Prabhupada life-story 14 – Incorporating ISKCON – The seven visionary purposes

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future talks. Thank you. Hare Krishna.
Hare Krishna. Welcome back to our discussion on Srila Prabhupada’s life story. We discussed about how Prabhupada encountered immense difficulty and hostility in sharing Krishna’s message to an extremely unreceptive audience, the hippies.
They were interested but many of them were challenging, many of them were mentally disturbed. So we saw that he has had different kinds of obstacles at different phases. Sometimes the audience was just not interested, sometimes the audience, he was not allowed to speak, sometimes he was robbed and sometimes he was driven out.
Now he had got an audience, there were some who were interested but many who were very rebellious, very impudent and sometimes just too disturbed to be able to sit in here but through it all Prabhupada was persevering and now that he had a solid place, now that he had a steady group of people coming, he told them, he decided to take the next step forward and he said that one day he told his followers that we will call our society ISKCON. What is ISKCON? ISKCON is International Society for Krishna Consciousness. So Krishna Consciousness was the contemporary rendition that Prabhupada had given of a word that the great bhakti saint and scholar Rupa Goswami had used in his writings.
Krishna rasa bhavita matihi. Matihi is consciousness, rasa bhavita is imbued with rasa, filled with rasa. Krishna is of course Krishna, God.
So Krishna Consciousness, when our consciousness is imbued, enriched with Krishna, with attraction to Krishna, with absorption in Krishna, with devotion to Krishna, that is Krishna Consciousness and Prabhupada felt that Krishna Consciousness, the absorption of the human consciousness in the divine was what would counter the selfishness of the human heart, what would decrease the incessant sensual and bodily cravings that were driving and dragging people here and there in the hope for pleasure. That was actually causing the degradation of humanity, of ecology, of culture, of civilization. So Krishna Consciousness was the way to spiritually replenish humanity and thereby bring a proper balance.
So now he, when he formed the society, he had seven purposes to it. This revealed his thought that he was, he wanted to systematically share spiritual knowledge for correcting the imbalance of values in today’s society, in the society. Imbalance of values means people were excessively materialistic and then neglecting their spiritual side.
So he wanted to give systematic spiritual knowledge and in fact that was what Swamiji was already doing. He was giving classes regularly thrice a week so that people could hear and Prabhupada envisioned a society which would do this all over the world and he saw that to correct the values, imbalance of values, just mere moralizing, oh how people have become degraded, that was not enough. If people had to change themselves, they needed a solid intellectual philosophical foundation for that and he wanted to provide that through the philosophical wisdom that he was rendering, for the spiritual knowledge that he was giving and to infuse a consciousness of Krishna as the supreme all-attractive person, as the reservoir of all love among all people, based on the wisdom given in the Bhagavad Gita and the Srimad Bhagavatam.
So here there was, what Prabhupada wanted to give was not just intellectual, it was transformational. He wanted to address the consciousness of people, not just their head. So he would infuse a consciousness of Krishna.
Krishna of course is God. Now some people suggested to him that, you know, you could say God consciousness. Prabhupada wanted to keep it specific, Krishna consciousness.
He says, yes, the word God is good but so many people have so many different ideas when they think of the word God and most people think of God in very hazy abstract terms. They don’t know who really God is. So by making the name very specific, Krishna consciousness, Prabhupada wanted to convey to people that Krishna is God as revealed in the Bhagavad Gita, as revealed in the Srimad Bhagavatam.
Another purpose that Prabhupada formulated of the society was that he wanted to have people, he wanted to bring society closer, members of the society come closer to each other and closer to the supreme person, infusing within them the understanding that all souls spiritual parts of the prime entity, the whole Krishna. So here Prabhupada envisioned community as a means to spirituality. That means he saw that actually people would come together for the purpose.
He was not envisioning a solitary spirituality. He was envisioning a social spirituality and that was evident also in the international society for Krishna consciousness. The process of bhakti especially is a society, is a social process.
The people come together and together they serve the Lord. The Bhagavad Gita has four verses which are the Chatur Shloki Gita. The four essential verses of the Bhagavad Gita 10.8, 9, 10 and 11.
