Srila Prabhupada's Disappearance Day lecture by HH Giriraja Swami mah

[Guest guest]

WHERE ARE THOSE MOSQUITOES?

 

A talk by Giriraj Swami on Srila Prabhupada’s

Disappearance Day

November 15, 2004

Houston

 

I shall read one verse from Srimad-Bhagavatam that I

thought

appropriate for today’s occasion. It is one of the two

verses that Srila

Vyasadeva’s disciples recited to Sukadeva Gosvami to

attract him to the

Srimad-Bhagavatam. It is from the Third Canto of

Srimad-Bhagavatam, second

chapter, “Remembrance of Lord Krsna,” Text 23:

 

aho baki yam stana-kala-kutam

jighamsayapayayad apy asadhvi

lebhe gatim dhatry-ucitam tato 'nyam

kam va dayalum saranam vrajema

 

TRANSLATION

 

Alas, how shall I take shelter of one more merciful

than He who granted

the position of mother to a she-demon [Putana]

although she was

unfaithful and she prepared deadly poison to be sucked

from her breast?

 

PURPORT by Srila Prabhupada

 

Here is an example of the extreme mercy of the Lord,

even to His enemy.

It is said that a noble man accepts the good qualities

of a person of

doubtful character, just as one accepts nectar from a

stock of poison.

In His babyhood, He was administered deadly poison by

Putana, a

she-demon who tried to kill the wonderful baby. And

because she was a demon, it

was impossible for her to know that the Supreme Lord,

even though

playing the part of a baby, was no one less than the

same Supreme

Personality of Godhead. His value as the Supreme Lord

did not diminish upon His

becoming a baby to please His devotee Yasoda. The Lord

may assume the

form of a baby or a shape other than that of a human

being, but it

doesn’t make the slightest difference; He is always

the same Supreme. A

living creature, however powerful he may become by

dint of severe penance,

can never become equal to the Supreme Lord.

Lord Krsna accepted the motherhood of Putana because

she pretended to

be an affectionate mother, allowing Krsna to suck her

breast. The Lord

accepts the least qualification of the living entity

and awards him the

highest reward. That is the standard of His character.

Therefore, who

but the Lord can be the ultimate shelter?

 

COMMENT by Giriraj Swami

 

I thought of this verse because it glorifies Srila

Prabhupada’s

characteristic of being merciful, of seeing the good

in others even in the

midst of so much other stuff. And the way we feel: how

can we take shelter

of anyone else, how could we find one more merciful

than he? We all--at

least I speak for myself--we all come with so much

poison in us, and it

was the mercy of Srila Prabhupada that he could suck

up the poison

without being affected, and at the same time purify

us. Of course, the

poison mentioned here is envy. Every living entity in

the material world is

full of envy. We are here in the material world

because of envy. And

only a pure devotee is free from envy. In fact, if one

is free from envy

he or she is liberated, because only a liberated soul

can be completely

free from envy. So, we act out of envy (jighmsaya),

and we are

unfaithful (asadvi). Unfaithful: We pretend, like

Putana, to be selfless

servants, but in our own way we are unfaithful. We

waver between our

determination to serve and our desire to enjoy and

exploit, between our

determination to help others and our tendency to be

selfish and neglect others

or even harm them.

 

There are many similarities between Putana and us, but

although Putana

was envious and unfaithful and came to poison Krsna,

Krsna did not

consider the dark side. He saw the bright side, that

she came to render

service. “She came to suckle Me just like a mother.”

So He took her as His

mother and elevated her to that position in the

spiritual world; she

became His nurse, like a mother. (A nurse is one of

the seven kinds of

mothers.) In the same way, Srila Prabhupada took the

good side of

whatever we did and magnified it.

 

Srila Prabhupada explained that there are different

grades of devotees.

