to come to Utah in 1982 had to do with the local (LDS) interest in topics of God Consciousness. Ghana Shyam (later Bhakta Tirtha Swami) and Maha Buddhi came to BYU on the BBT (Bhaktivedanta Book Trust) library party in about 1976. I was also serving on the library party at that time, but was in another region. The BBT library party’s purpose was to place sets of Prabhupada’s books in college libraries all over the country. To that end we dressed in suits and ties, and carried the typical book salesmen’s briefcases.

In the morning we would visit professors, and if they would sign the professor recommend cards, we’d take those cards to the acquisitions librarian, who would generally order the books (about a 600 dollar investment, as well as a ‘standing order’ to take more books as they were published)

Once in a while a professor or two would order a set of books for his own reference. Thus it was the most sets ever sold on one campus were 6, both at Dartmouth and Harvard.

At Brigham Young University, Ghana Shyam and Maha Buddhi sold 19 sets over a two day period. It was a stunning record.

When I heard this news in 1976, I thought the Mormons must be statistically 3 times more pious than people in other other parts of the country. Then six years later, when I was looking for a radio station, and heard one was for sale in Provo, Utah, the home of BYU, I was very interested. The rest is history.