So 10.8 talks about how the knowledge of the supreme person infuses devotion within people. So aham sarvasya prabhavo matah sarvam pravartate iti matva bhajante mam budha bhavesam anvitaham. Krishna says those who understand that I am the source of everything, I am the absolute truth, they become wise and they become totally devoted to me.
And then in the next verse he says how is this devotion practiced. He says that in 10.9 machitta madgata prana bodhayantah parasparam kathayantash chamam nityam tushyanti charam anticham So he says machitta madgata prana that they think of me, their life is devoted to me and then when they come together they delight in discussing about me, in hearing about me and speaking about me. They delight in that and they get the supreme joy in that.
In fact they keep enlightening each other about this and they delight in this. So Prabhupada was taking this which is given in the Bhagavad Gita and which is the tradition as seen in the Bhagavatam also where the great saints and sages would come together and discuss spiritual wisdom with each other. So this was what Prabhupada had come to give and this was what he he formalized that people come together with closer to each other and closer to Krishna.
So it was a social kind of spirituality centered on the supreme spiritual reality Krishna and Prabhupada himself was doing that. He was giving talks and people were coming closer to him and through him they were coming closer to Krishna. And those who were coming together they were also coming closer to each other.
So Prabhupada came from a venerable tradition and he was expressing the mission of that tradition in contemporary terms here. He said to build, to erect places of worship devoted for transcendental past, a place of transcendental pastimes devoted to supreme entity Krishna. So Prabhupada did not explicitly say to build temples.
Prabhupada said there’s actually a place of worship dedicated to Krishna. Now worship can be in many ways. Worship can of course be, we can have Krishna’s sacred images, the deities and they can be worshipped.
But Krishna also says in the Bhagavad Gita that those who study his message they are worshipping him with the intelligence. Ishtasyamiti Mehmatihi. That is that those who study the sacred conversation of ours, they are worshipping me with their intelligence, Krishna says.
It’s like aarti can be performed with a lamp, with incense, but similarly aarti can be performed with our intelligence. So Prabhupada wanted the center that he would establish to embody this form of worship also. Worship through education.
Worship through glorification of the Lord which brought the head and the heart closer to the Lord, which used the intelligence in the service of the Lord in a mood of reverential worship. And in fact at this point when Prabhupada had this 26 second avenue center, now there were no deities of Krishna. All that Prabhupada had was his message that he was speaking.
So it was primarily worship that was definitely happening, but it was happening through the spiritual wisdom that he was speaking. And then the next purpose he said was that to propagate the Sankirtan movement as taught by to inspire people for chanting the holy names of Krishna. This was also a very important purpose and Prabhupada had already started that and it was resonating with the people.
That message of bhakti which had been available for millennia, which had been systematically by Krishna thousands of years ago in the Bhagavad Gita, that message had been made even more accessible and relishable and universally available by Lord Chaitanya through his Sankirtan movement. That to worship God does not necessarily require anyone to go out in the forest to search for him in the privacy of one’s heart. To worship God does not also require one to have mastery over elaborate rituals and follow fastidious rules of cleanliness so that one could worship the deity form of the Lord.
To worship the Lord was very simple. He could be worshipped simply by singing his holy names and while singing those names one could experience such sublime ecstasy that one would become elevated, that one would become transformed, that one would become spiritually enriched. So already the hippies had started experiencing the magical cleansing of the heart, the clearing of the consciousness that happened through the chanting of the holy names and Prabhupada wanted his movement to propagate this chanting of the holy names.
Indeed, the movement that he subsequently founded was well known especially for the public performance of the Harinam Sankirtan. Here Prabhupada had that vision which he embodied in the purposes of the movement. Further he said that he wanted to encourage people to live a simpler and more natural life close to each other and close to God.
Prabhupada saw that materialism was not just a mentality, it is a lifestyle and the lifestyle involved acquiring more and more material goods which consume one’s consciousness and which entangled people. So to live simply would be more conducive for living spiritually. At this particular time Prabhupada lived simply, primarily because of necessity.
