Srila Prabhupada's compassion

[Guest guest]

Despite what Prabhupada saw on his first walk through the streets of Boston

and later through the streets of New York, he felt his compassion awakening

and prayed to Krsna to help him make the path of bhakti understandeble to

the American people. His first year in America was especially difficult with

no financial or moral support and very little interest in his teachings, but

instead of returning to Vrndavana hopeless, he was patient, determined, and

imbued with a sense of kindness toward these spirit souls who had so fallen

from their constitutional position. He did not see the degradation as much

as he saw the truth of the souls' natural relationship with Krsna.

 

But he didn't mean it was easy. We who have been raised in the West can

appreciate Srila Prabhupada's austerities - what it must have been like for

a pure Vaisnava to leave Vrndavana to live in New York City during the

1960s, to see the young men bearded, long-haired, and dirty, the scantily

dressed young women, the stores selling meat, the intense mood of sense

gratification of the place. He didn't become cynical or hard, and he didn't

hate people for their ignorance. He remained always open to anyone who would

take to Krsna consciousness, even if they came before him naked, as happened

on his visit to Morning Star Ranch. One of the men who became a devotee

after Prabhupada's visit to Morning Star said, "He didn't see our bodies but

our souls. He was a great soul."

 

For Prabhupada's followers, his tolerance and mercy toward our fallen ways

is one of the ways we measure how great he was. At the mahotsava held just

after Prabhupada's disappearance in 1977, one of Prabhupada's Godbrothers

said that he too had gone to the West, but it was not his nature to deal

with low-class people. His implication was that Prabhupada had such a

nature. But we know that Prabhupada was the highest Vaisnava experiencing

great compassion for the fallen.

 

Prabhupada's compassion was not ruled by emotion but by intelligence. He

didn't just feel sorry for the conditioned souls but thought carefully how

to uplift them. Then he worked to do so. If he saw that something he was

doing was not effective, he changed his tactics. He never lost sight of his

goal to bring the people he met (or met through his followers) to spiritual

awakening. He was flexible in his approach, concentrating on education but

using other means to attract people to receive it.

 

(Vaisnava Compassion-HDG Satsvarupa Maharaja)