Date: March 10, 2008
Verse: Srimad-Bhagavatam 3.13.23
Speaker: HG Madhudvisa Prabhu
By Ananda Tirtha (das) PVS (Mayapur – IN)
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iti mimamsatas tasya brahmanah saha sunubhih
bhagavan yajna-puruso jagarjagendra-sannibhah
TRANSLATION: While Brahma was deliberating with his sons, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Visnu, roared tumultuously like a great mountain.
PURPORT: It appears that great hills and mountains also have their roaring power because they are also living entities. The volume of the sound vibrated is in proportion to the size of the material body. While Brahma was guessing about the appearance of the Lord’s incarnation as a boar, the Lord confirmed Brahma’s contemplation by roaring with His gorgeous voice.
Madhudvisa Prabhu: In the Bhagavad-gita, Chapter Four, Krsna is giving instruction to Arjuna of how to leave this material world. He does it in a very simple way. You’ve all read the sloka, probably memorized it. I did when I was a brahmacari. Memorized it and forgot it, but it’s always there.
janma karma ca me divyam evam yo vetti tattvatah
tyaktva dehah punar janma naiti mam eti so ‘rjuna
Krsna is telling Arjuna a very simple instruction. This sloka of the Bhagavad-gita has a direct correlation to the sloka that we have just read here in the Bhagavata because in the sloka that I quoted from the Bhagavad-gita Krsna is telling Arjuna that if you can understand the transcendental nature of my appearance and activities, then upon leaving this body, you do not have to take birth in the material world again and you come to my abode. You come back to home, back to Godhead.
That is what we are all looking for. We are looking to go back to home, back to Godhead. Although we do not want to admit it, we all say humbly, “I just want to serve.” But actually, we do not like this material world. It’s not a very nice place. Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati said this material world is not a place for a gentleman. And it is always burning here, blazing, like a forest fire burning. No one goes to the forest to set a forest fire, but it automatically combusts. The bamboos are growing in such proximity that they rub against each other and spontaneous combustion. The fire starts to burn. No one goes there to set it.
Same way in the material world, you are just walking along being a very nice person and someone comes along and gives you the evil eye. You’ve had it happen. Sometimes you just do not get along with a person no matter what you do. You just rub each other the wrong way. Do not feel bad. That is the material world. That’s how it is designed. It is designed to hassle you. It is not designed to make you feel happy here. It is made to punish you. Durga, she is in charge of the prison. This prison is to punish you. It is to make you feel you don’t want to stay here and enjoy independently of Krsna.
So here Krsna is telling Arjuna how to get out of this material world. Although we do have this great Mayapur Candrodaya Mandir, the rising moon, the candrodaya, the rising moon of cooling mercy. Prabhupada gave this title to the temple here because he understand that from this place, the cooling rays of the candra, the rising moon of Lord Caitanya would spread all over the world and it would be able to cool down the blazing fire.
We know that Nityananda, we sing, nitai pada-kamala, koti-candra susitala, that the lotus feet of Nityananda are more cooling than a million moons, koti-candra. So here we have one moon and in a little while we will see the great Gaura Purnima, the great moon rise and it will make everything very cool. From this place, the Candrodaya Mandir, Srila Prabhupada wanted the cooling rays of Lord Caitanya’s mercy to spread all over the three worlds.
Here the correlation between the sloka of Bhagavad-gita that I spoke, janma karma ca me divyam, and this sloka is that here we have another one of the activities and appearance of an incarnation, avatara, of the Lord. Avatara is one who descends. Here we have the Varaha incarnation descending in the form of a boar, but not an ordinary boar. When the Lord appears, he does not appear as an ordinary boar or an ordinary turtle or an ordinary lion or an ordinary fish or an ordinary human being. He is extraordinary boar. Here we have the chivalrous activities of the Lord being accounted for in the Srimad Bhagavatam. The activities of the Lord are very chivalrous, they are very bold and heroic. The Lord is our ultimate hero.