The lowest grade will find a little fault and make a

big thing out of

it. The next grade will see the good and the bad in a

person but give

more emphasis to the bad. And the next grade will see

the good and the

bad and give equal importance to both. But the more

advanced devotee,

although he sees both the good and the bad in a

person, gives more

emphasis to the good. And the most advanced will find

a little good and make a

big thing out of it. And that is the way that Srila

Prabhupada was. He

could see that spark of desire to serve in us, and he

would fan it. He

was very expert and would protect the little spark.

Sometimes if a

flame is weak it can be extinguished. If it is

dampened it may go out. And

if it is blown upon too strongly it can go out. Srila

Prabhupada was

very expert to preserve that little spark and fan it

in just the right

way to make it grow. And he promised and guaranteed

that if we just give

this life to Krsna, we will be successful and go back

home, back to

Godhead.

 

He always directed us to Krsna. He told us that a

spiritual master does

not say, “Surrender to me; I am God.” Rather, he says,

“Surrender to

Krsna. I am an insignificant servant of God.” So Srila

Prabhupada was

unique, at least among the swamis and yogis that came

to the West before

him or about the same time. He was unique in that he

was always

directing us to Krsna: “Do not surrender to me;

surrender to Krsna.” Once, when

one of our Godbrothers, Pusta Krsna Prabhu, said to

Srila Prabhupada,

“I trust you and can surrender to you, but I do not

trust anyone else. I

cannot surrender to anyone else-- any representative

of yours--because

I fear they may cheat me,” Srila Prabhupada replied,

“Do not surrender

to me. I will also cheat you. Just surrender to

Krsna.” Because he was

fully surrendered to his spiritual master and Krsna

and always directed

us to surrender to Krsna, he actually was a perfect

servant of Krsna

and a transparent medium. Therefore we had faith that

we could surrender

to him and that surrender to him was tantamount to

surrender to Krsna.

 

The same quality that we read about here, the merciful

quality of

Krsna, was fully manifest in Srila Prabhupada. He was

truly a transparent

via media because he saw the good in us and addressed

the good. And the

good in us is in fact us, because as souls, as parts

and parcels of

Krsna, we are pure. It is just because we are covered

by the material body

and mind that there is impurity. So Srila Prabhupada

would actually see

our true natures as servants of Krsna, eternal

servants of Krsna, and

he would relate to us as eternal servants of Krsna.

And that inspired us

to act as servants of Krsna.

 

Sometimes Srila Prabhupada seemed to see the good to

such an extent

that he seemed to miss the other side. Once, a

youngish man came to Juhu.

He had a Ph.D. We were quite new in India, and very

few local people

were coming forward to join. It was mainly the

devotees that Srila

Prabhupada brought from America and Europe who were

assisting him. Anyway,

the young man seemed very doubtful to all of us. I was

pretty naive

myself, but even I had doubts about him. Srila

Prabhupada, however, was very

enthusiastic about him and invited him to stay

upstairs near Srila

Prabhupada’s quarters in the back, in Prabhupada’s own

servants’ quarters.

He wanted to encourage him and keep him close. One of

Srila

Prabhupada’s disciples (although we were all thinking

it, more or less) actually

went up to Srila Prabhupada and said, “Srila

Prabhupada, I think you are

wasting your time on this man. You should just let him

go.” [laughter]

And Srila Prabhupada said, “No, I want to give him a

chance.” Anyway,

after a few days he did leave. He just was not that

serious--not that

substantial. But that really is not the point. The

point is that Srila

Prabhupada wanted to give him a chance. He was always

ready to give a

person a chance, and another chance, and another

chance.

 

And often, Srila Prabhupada’s faith in a person or

mercy toward a

person brought great results. There was a young man

who came to the Boston

temple when I was there in 1970. His name was Peter,

and Peter was

eccentric--to say the least. In the old Boston temple

there was the front

door, and then there was a hallway and a stairway up

to the temple room.

