By Ravindra Svarupa Dasa
Each morning in ISKCON temples we pay homage to our Founder-Acarya Srila Prabhupada by singing Sri Guru-vandana together while offering him guru-puja.
Sri Guru-vandana is a Bengali song composed by Srila Narottama dasa Thakura. In the hymn’s second stanza, that great acarya directs our attention to the words or speech (vakya) issuing from the guru’s lotus-like mouth (guru-mukha-padma). Srila Narottama dasa Thakura says we should make those words one (aikya) with our hearts and minds (citta). And, he goes on to say, we should allow no other desire or longing (asa) to reside there.
In the next stanza, Srila Narottama dasa Thakura spells out some consequences of our thus assimilating the words of the spiritual master. Those potent words then confer upon us the gift of spiritual sight (cakhu-dan). Thereupon transcendent knowledge (divya-jnan) illuminates our hearts, and this knowledge obliterates all avidya and bestows prema-bhakti.
Srila Prabhupada took especial pains to bestow his vakya through the medium of written English and to publish those writings in book form. Prior to embarking from India in 1965 on his solo expedition to the West, Srila Prabhupada, working virtually alone, had composed and published, in three hardback volumes, his English-language translation and commentary on the First Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam. He brought boxes of these books with him aboard the Jaladuta, and they accompanied him on the voyage of over 9,000 nautical miles from Calcutta to New York. There he began to gather, organize, and deploy the necessary and spiritual resources—material, human, and spiritual— for their eventual distribution and reception worldwide.
In this way, his guru-vakya itself gave proof to its empowerment to spread over space and time.
In the pages of the very first of these volumes we find one place that Srila Prabhupada most brilliantly elucidates for us the full process of the transmission of that divya-jnan which Srila Narottama dasa Thakura referred to in his song. In Srila Prabhupada’s presentation of the final verse of the third chapter of Canto One, he spells out the conditions necessary for the transmission to take place—namely, the qualifications required in the speaker and in the hearer.
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