impersonal calamity thou hast removed

[Guest guest]

I will never forget one lecture in which, as often happened, he was

attacking a famous impersonalist commentary to the verse, "On Me fix thy

mind; to Me be devoted; worship Me; revere Me; thus having disciplined

thyself, with Me as thy goal, to Me shalt thou come." (Bg. 9.34) The

impersonalist scholar commented: "It is not the personal Krsna to whom we

have to give ourselves up utterly, but the unborn, beginningless, eternal

who speaks through Krsna." Whenever Srila Prabhupada had Rayarama read this

passage at a lecture, he would explode into a furious diatribe. "Just see

what a nonsense rascal. Krsna is standing there and says, ‘To Me; worship

Me.' And he, a very great scholar, says it is not to the personal Krsna but

to some void. Just see what a rascal number one." After listening to this

diatribe for about a month, Kirtanananda finally, at the end of a lecture,

said, "I don't see where he's actually wrong. Krsna is in all of us. So if

we surrender to the unborn within all of us, then we attain the ultimate."

 

And he went on in this way. Srila Prabhupada didn't say a word. Kirtanananda

finally ran down, and Srila Prabhupada asked, "Are you finished now?" When

Kirtanananda acknowledged that he was, Srila Prabhupada suddenly began to

roar like the lion incarnation. "Krsna is standing right before you and He

says, ‘You worship Me,' and you mean to say you do not worship Krsna? You

mean worship some void, unborn? Krsna is before Arjuna and He says, ‘On Me

fix thy mind. To Me be devoted. Worship Me!' You do not understand? A

nonsense rascal says it is not to Krsna, so you want to worship such a

nonsense rascal? ‘Not to the personal Krsna,' he says, and Krsna says,

‘Worship Me.'" We all sat in shocked silence. Kirtanananda didn't say

another word. I remember that I thought this attack very harsh, but Umapati

thought it was justified. "He's right," Umapati said afterwards. "None of

the commentators mention worshiping Krsna, but Krsna clearly says, ‘Worship

Me.' You've read Bhagavad-gita before. Have you ever thought of worshiping

Krsna?" I had to admit that although I had read Gita three or four times

before, worshiping Krsna had never entered my mind. Later I came to

understand that most scholars and swamis avoid the clear command of this

verse, although they teach from Bhagavad-gita. Indeed, the following year in

San Francisco I bluntly asked one celebrated Swami Mayananda, "Do you

worship Krsna?" He was sitting in a chair, and I was standing over him when

I asked the question, and he jumped to his feet and shouted, "No! Why should

I?" His eyes flashed, and he was furious and he chided me that Krsna is

nothing but the Self that is within all of us.

 

Thus Srila Prabhupada's first job was to establish that the supreme aspect

of the Absolute Truth is a person and that we are to worship this person. By

and large we were mostly impersonalists addicted to inactivity. We were

concerned about mukti, nirvana or liberation from all material action, but

he deluged us with words and showed us how action for the sake of the

Supreme is on the spiritual platform and is superior to inaction. This

essentially is the message of Bhagavad-gita, for Lord Krsna tells Arjuna to

fight, "but do it for Me." Srila Prabhupada said, "When one works for Krsna

and chants His name, he is already liberated and living on the spiritual

plane. Just as one feels heat as soon as he touches something hot, one is

liberated as soon as he enters into the service of Krsna."

 

We all felt that we had just touched something very hot. Certainly no one

doubted that our long slumber had been disturbed.

 

By Hayagriva Prabhu, BTG #47