In the world we are always looking for a hero, someone to look up to. This is why in the later sixties the youth became disenchanted because their heroes had all let them down. People creating false heroes whether they be sports figures or movie stars or political figures or historical figures, scientists. So many heroes there are in the material world but they all let you down. You see that they are not really heroic when you get close to them. You cannot follow them.
The youth of the sixties they all rejected their so called heroes. They rejected their parents’ values. They rejected the religious values. They rejected the economic values that were being given to them. They decided they were not going to fight in the war. They were not going to go to kill the yellow man. They rejected all those things and took shelter of intoxication.
Prabhupada came and told them, “You will not be able to cure your frustration by becoming more intoxicated than you already are, more confused than you already are because the frustration is caused by confusion what to do, what not to do.” By taking some intoxication, you become more confused, more disillusioned. So Srila Prabhupada came and gave this panacea of the Holy Name.
Prabhupada was an old man. In my day, we had a saying, “Don’t trust anybody who is older than thirty.” Srila Prabhupada came, he was seventy. We all began following him, an old man in the midst of all us so-called revolutionaries, people that were iconoclasts. We wanted to break all the images.
Prabhupada was coming and giving us a most conservative philosophy compared to the philosophy that we were embracing. He was giving us a most conservative philosophy, but because he was a genuine hero, he was a chivalrous person, he was an honest man, he was a beautiful man, he was a very daring person, a loving father, we put aside all of our reservations and we followed him. In this way, he eventually brought us to Mayapur and decided to build this wondrous city. We have all been around the Mayapur Candrodaya Mandir.
Here we have the Lord appearing and he is appearing in a very glorious way as a boar. One may wonder, why does God go to such extent, appearing as a boar, appearing as a half lion-half man, appearing as a dwarf, why doesn’t he just kill the demons by blinking his eyes or sneezing towards them or snapping his fingers? He is the Supreme Personality, bhagavan, yajna-purusa. He could just snap his fingers and a million demons could be killed. He could just snap his fingers and a million earths could be lifted up from a muddy place, the lower planetary systems where it was thrown. Why doesn’t the Lord just snap his fingers and have these things become right?
The answer is that the Lord does these extraordinary thing in a very chivalrous way in order to capture our hearts, in order to capture our attention, in order for us to be come absorbed in the transcendental, divyam nature of these pastimes so that we can fill up our lives with these images, with these stories, with these narrations. It is proven that people remember things in a story form. If you want to remember something, you can learn a little story about something and then you can remember things easier like that. You can fill up your memory, you consciousness with all these pastimes of the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
Not that he is just coming as one form as one human form, no. He is attracting in so many different ways. Somebody may be more attracted to the boar incarnation than to Krsna and Balarama or to Radha and Krsna. You see that people are different. We all are different. We all have our different attractions towards Krsna. Go to South India, you will see many Varaha temples, Nrsimhadeva temples. We have Lord Nrsimha protecting us. Prabhupada gave us all these wonderful forms of the Lord and another thing, by Krsna appearing in these different forms and Srila Prabhupada insisting that we display these different forms, he has forced us to preach.
There is a nice story you may have heard. When Srila Prabhupada was recovering from his illness at Stinson Beach in San Francisco, the devotees brought some oil paintings from the temple and displayed them around the house. Prabhupada had a sitting room there. He was entertaining guests who would come over and visit. There was a piano in the house and Prabhupada decided to play the piano. They moved the piano from the wall and they heard a thud. Prabhupada said, “What was that?”
The mataji who was there said, “That was nothing, Prabhupada.”
Prabhupada said, “No, no, what was that?”
She went behind the piano and pulled up a big picture of Nrsimhadeva. Prabhupada said, “What is Nrsimhadeva doing behind the piano?”
The mataji said, “Oh, he looks so ferocious, and so ghastly that I didn’t want to show the picture of Nrsimhadeva because I didn’t want to have to explain it to all the people who came to visit you.” So she hid it behind it the piano.