Basically, when a new person came all they would see

was the hallway,

unless someone greeted them and directed them to the

stairs up to the

temple room. So, Peter made his home in the front

hallway. He would keep

all his books and personal paraphernalia scattered on

the floor of the

hallway. He would rest his back against the wall and

stretch his legs

out, completely blocking the hallway. And sometimes he

would lie down

and sleep in the hallway. He did not respond to normal

instructions and

thus earned for himself the name “Crazy Peter.” We

used to call him

Crazy Peter.

 

Still, we all knew Srila Prabhupada’s mood. Srila

Prabhupada was very

merciful, and especially in the early days of the

movement in America,

we considered that any soul that came to the temple

was sent by Krsna

and was not ordinary, and we would really do

everything we could to

encourage the person. But with Peter things came to

the stage where we

thought that he was causing such a disruption that new

people who came would

be discouraged from Krsna consciousness. We thought

that maybe for the

larger interest, for the greater good, we should just

ask him to go.

Satsvarupa Maharaja, as the temple president, wrote to

Srila Prabhupada

and asked if we could ask Peter to leave. And Srila

Prabhupada replied,

“What’s the matter, can’t you tolerate?”

 

Thereafter, Srila Prabhupada returned to India, and he

asked each

temple to send one devotee. I was chosen from Boston,

and so I went to

India. For years I never heard about Crazy Peter, nor

did I think much about

him. Then, after being in India for many years, I came

back to visit

the United States. And there, at the Los Angeles

temple, during

guru-puja, I saw Crazy Peter. I could not believe it.

So many years had

passed--Srila Prabhupada had left the planet--and

there was Crazy Peter right

in the temple room in Los Angeles.

 

I asked a nearby devotee, “Who is that?” He answered,

“Oh, that is

Kusakratha Prabhu.” I thought, “Kusakratha Prabhu--the

Sanskrit genius who

is producing translation after translation of Vedic

scriptures and the

works of the Gosvamis and other acaryas?” We were

reading them and

reciting prayers from them. His translations were an

essential part of our

spiritual lives. I thought, “O my God, that is

Kusakratha Prabhu! Crazy

Peter has become Kusakratha Prabhu, the Sanskrit

translator!”

[laughter] And then I thought of Srila Prabhupada’s

mercy. Srila Prabhupada had

protected him. Somehow Srila Prabhupada wanted to give

him a chance to

do service, to become Krsna conscious, and he did.

 

Another aspect of Srila Prabhupada’s faith in us (and

in the process of

devotional service) was how much responsibility he

gave us. We were

young boys and girls. I joined at the age of

twenty-one and I was already

a little older than most. Satsvarupa Maharaja was

twenty-nine, and he

was like an old man. He even had a job! [laughter] I

hardly knew anyone

of my peers who had a job. He had a job and he went to

work and he got

a paycheck. So, we were really young and inexperienced

in the world,

yet Srila Prabhupada gave us such tremendous

responsibility. Practically

any devotee who wanted to go to a new place and open a

center, Srila

Prabhupada would say, “Go. Do it.” If a householder

couple wanted to

preach, he would tell them, “Go together and preach.

Open a center.” There

were just a few temples then. The first was New York

and the second was

San Francisco, and in San Francisco, as he was about

to leave for

India, Srila Prabhupada told his young devotees, “If

you want to please me,

open a center in Los Angeles.” One of those devotees,

Dayananda Prabhu,

went to Los Angeles.

 

That was Srila Prabhupada’s mood. And then there were

the three couples

who went to England--Shyamasundara and Malati, Gurudas

and Yamuna, and

Mukunda and Janaki. It was such a big thing for them

to go to England,

and even bigger because Srila Prabhupada’s Guru

Maharaja,

Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura, had sent one of his

sannyasis to England to

preach and he really could not do anything

substantial. So Srila Prabhupada

sent the three couples, and they lived in very austere

conditions,

sometimes not even all together. At one stage all

three couples lived

together in a warehouse. Later, sometimes one would

stay in one place and

another couple would stay in another place. Eventually

one thing led to

another and they were successful. They met George

Harrison and the

Beatles and they became tremendously successful. Then

too, Srila Prabhupada

had disciples preach in Russia, and later in China.

