Carrots

[Guest guest]

Dear Maharaja

 

Please accept my humble obiesances

All glories to Srila Prabhupada

 

I am working on some course material for the congregation and in dealing

with prasadam standards, the following came up.

 

NM followers avoid carrots and red lentils as well as onions and garlic,

citing a story from the Vedic Puranas as the reason. The story describes

that a great sage was going to conduct a traditional cow-sacrifice in which

a cow was to be ritually killed, offered in a sacrificial fire and emerge

from the fire with a new body. The cow was killed in the afternoon and was

due to receive a new body through the sacrificial fire that evening. During

the interim, the sage's pregnant wife, driven by a sudden, intense hunger,

stole some of the cow's body and ate the flesh. She buried the left over

bone, blood and skin. That evening when the cow emerged from the fire in a

new body, the body was incomplete. The sage was angry and released a

powerful curse that turned the bones into carrots, the blood into red

lentils and the skin into garlic and onions.

 

The NM disciple who told me this said that NM learned this standard off

Kesva Maharaja who learned it off Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Maharaja, and

that it is followed by most Gaudiya Vaisnavas.

 

Do you have any experience in this regard? I could hardly imagine that if it

is widely followed by other GVs that it would not have come up before the

rise of NM.

 

I am not attempting to prove/disprove or validate their claim, I am merely

interested in putting it into perspective.

 

Ys bvd