By Urmila Devi Dasi
On Janmastami, hundreds or thousands of people visit our temples. Many of those guests will, at other times, visit holy places such as Vrindavana. Since we are the ones broadcasting the glories of the dhamas, it is our duty to help people to visit with respect. Printing out this simple flyer and distributing it on Janmastami may help towards education our congregation.
Your servant, Urmila Devi Dasi
Read also:
Our Heart in Vrindavana…and our intelligence and hands and pocketbook, too!
Thank you so much for bringing this to the attention of all! I am traveling with my son this October on his first visit to the dhama, and you have inspired us to pay more attention to this simple act to help beautify and protect Sri Vrindavana dhama.
We naturally are trying to pay close attention to many sadhana oriented activities when we approach the dhama, we can find ourselves losing sight of some automated activities that we may not think about. The culture of the West cannot accomodate clay and leaf utensils, but certinaly the culture of Vrindavana village can, and we should take advantage of it.
There are the 10 offenses to the dhama that a pilgrim is advised to pay speciall attention to while visiting and living in the dhama. Like we do at the end of the 10 offenses in chanting, some nama-bhaktas say, “it is also an offense to be inattentive while chanting,” maybe we could add to the 10 offenses to the dhama, “it is also an offense to be inattentive while purchasing goods and services that would have an adverse resultant effect on the ecology of the dhama.” Or something like that ;-)
The last time I went to Vrndavana I didn’t know we had a choice. I just assumed they burned the plastic bags. There is no reason the government should allow things to get to the point of bad sanitation or starvation but that is another thing.
I went to a fruit vendor since I was there during a festival and had to rent a hotel room and thought it would be simpler at the time, since I was taking a japa walk back from the bazaar or something. The fruit vendor sold me several funny looking green fruits that were round and put them in a plastic bag, the first one I had seen in India.
As I started walking back towards my hotel I noticed several monkeys looking at me. One slid down a pipe on my right, another was in an alley or someplace and two or three started coming my way from in front of me.
I was about to be attacked so I picked up a stick from one of the vendors shops and started to beat it on the ground like I had seen one of the vendors do. It didn’t work. The leader of the monkeys ran up and tore my bag apart like it was made out of nothing. All the fruits rolled down the street which was sloped right into the hands of all the monkeys. Even the smallest one ran up in fear wondering whether I would try to stop him or not but I didn’t have the heart to try to take away any fruit from him because he was the smallest and probably didn’t get to eat very often.
I went back to the vendor very angry thinking he may have done this on purpose to me but this time he sold me a watermelon and told me to put it underneath my kurta when the monkeys weren’t looking. I got back almost all the way to my hotel, with monkeys looking at me strangely and it was only when I was almost there that a brijabasi came up to me and said, “Oh, are you pregnant?” and then I understood that the watermelon trick was to fool the monkeys into thinking I was a pregnant woman and not just someone carrying a watermelon under his kurta.
In 1981, while living in Vrindavan, I was sitting, talking liesurely with Ganga Prasad, the owner of the famous Loi Bazar cloth shop who has since passed away. He told me this story: In the early 1900s when he was a boy running and playing in the courtyard of his home, he accidentally kicked a rat and killed it. This happened early in the morning while his grandfather was doing puja, so he considered Ganga Prasad’s deed very inauspicious. In order to mitigate the offense, his grandfather put the rat on a board, covered it with a harinam chaddar, and carried it through the streets chanting Hare Krishna on the way to the Yamuna, where he cremated it. In other words, he treated it just like a devotee.
That story reminds me of another. Prabhupada once told me that his uncle used to own a cloth shop and each evening he would put out a bowl of rice for the rats, and for as long as he had the shop they never disturbed the cloth. Prabhupada was concerned about our habits in relation to nature and the environment. In Los Angeles, while on his morning walk, he once noticed a water faucet that had been left on, so he told his servant to turn it off. Another time he told me that he had a friend in Calutta whose guru lived in the Sundarban forests and who was friends with the tigers there. Anyone who has seen a healthy Bengal tiger knows that it is one of the most powerful and awesome animals in the world. As he was telling the story, it was apparent that Prabhupada was impressed with his friend’s guru, because when the man went to the forest to visit, his guru would call out, “leave him alone, he’s my man”. And the tigers would leave him alone.
Since I’m remembering these stories, here’s another: In 1970, in Los Angeles when a few of us were hard at work making church classrooms into temple living quarters, Prabhupada came around for an inspection tour. Later that evening he called me into his room and mentioned that he saw some plates of half-eaten prasadam left near our construction area. He was gentle with me, knowing that we were working very hard. Rather than chastise me, he told me a number of stories about the harmony of humans and nature, how varnasrama society is natural society, and how the rules of such a society, like honoring prasadam, fit within a scheme of care and respect, not only for Krishna, but for His nature and for human society.
SUPPORT URMILA’S EFFORTS!
Please see my posts on the other article entitled “Ecology in the Dham”. Let’s all lend support to Urmila’s efforts. She’s calling for practical action, while some of us, including me, are just talking. Now let’s help her. We are servants. Service means doing what Urmila wants us to do and, if possible, going even further to understand and satisfy her motives, methods, and desires. Let’s execute!
SUPPORT URMILA’S EFFORTS!
Related articles:
Karuna Purna dasi’s “Response to Urmila Devi Dasi on Vrindavana”
See my recent post on Karuna Purna’s article by following the above link.