Srila Prabhupada

really gave us very big challenges. He had a lot of

faith in us. He gave

us a lot of responsibility. A lot of money was passing

through our

hands, and Srila Prabhupada let us spend it, and the

movement was really

expanding.

 

When we trust someone, it inspires the person to want

to fulfill our

trust, to prove that our faith was justified. Very few

devotees betrayed

Srila Prabhupada’s trust. One who did, however, was

Gaurasundara Prabhu

in Hawaii. Somehow he sold the Hawaii temple and kept

the money and

disappeared for a while. Even then, Srila Prabhupada

wanted to get him

back. Once, he was recounting Gaurasundara’s misdeeds:

“He did this; he

did that. He was such a rascal--such a rascal. But I

like that rascal!”

[laughter] He was very merciful. Kam va dayalum

saranam vrajema: “Of

whom should I take shelter but him, who is most

merciful?” I cannot

imagine anyone more merciful than him.

 

So we take shelter of Srila Prabhupada, and we want to

take more and

more shelter of him. We want to encourage more and

more people to take

shelter of him and to take more and more shelter of

him.

 

It is, of course, bittersweet, thinking of his

departure. But it is a

sweet day, and Srila Prabhupada does bestow his mercy

especially today.

He bestows a special type of sweet mercy. And we can

have full faith in

his mercy and shelter and feel safe and secure under

his lotus feet and

in the company of his other devotees.

 

Srila Prabhupada has given shelter to so many souls

that if we look at

each other and see each other independent of Srila

Prabhupada, we might

think, “I like this one, but I don’t like that one so

much. I want to

be with this one but not so much with that one.” Yet

if we think that we

are under the shelter of Srila Prabhupada’s lotus

feet--and that is the

main thing--then we should feel happy that others have

also come to the

shelter of Srila Prabhupada’s lotus feet. Just like in

the

Govardhana-lila, all the Vraja-vasis took shelter

under Govardhana Hill. And they

were happy there. That is all we hear, how happy they

were just to be

with Krsna under Govardhana Hill. We do not read that

some devotee

thought, “Oh God, it would be so nice if only Jatila

was not here. Why does

she have to be here? And Kutila . . . Oh God . . .”

And then they forget

about Krsna standing right before them. [laughter] We

do not hear

that. We just hear that their gaze was fixed on the

beautiful

transcendental form of Krsna, in ecstasy. So that

should be our mood.

 

There was one disciple of Srila Prabhupada’s, Tusta

Krsna Prabhu, who

got into a different mood. To give some historical

context, there was a

devotee named Sai who had his own following in Hawaii.

Then he joined

and brought all of his followers with him, and he took

initiation from

Srila Prabhupada and became Siddha-svarupa dasa. One

of Siddha-svarupa’s

followers was Tusta Krsna. He and Sai’s other

followers all became

members of ISKCON, but Tusta Krsna Prabhu in

particular was very nice, and

he had a very affectionate relationship with Srila

Prabhupada. Somehow

he developed the idea that Siddha-svarupa was a pure

devotee and that

others were not and that devotees should follow

Siddha-svarupa and not

others. Srila Prabhupada wrote back that

Siddha-svarupa was a good soul

but that anyone who is surrendered to the spiritual

master is a pure

devotee, and that we should not discriminate that this

is a pure devotee

and that is a non-pure devotee and thus make factions.

Then Srila

Prabhupada wrote, “Siddha-svarupa will go to the

spiritual sky, you will

go,” and then he mentioned Syamasundara Prabhu,

perhaps because he was the

GBC. So, Srila Prabhupada wrote, “Siddha-svarupa will

go to the

spiritual sky, you will go, Syamasundara will go, all

others will go. We will

have another ISKCON there. Of course, Mr. Nair [the

man who had tried

to cheat Srila Prabhupada in Juhu] must stay.”