Prabhupada said, “No, no, this is our Lord. This is the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Just as Radha-Krsna is our worshipable Lord, Nrsimha is also our worshipable Lord.”
When you see a picture of Nrsimha in the temple, you are forced to preach. You are forced to preach. It is inevitable. A person will come to the temple, walk around the temple, walk around the temple. Then they stop right in front of the picture of Nrsimha. “What is that?” You know, Radha, Krsna, Balarama, the gopis, everything nice, then, “what is that?” [Laughter] Then you have to preach because you just startled this person with the form of Lord Nrsimhadeva with intestines hanging around his neck and blood dripping from his fingernails and a disemboweled. . . . “What happened to that poor guy?”
“He’s disemboweled.”
“I thought this was peace and love?” There’s Radha and Krsna with a flute and here is this poor man, seems like an ordinary person, nice person, here he is with his guts spilled all over the floor.
So we have to preach. We have to preach the glories of Lord Nrismhadeva. People may say also here, “Oh, Varaha, God comes as a boar, a pig?” This is considered to be the lowest of all animals. We know from the description of Lord Jagannath, the swine herders, they were considered the lowest of all the tribes. They herded the pigs. Here we have the Lord appearing in that species.
This is the all powerful nature of God that he can appear as a hog, as a boar. But he is the Supreme Personality of Godhead. He is not an ordinary boar. What boar comes out of the nose of Lord Brahma? What boar immediately grows to be as big as a stone? What boar is able to contemplate the most intelligent person in the universe’s mind? Here in the purport Srila Prabhupada says the boar contemplated the mind of Lord Brahma and let out a big roar, “Aaaarrrrhhh!” [Laughter]
Brahma was just thinking, “Could this be the Supreme Personality of Godhead?”
“Aaaarrrrhhh!” You bet it is. This is not an ordinary boar that came out of your nose. This is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Bhagavan, Yajna-purusa.
Like this, you become attracted to that activity. Isn’t it amazing? That is better than any pulp fiction, any action hero, better than any sports figure, sports hero, home run hitter, soccer player, bowling, cricket. Which sports hero can come out of the nose of the umpire? [Laughter] They are always blowing their noses, but never. Yajna-purusa comes out of the nose of Lord Brahma. Brahma is the topmost living entity in the whole universe and Yajna-purusa comes out of his nose and then roars like a mountain.
That’s another thing. Sivarama Swami was talking the other day about the inconceivable nature of the Lord. There are so many things that are inconceivable and here Prabhupada explains how mountains can also roar. So we are not used to roaring mountains, but also we are not used to moving mountains. So I will tell you a story about a moving mountain.
We all know how one mountain moved, but that same mountain also moved other times, three times. You may have heard the story about Pulastya who was a sage and he came to the house of a brahmana. The brahmana had a very nice son. The son had the body of a mountain and his name was Govardhan. The sage came to the house and asked, “Are you Vaisnava?”
“Yes.”
Being a brahmana the man said, “Whatever you like, Maharaja. You can have anything in my house. I simply want you.”
He said, “I am a sage. I am very humble. I do not need anything. You can see I just have a loincloth here, traveling all over.”
He said, “But anything, anything you like.”
The sage said, “Well, I do meditate and I don’t have a place to meditate on. I don’t have a mountain to sit on. You wouldn’t have an extra mountain around here, would you?”
The father said, “Aaah, yeah, but it is just a little mountain over there.”
The sage looked at Govardhan and said, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I want.”
Govardhan did not want to go, but the father had promised the sage to give him whatever he desired, so Govardhan surrendered. He said he would go with the sage, but he made one condition. He said, “I will go with you under the condition that wherever you put me down, there I will stay.”
The sage said, “Very well, I will just carry you because I have all this mystic power from all the austerities I have performed. When I get to the place I want to go, I will put you down.” So the sage was going on. It was a tragic departure, just a young mountain going off with the sage to sit on, who knows how long.
