Why are there no remains of Lord Chaitanya’s South India tours?

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu toured south India personally. But we do not have any traces of it even before 500 years. How come such spiritual influence has not attracted any permanent followers? Why LCM had not tried to propagate or make observable and logstanding effects? What was His purpose in that tour? It appears that it was of no much significant (I am making this comment because we donot see any traces of LCM’s trip like mentioning in literatures,folktales,ashrams, temples, congregations…).

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
today thank you question chaitanya mahaprabhu toured south india personally but we do not have any traces of a south india tour although it happened only 500 years ago how come that such spiritual influence did not attract any permanent followers it appears that it was not of so much significance i am making this comment because we do not see any trace of lord chaitanya mahaprabhu like mentioning in the literature, folktales, ashrams, temples, congregations and so on answer the first and totally undeniable proof of the success of lord chaitanya mahaprabhu south india tour is the presence of gopal bhatta goswami in the gaudiya sampradaya now historians cannot deny the fact that gopal bhatta goswami was belonging to south indian family going to his revational family his lineage is relatively well known and others and it’s also undeniable that he actually came to rindavan and he wrote the several he several gaudiya vishnu literature jiva goswami when attributed to satyendra was partly to gopal bhatta goswami and gopal bhatta goswami are together said to have written many of the books which especially explain how the karmakanta rituals rituals need to be performed within the vaishnava gaudiya vaishnava context so his earlier being in the sri vaishnava sampradaya and later coming to gaudiya sampradaya both these are well documented that’s the first time so yes he went abroad and this and there was a significant success this itself for in traditional india for a person who was born brought up in a particular place and was living in a particular religious place like srirangam where he was traditionally considered to be a bastion a stronghold of sri vaishnavism and for a person to get converted from that and to become a gaudiya vaishnava that is significant by any standards similarly historians also know that ramanand rai was a was in an administrative post of significant importance in south india and he also left that and came to jigna to stay with the lord so as far as his associates are concerned that the lord can lord transformed and inspired them is undeniable now apart from that lord chaitanya went to south india list of places that describes where all he went and what all he did so the miracles like say he removing the leprosy of vasudeva vasudeva purata sundara vasudeva tranakarata so he delivered vasudeva or for example his making thousands of people dance and sing and inspiring them to become gaudiya vaishnavas now the skeptics may call these as poetic exaggerations or pious exaggerations and the point is that whenever the lord propagates any message because the lord is himself all powerful his presence and his potency can do extraordinary things and now if say a few hundred years later if shila prabhupada had not propagated krishna consciousness and not established his scorn now shila bhaktasiddhanta sarvesh thakur’s contributions would have been practically unknown and shila bhaktasiddhanta sarvesh thakur his contributions were not insignificant the gaudiya might had 64 branches all over the world and all over the country and three more branches abroad rangoon berlin and london and he had a large number of disciples and followers but no matter how powerful the influence may be in one particular generation we need representatives of the lord for glorifying him in every single generation just as our previous acharyas have glorified the lord in their generation of course their contributions are for all of eternity the book that the goswamis have written the books that shila prabhupada has written they will be available and valuable for us for the next 10,000 years but to make them accessible and relevant and usable for people there have to be spokesperson for krishna glorifiers of krishna in every generation in the first generation of his scorn that means the prabhupada disciples have done a glorious responsibility in spreading this scorn now it is the responsibility of our second generation devotees to carry on that and the glorification of krishna in this generation the propagation of krishna in this generation cannot be done by anyone except the members of this generation and if in a particular generation there are no members to do that then no matter how great and glorious the contribution of the previous generation may be it can soon become lost to history unless the contributions are either immortalized in stone in terms of building temples and structures that last for a long time or they’re immortalized in terms of books which last for a long time in general um how do we know what happened in the past architecture and literature are the two primary ways in which we know so shetana maha we know very clearly in south india he did not go about asking anyone to build temples nor did he nor did any people who any of his associates who stayed in south india and wrote books in south so they left south india and came to north india to vrindavan because that was where the lordful desire to focus and develop the gaudiya mission gaudiya vishnu mission at that time so therefore if there are not glorifiers of the lord in each particular generation then that those glories can get lost very soon sushila prabhupada had not been there bhaktivedanta surya thakur’s contributions would have become just a footnote in history and not only a footnote they may have even got lost entirely because mundane historians are not concerned primarily about spiritual movements they are only concerned with the sociological effects of spiritual movements so only there’s a social effect there’s a transformation in terms of tangible change mass appeal or actually prabhupada considered three activities as successes for his movement primarily he said he would tell you know he would encourage the disciples that build more temples than what i have built write more books than what i have written and make more disciples make more devotees than what i have made so now among these the devotees that we make they will last only for one generation and the