[laughter] This devotee,

Tusta Krsna Prabhu, was actually the first one to meet

Mr. Nair.

 

More recently, our dear Godbrother Bhurijana Prabhu,

with his wry sense

of humor, remarked some time after Tamal Krishna

Goswami Maharaja’s

departure, “I used to think of the idea of another

ISKCON in the spiritual

sky, and I did not know how I felt about it, but now

that Goswami

Maharaja is there, the idea is becoming more and more

attractive.”

[laughter]

 

Of course, our appreciation of Srila Prabhupada is the

basis of

everything. It is the basis of our spiritual lives. It

is the basis of our

association. It is the basis of our movement. But

Srila Prabhupada is also

pleased when he sees that we appreciate each other and

see the good in

each other, as he did, and when we help and encourage

each other, as he

did. Then our love for him and our service to him is

more complete; it

includes appreciation for his other servants and

service to his other

servants. And ultimately, it is all service to His

Divine Grace. Our

service to the other devotees is service to him. Our

appreciation of the

other devotees is actually appreciation for him. So it

all comes

together by his grace.

 

Hare Krsna.

 

Are there any questions or comments?

 

Amrit Gupta: Maharaja, you decided to serve Prabhupada

in such a

difficult time. You had all the resources at your home

and were the only son

of your parents. Yesterday you said that one can use

all material or

monetary facilities to serve God. What made you decide

to take such a

difficult path and leave everything to serve Srila

Prabhupada?

 

Giriraj Swami: I was looking for a spiritual master,

and when I met

Srila Prabhupada I understood, “He is my perfect

spiritual master.” So I

joined the temple. There was never any consideration

of staying with my

family. I was happy in the temple, and I was happy in

India. Within two

or three days of my arrival, I felt at home in India.

In fact, I felt

more at home there than in America.

 

Srila Prabhupada wanted us to help him. He wanted our

service. He was

not that interested in the money. And now, so many

years later, some of

it is coming anyway. Without having compromised to get

something then,

I have gotten it now anyway.

 

I did not find my path difficult then. Maybe if I had

to do it again

now I would find it difficult, but at the time I did

not find it

difficult. It was natural.

 

To be with Srila Prabhupada in Juhu was incomparable.

Remembering that

spirit and mood of service . . . Just like we pray,

kaha mora svarupa

rupa kaha sanatan.* I would now pray, “Where are those

mosquitoes? Where

have they all gone? Where are those rats? Where have

they gone? Where

are those leaks in the ceiling? Where are they all

now?” Because they

were all part of the ecstasy of serving Srila

Prabhupada, I would not

have traded them for anything--not for all the wealth

in the world. And I

would welcome them again--even now.

 

Thank you. Hare Krsna.

 

Srila Prabhupada ki jaya!

 

------------------------------

 

*The complete verse and two subsequent verses from the

“Song of

Separation” that we sing on the disappearance days of

Gaudiya Vaisnava acaryas

read:

 

kaha mora swarup rupa kaha sanatan

kaha dasa raghunatha patita-pavan

 

kaha mora bhatta-juga kaha kaviraj

eka-kale kotha gela gora nata-raj

 

se-saba sangira sange je koilo bilas

se-sanga na paiya kande narottama das

 

“Where are my Svarupa Damodara and Sri Rupa Gosvami?

Where is Sanatana?

Where is Dasa Raghunatha, the deliverer of the fallen?

Where are my

Raghunatha Bhatta and Gopala Bhatta, and where is

Krsnadasa Kaviraja?

Where did Gauranga Mahaprabhu, the king of dancers,

suddenly go? Being

separated from their loving association and the

blissful pastimes of

Mahaprabhu, Narottama dasa can only cry.”

 

 

 

 

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