So he was passing over Vrindavan. Govardhana thought, “Well, I’d like to stay there. That would be a good place to stay at.” Somehow or other, the Lord cooperated. Although the sage was completely self-controlled, he had to answer the call of nature. The “call of nature”, that’s a euphemism. He had to pass. The sage was moving from one foot to the other.
The mountain was saying, “What’s the matter, what’s the matter?”
He said, “Oh, I have to pass.”
He said, “Oh, that’s OK. Just put me down and go to pass. Then we’ll continue on with our journey.”
The sage thought, “I’ll just put him down. It’s not a real put down, I just have to pass.” He put the mountain down, went off and passed. He came back and lo and behold, Govardhan would not move.
There he stays for who knows how long until Lord Ramacandra wanted to build the bridge to Lanka. He sent Hanuman with all the monkeys to get big boulders and big stones and big mountains. He came to Govardhan. Hanuman lifted Govardhan up and a voice came from the sky, “I do not need any more mountains, Hanuman. You can put Govardhan down.” Govardhan was put down. That was the second time he was moved.
We all know the third time, when Krsna was saving the inhabitants of Braja from the torrential rainfall of Indra. Once again, we have moving mountains. Why didn’t Krsna just snap his fingers and put Indra back in his place? Why did Krsna have to go to the extent of lifting up a whole mountain? He could have just snapped his fingers and all of the rain could have been blown away along with Indra and all the clouds, just blown away. But no, Krsna decided that he was going to pick up the Govardhan hill. Oh, wonderful Krsna!
All the inhabitants became awe struck by Krsna’s prowess. When Krsna was transferring the mountain from his different fingers, everybody said, “Oh no, let’s help him! We have to help. We have to hold our sticks up to hold up Govardhan Hill.” Krsna’s holding with one pinkie finger. Krsna became a hero once again.
In the sastra, the great debt we owe to Srila Prabhupada, he gave us all the pastimes of Krsna, all the pastimes of Nrsimha, all the pastimes of Varaha, all the incarnations, so again and again and again we become amazed, we become attracted to the pastimes of the Lord.
This is what our movement is all about. We are the gosthy-anandis. We are not bhajananandis. We are preachers. Just like, as a second generation coming from Caitanya Mahaprabhu, Srinivasa and Narottama and Syamananda were instructed by Jiva Goswami to take the books, the sacred texts of the Goswamis and spread them throughout Bengal.
When Caitanya Mahaprabhu left, he had assigned the Goswamis, specifically Rupa Goswami and Sanatana Goswami, and later Jiva Goswami, to compile all the siddhanta of Vaisnavism for all those generations to come. But in Bengal, they didn’t have copies of those books. In those days, there was no printing press. Everything was done by hand. They were all in Vrindavan.
So the first traveling book distribution team was Srinivasa Acarya, Narottama, and Syamananda. They were sent with the books to go to Bengal and Orissa where the Vaisnavas were waiting. So many philosophical discrepancies were arising because they did not have the books of the Goswamis. They did not have all the codes of Vaisnava behavior. So they were sent out to preach the glories of the Lord.
Therefore we are following in the line of the six Goswamis. We are following in the line of Bhaktivinod Thakur, who began to write Krsna conscious philosophy in English. In the same year he sent the famous book, “Lord Caitanya’s Life and Precepts,” to McGill University in 1896, that was the year of Prabhupada’s birth. Later on Bhaktisiddhanta took over the printing press, the brhat-mrdanga of Bhaktivinod and printed books and distributed them all over India and outside of India. He sent his disciples to Germany, to England, and to so many other places. Then Srila Prabhupada caught up the preaching spirit of Bhaktisiddhanta and went to America.
Therefore, if we are enthusiastic about preaching the glories of the Lord, making our whole life one big festival, one big festival, one big celebration. Prabhupada once told us that you can have a festival just for having a festival’s sake. You do not have to have a special time, but he said, “I will give you festival for every week”. And he did when we were in Los Angeles. Every week we would print up fliers at the beginning of the week celebrating different festivals. We had the flower festival. We had the chandan festival. We had the boat festival. We had Nrsimha’s appearance day. We had the Ratha Yatra. We had so many festivals because festivals are things that enliven devotees.