temples and the books they can last for many generations but if the devotees are not made in the then the temples and the books are no longer accessible who will tell others about those temples and books so what happened in the case of shichatana mahaprabhu’s mission in south india was that he transformed a large number of people but there were no devotees leaders stationed in south india to carry on his legacy so for that generation people were transformed but then the effect got dissipated now why did the lord allow that that is krishna described in the bhagavad-gita the nature of time sakalene hamatha yoga on ashtaparantam why the nature of time that the great knowledge of yoga the great knowledge of bhakti yoga ultimately gets lost so chaitanya mahaprabhu’s plan is something that we can’t know but there is but there is no reason for us to doubt or deny the historicity of what is given chaitanya charitamrta and other literature in our gaudiya tradition because the books do tell it and we do have some indicators in terms of the presence of ramanand raya and gopal bhattakoswami nasam and as i said if there are not glorifiers of the lord in each generation then things do get lost and what was the significance of his trip the significance itself was that actually whenever he traveled he inspired and transformed people and he gave them love of godhead and they got spiritually very advanced if not liberated so delivering those people itself is a great achievement now we will see that lord chaitanya mahaprabhu went even to north india he went to varanasi but even after he defeated prakashanasa siddhi over there varanasi continued to be a center of mayavad why is that because the lord did not station any of his followers over there now we may wonder why did the lord do like that the lord has a plan for how to propagate his movement in various generations and he chose to propagate in a particular in a particular way that’s why he focused he stayed himself in orissa then he sent his goswamis his goswami disciples vrindavan and his other associates from navdeep many of them stayed in navdeep so in these three places chaitanya mahaprabhu focused his efforts orissa bengal and vrindavan and we see there are very significant legacies going on till this day in all these three places so wherever there is emphasis that is where normally effect and transformation takes place and even if there is no emphasis just like we in our movement have distributed so many books in some countries millions of books have been distributed but still there are only handful of devotees so is all that book distribution just a waste not at all what is can we say that the book is of no significance no the book distribution is like a seed sowing program but then when we have a proper temple community development devotee care systems then that is like cultivation of the seed and the reaping of the harvest so that may or may not happen everywhere because the seed of krishna season 2.40 therefore whatever is done is going to benefit those people for all time to come and we can also learn from the example of chaitanya mahaprabhu that if we want to be effective in our preaching we need to have a base and a solid outreach surrounding that base and if if we just go around traveling and preaching which is also good we can benefit people but at the same time if we want to have a tangible lasting legacy then there has to be focus on one particular place so in chaitanya mahaprabhu’s life we saw see that he went on south india north india tours and he transformed people over there in one sense those were morale boosting tours it’s like uh if we consider lord chaitanya’s tours like spiritual or intellectual wars then practically all country schools of thought were defeated by lord chaitanya mahaprabhu you know he encountered buddhists he encountered mayavadis he encountered vaishnavas of other sampradaya i may not say that he defeated them directly but tattvavadis and sri vaishnavas and kushti margis and he actually helped them come to a higher understanding so we see that it was a victorious tour so if we compare it to a war if a world conquering general is going to travel everywhere you know he may not have enough commanders to continue on wherever he goes and conquers for a long time to come so we see alexander is called the great and he conquered a large part of the world but within a few generations after him his legacy was lost so he appointed seleucus and others as his successors in a few places but in many places what to speak of after him during his lifetime only the places were lost that when he came on his way to india and when he was returning back the kingdom that he had conquered many of them had rebelled against him and he had to fight his way back and in one of the skirmishes when he was fighting back he got wounded and he was killed so now does this mean that his conquest had no significance from the historical point of view that at least he went around and conquered so many people and conquered so many lands that is significant now that he could not sustain that hold on so broad empire is understandable because he may not have had so many competent generals so in that sense chaitanya mahaprabhu he is going around all over the country north and south india transforming people is itself demonstrative of the potency of krishna consciousness and sweetness of the gaudiya vaishnava siddhanta and sadhana but at the same time it also indicates that unless there are specific trained competent and advanced people to carry on the legacy the legacy may just get lost by the power of time actually prabhupada would also say that don’t make me like alexander that whatever i have started at least you maintain that if you can’t expand it of course the prabhupada’s disciples have lived up to prabhupada’s hopes prabhupada had 108 temples now we have anything between 400 to 600 temples depending on how we define the temple in the censure so they have built on and expanded the legacy of prabhupada but it is sobering lesson for all of us that no matter how great the founder no matter how great the acharya we cannot rest on the laurels of the previous acharyas the responsibility to glorify the lord in every generation is fairly and squarely of the members of that generation if in a particular generation there are no people who will glorify glorify the lord and carry on the message and mission then that one generation can cause the message to get lost and the mission to get obscure so we can take inspiration from the example of chaitanya mahaprabhu and recognize our responsibility for our generation thank you