He did not have much money, so his life was very simple. But even when he had built big temples for himself, for the Lord, using his own resources which he had acquired through the followers, through those who were devoted to Krishna, but even then Prabhupada also saw a part of his mission as establishing eco-friendly communities, farm communities which would encourage people to come closer to nature and closer to the Lord of nature. So materialism would take people away from Krishna, from God and from spirituality because they just consume one’s consciousness.
So simplicity was what Prabhupada recommended. Similarly another purpose of the Sankirtan movement was of the movement of the purpose of ISKCON that Prabhupada established was to write literatures, to publish periodicals, magazines and books to fulfill these various missions. So actually Prabhupada, this was what he spent a significant amount of his time and energy on writing books, on encouraging people to read those books, on personally distributing his books, encouraging others to distribute his books.
And in fact, this became a primary mode of outreach for him and a primary mode of engagement for his followers, distributing spiritual literature. In fact, the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition which belonged to the Madhva Sampradaya, the tradition that Prabhupada belonged to was known as the tradition of the book. Although it is a bhakti tradition, it was not just a sentimental tradition.
There had been tremendous literary outreach that had come out from the tradition. People had written so many of the saints and the scholars in the tradition. If you look at every generation, starting from the Goswamis who were primary disciples of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, down to Prabhupada’s own spiritual master, Bhakti Suddhansuri Thakur and his spiritual, his father and spiritual preceptor, Bhakti Vinod Thakur.
They had all written so many books and Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada himself planned to write books and he would encourage his disciples to write books. So, Prabhupada was continuing an ancient tradition which he represented and presented. Prabhupada had a profound spiritual vision for his movement which had just started in Lower East Side in 22nd Avenue.
So, now when he decided that he would form this institution, he had asked Keith that he would like to register a religious institution and they had gone to one Mr. Goldsmith who was a lawyer and who had some eclectic spiritual interests and when he heard about an Indian Swami who was, who wanted to start a movement in America, he was very interested. So, he came and he talked with Prabhupada and Prabhupada had already been a businessman in India. So, he was shrewd.
He knew what all were legalities required. So, he completed all the legalities and then they wanted to form a trust. The trust needed members.
So, one day after what was seemed to be like a routine program that happened, Prabhupada told the people. So, he said, so now we have an announcement to make and Mr. Goldsmith, he had come, started coming for some of Prabhupada’s talks and that particular talk he was there and he said, so you can make the announcement, he said and he said, so he said Swami is forming the International Society for Krishna Consciousness and all of you can sign and Prabhupada just called all of them that all of you can become trustees. Now, they had a system of rotating trustees.
So, there were three people will be trustees for this year, three people for the trustees for the next year and three people the trustees for the year after that and more and all the trustees actually signed the document without even reading it. They had no idea what they were getting into and they’re just curious. He says, now what is Swami doing? He’s forming a society.
What is the need for that? He said, maybe he wants to get some tax benefits in case somebody gives a big donation, but then thought who’s going to give a big donation? Who has money? Apart from Goldsmith, he was a lawyer and he was not really so interested in Prabhupada that is at that time. So, he said, who has money? Who is going to give money? But he thought, okay, Swamiji wants to do this. We are fine with that.
They like Swamiji and they want to do something for him. So, they started, they all signed and then this way with trustees who did not know what they had been interested, Prabhupada alone was the pioneer, was the executor and was the mover and shaker for the movement which would eventually spread all over the world. But while they were not so interested, but there were still signs that some of them were becoming serious and Howard, you know, one day he, Prabhupada would bring some books and one day Prabhupada told, when he saw Prabhupada, he, Prabhupada had written some books.
He had written Bhagavatam and Howard was an English professor. So, one day he was reading the book and he saw O, the king. And he said, wondering, is there a king named O? He said, no, actually it was O, king.
It was a form of address. So, then he realized that grammatically there was not required. So, he went to Prabhupada and he said that, Swamiji, you know, there are some grammatical issues that need to be fixed over here.
