HKDD; Vaisyas - agriculture, cow protection and trade.

[Guest guest]

mark chatburn wrote:

 

Many good points to address. Unfortunately, I don't have time to

address them all now.

 

>

> Too many

> devotees fear ownership and see it as wrong; that to

> possess and exchange goods and services is wrong. What

> results is like communism where the state is the

> ultimate owner, here people felt disempowered and

> disenfranchised and ultimately neglected the care of

> their non-possession or non-work.

 

I'm not advocating communism. You're right: Communism is disempowering.

Srila Prabhupada said that because of communal ownership, no one has

incentive to produce. I have seen that practically speaking, at places

like Gita-nagari in the 1980s, that was in fact true. Lack of ownership

turns everyone into a dependent sudra, waiting for someone else to take

the initiative.

 

Ownership should be there. Eg: "Everyone should have a piece of land

given by the government" (my paraphrasal of Prabhupada's Geneva lecture

"Everyone should Own Some Land")

 

The point is, ideally, that land should be used for production for one's

own family (primarily) not primarily for the market.

 

 

> Devotees throughout the world have hectares of land

> that were either donated or were bought on the backs

> of the sweat of sankirtana devotees, and yet this land

> goes mostly unused, or if used used in a way that is

> highly inefficient, or not in accordance with what

> should be done. Rohita says that they only cultivate a

> few hectares and then using a tractor, Syam cultivates

> very little at the Manor though he has the trained

> animals to do it and could easily buy or rent land

> with the help from the Hindus in the UK. At Inés Rath

> they have a whole island barely used for agricultural

> production. Even with the Dharmaksetra project in the

> UK, the production side of the endeavour was almost

> completely overlooked, whereas Vedic Emporians were

> costed to the last piece of marble. At Vrindavan, at

> Mayapur, here in Argentina, in Brazil, all over the

> world, from my experience, and from what I have seen

> and heard, production of agriculture is not greatly

> seem in ISKCON farms.

>

> I do not mean to belittle the hard work that many

> devotees have put in here, but to show that even if

> this amazing solution of HKDD's were to appear -

> meaning huge tracts of land bought for the devotees to

> live a subsistence lifestyle, I doubt devotees would

> do it very easily. It lies in our conditioning, it is

> a social issue...

>

> Mark.

 

"Devotees around the world have land, but are still unproductive," to

paraphrase your statements.

 

The key problem here goes back to Naveen Krsna's favorite Prabhupada

quote:

 

"Lack of success is due to lack of training."

 

There is no training. When you are struggling to do something and you

have no idea how to do it the right way, after awhile it gets pretty

demoralizing. Lack of training is the big problem.

 

Lack of training has two aspects.

 

1. There is lack of training in practical skills.

 

2. There is lack of spiritual training that would show these devotees

how developing self-sufficient agriculture and ox-power would aid in

their spiritual progress.

 

So, just because some devotees have access to land and are not

sufficiently utilizing it, does not prove that giving land to people is

the wrong way to go. The problem is that land is only half the solution

-- the other half of the solution is appropriate training. Nothing will

be successful without good training.

 

your servant,

 

Hare Krsna dasi