Most of us have participated on one level or another in a Ratha Yatra festival. We all realize how much excitement it generates, especially when Srila Prabhupada was coming to the temple for the Ratha Yatra festival, everyone becomes very enlightened. All the staircases are painted. The walls are painted. Everything is rejuvenated. New curtains, new outfits for the Deities, extra flowers, great prasadam, it becomes exciting. Srila Prabhupada wanted that type of festival atmosphere all the time in our temples.
This is how we can make our Krsna conscious life exciting. Sometimes over the years devotees become jaded. “I’ve been there, I’ve done that. I’ve been to aratik. I’ve done that Ratha Yatra. I’ve been to India” But it is never to become hackneyed. It becomes joyful when we become excited about broadcasting the glories of the Lord, broadcasting these festivals of the Lord, following in our line of disciplic succession.
We are not meant to go to the Himalayas and mediate in a cave or go to Radha Kund and try to live out our siddha-deha. This is not our line. Our line is the preaching line of Bhaktivinod, the preaching line of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Goswami Maharaja, the preaching line of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada:
“That is your right
You’ve got the mace
Save me a fallen
Your Divine Grace”
Srila Prabhupada brought the big club to smash maya. We are not meek and humble devotees. Prabhupada wanted us to go all over the world and broadcast the glories that are being given to us here in the Srimad Bhagavatam, the glorious pastimes of Varaha.
We never know what captures a person’s heart. We can never know what aspect of the Lord’s heroic deeds will capture the heart. We have to go and we have to spread all the pastimes of the Lord, not simply just the rasa-lila of Krsna. “Oh, we have become so elevated that we only deal with Radha and Krsna now. All the other incarnations, we do not deal with them anymore. Bhagavad-gita, no that is just a preliminary stage.” We have some devotees who have been devotees for a few years and now they are going to the Radha Kund and now they are going to just sit and meditate and do the manasa-puja of the Lord. No, our mission is to go and to spread the glories of Bhagavad-gita, Srimad Bhagavatam, along with the transcendental lila of Sri Sri Radha-Madhava, Asta Sakhis.
This is what we have to learn form this sloka, that the Lord appears, he appears in a very glorious way. The occasion of his glorious appearance is for our purification. When we read about these pastimes, when we think about these pastimes, when we converse, we talk about these pastimes, we preach on these pastimes, then we become purified. Then upon leaving this body, naiti, we do not take this body again. But finally, we come to Mayapur. This is the purport of this sloka. I’ll read it once again. If there are any questions, I’ll try to answer them.
“While Brahma was deliberating with his sons, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Visnu, roared tumultuously like a great mountain.”
I remember a pastime with Srila Prabhupada when we first became introduced to Varaha. We were recording Srila Prabhupada in a professional recording studio in Los Angeles and Prabhupada wanted to sing a bhajan. So we were singing the Dasavatara Stotra, the ten incarnations of the Lord. We thought, “We’ve never heard this bhajan before. We’ve only heard one verse, tava kara-kamala, by Jayadeva Goswami.”
So Prabhupada was going to sing the whole bhajan for the first time. We wanted to see the words to learn them. Prabhupada said, “No we do not have the words. I just have the picture.” He produced this picture from his book, it was a small Brijabasi print from India. It had a picture of Krsna and around Krsna were all the ten incarnations. Srila Prabhupada put that picture in front of him. He put the earphones on. We had him in the isolation booth. He played the harmonium and he played the mrdanga also on that recording. We laid that mrdanga track over because no one could play the mrdanga slow enough. He said, “t is very easy to play the mrdanga fast, but when you have to play slow, it becomes very difficult.”