Can I do that? Prabhupada said, very good. He said, yes, do it. And then he started retyping the things.
He started typing the things for Prabhupada with grammar corrected and he typed one sheaf and then he asked Swamiji, do you have anything more, Prabhupada? He said, Swamiji, yes. So, Prabhupada had come. And then Prabhupada took him to his room and he opened a trunk and Howard’s eyes went wide.
You know, there were heaps and heaps of pages that Prabhupada had written. And because Prabhupada did not have money at that time, he would write from the left margin to the right margin. From the top of the page to the bottom of the page.
And this was not just one, two, practically the trunk was filled with pages like that. And Howard was stunned. He said, Swamiji, this is a lifetime of work.
And Prabhupada just smiled and said, many lifetimes, many lifetimes of work. So, Prabhupada, when he did not have a typewriter to type, he was writing and he was preserving all the manuscripts. Prabhupada, when he had been in Delhi earlier, he had been in such financially constrained situations.
Sometimes when he would write magazine articles, if somebody would send him a letter, he would actually take the envelope of the letter and remove the parts of the envelope and make that envelope into a paper. And he would write on that envelope and that he would take to a printer. Sometimes his pen would get exhausted.
He would go and ask people that, you know, I have a pen, but I don’t have money for a refill. Can you give me a refill? Now, Prabhupada had written, toiled months and years through it all, through that kind of situation to keep sharing Krishna’s message. And now Krishna was sending some people to assist.
Keith and Howard, they saw how eager Prabhupada was to share Krishna’s message and they got an idea. Let us do something for Swamiji. So, the storefront in which they would speak, in which the classes would be held, that was very barren and bare.
So, they got an idea, let us decorate this. So, they kept everything a secret from Swamiji and they went to the nearby market and they got some pictures. There were curtains over there, which had not been cleaned for a long time.
So, they took it to the laundromat. And when they put it there, it turned the water brown. It was that dirty.
But they got it all cleaned. And one of them, one Harold, he got an oriental rug, which he had in his house. And then they got many pictures.
They got some paintings and they decorated the whole room. And they also got some incense, which they kept for lighting, for lighting as well as for fragrance. And when that morning, that evening when Prabhupada came and looked around, the whole storefront was transformed.
And Prabhupada gave a bright smile. He said, Oh, you are advancing. This is Krishna consciousness.
You are advancing. This is Krishna consciousness. Prabhupada’s bright mood brightened the hearts of all his followers, those who were becoming his followers.
What did Prabhupada see over there? He had been trying to share Krishna’s message with them. And the essence of Krishna’s message was that, we are all servants of Krishna. And here they were trying to serve Krishna by creating a receptive atmosphere for people to hear about Krishna.
And Michael Grant came there one day for a discussion. He saw the whole room was transformed. There are carpets, which look so elegant.
There are paintings. There were pictures. And there was incense.
He was amazed. And then when Prabhupada came later, he came and looked at the paintings. There was one picture of Lord Chaitanya with six arms, two holding a flute, two carrying a bow and arrow and two carrying a stick and a pot.
So this was Chaitanya Mahaprabhu displaying the form of Krishna, Ram and Chaitanya together. Prabhupada was very pleased to see that photo. They had another picture where there was a monkey and they didn’t know what this was.
They thought maybe this was a cat because of the way the jaw and the lips were shaped. And Prabhupada said, this is also very good. Prabhupada said, what is this? The boys asked.
He said, is this a cat? Prabhupada said, this is Hanuman. This is Hanuman. This is a servant of Lord Ram who performs adventurous services, glorious services for him.
Now Hanuman is a worshipable personality, a deity in his own right, who is adored and cherished and worshipped by millions in India. And yet the students of Prabhupada thought of him to be a cat. They were so ignorant even about the very basics of the cultural wisdom and yet they were eager to serve, eager to receive.
And this was the qualification that Shila Prabhupada saw. This was the spark that Prabhupada fanned. And it was from here that the flame of spiritual wisdom would illuminate in their hearts and through their hearts to many other hearts.
Thank you. Hare Krishna.