So he was singing the melody very slowly:
tava kara-kamala-vare nakham adbhuta-srngam
dalita-hiranyakasipu-tanu-bhrngam
kesava dhrta-narahari-rupa jaya jagadisa hare
kesava dhrta-sukara-rupa
This way Srila Prabhupada showed us how to play the mrdanga and the kartals very slowly. So when you hear that recoding, you can understand that we are all standing around. Well, I was designated to play the kartals. I thought, “I may not be able to play the mrdanga slow.” Nobody could play as well as Prabhupada. And nobody could play the harmonium as well as Prabhupada, either. So Prabhupada played the harmonium, he played the mrdanga on that recoding.
Then he said, “Madhudvisa, you play the kartals.”
I was very proud. I thought, “All right, I’m going to play the kartals! I can play the kartals. I may not be able to play the mrdanga and the harmonuium, but I can play the kartals.” So we started the recording. I started playing the kartals like this, “one-two-three”. Everyone knows. [Plays kartals]
He said, “No! One-two-three.”
I started. [Plays kartals again in same beat]
Prabhupada said, “No, ONE-TWO-THREE.”
I said, “One-two-three? I thought I was one-two-three?” [Laughter]
“No!” He said, “You are one-two-three-four.”
I was going [plays beat on kartals again]. That was one-two-three-four. So he showed me how to play, very slow and very deliberate. In that way I learned how to play the kartals. We learned about the boar incarnation.
Prabhupada’s books were not out. This was so early we only had Bhagavad-gita. In fact we had an abridged addition of Bhagavad-gita, not even Sanskrit and some of the purports were just cut in half by the publisher because the book was too thick, too big. The McMillan Company was the publisher. They said, “We want a small version, a two hundred page version.”
Prabhupada was aghast, “No, two hundred pages?” They just indiscriminately cut up the book. Prabhupada was very angry and he was waiting for the day when the contract would expire with the McMillan Company so that we could print our unabridged Bhagavad-gita.
So we didn’t have any Bhagavatam. When we saw the picture of the ten incarnations, then our question began. “Oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh!” We knew Nrsimhadeva, we didn’t know anyone else. Prabhupada explained all the ten incarnations to us that day and showed this humble fool how to play kartals “one-two-three.”
Thank you very much. Hare Krsna. [Applause]
What time is it? Nine yet? Five to nine, OK, we have time. Are there any questions?
Kalangana Devi: Based on the sloka from Bhagavad-gita, those who understand the transcendental nature of my appearance and activities does not appear anymore in the ordinary material world but go back to my abode, so Satsvarupa Maharaja wanted to understand this sloka perfectly well, so he wrote a letter to Srila Prabhupada and he said, “Srila Prabhupada please kindly explain this sloka to me because I want to understand it very well.”
Srila Prabhupada answered like this: “Because you have a bona fide guru and guru is saying that God can appear as a boar, therefore, you do not need to search anywhere else who is God because you believe your guru that God can appear as a boar and this is perfect.” Thank you. Hare Krsna”
Madhudvisa Prabhu: Jaya, thank you, Mataji. Hare Krsna. Any other questions?
Janardana Das: Hare Krsna. So Prabhu, we just heard the ten major incarnations of dasa-avatara. Is there any reason why there are no other descriptions other than those ten?
Madhudvisa Prabhu: Well, we have the song by Jayadeva Goswami. These incarnations are given in the song, therefore, we listen like that, but as we know, there are many, many different incarnations of the Lord. Lord Buddha is listed in that song as well and he is not listed as one of the major avataras, but it is a song by Jayadeva. He lists Lord Buddha, significant in our preaching. We list them as the ten incarnations, but there are many, many other incarnations and the echelon of importance I do not know. We understand that Lord Buddha is saktyavesa-avatara whereas other incarnations listed in that song are full avataras of Visnu, visnu-avatara, major incarnations of the Lord.
Janardan Das: Just one more comment. Prabhupada said it is very difficult to understand the boar incarnation of Krsna but it is more difficult to understand Krsna’s pastimes.
Madhudvisa Prabhu: Yes, without a doubt. That is why we worship Panca Tattva, so that we can have some understanding of Radha-Krsna.
All right, thank you very much. Srila Prabhupada ki jai!