Prabhupada: A timeless teacher for troubled times

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Welcome, Hare Krishna. Today, I would like to share with you that life and teachings of an inspiring spiritual teacher who has shared an invaluable legacy for inner enrichment for the whole world.
This great spiritual teacher was with us less than half a century ago and what he offered us was a message of inner healing and inner strength that is very much relevant to our troubled times. A timeless teacher for troubled times. The wisdom that he gave was timeless and yet it is so relevant in today’s troubled times.
This was Swami Prabhupada, as he was known fully as His Divine Grace A.C Bhaktivedanta Swamishla Prabhupada. So, let’s begin first with a quick overview of what he offered to the world. His story is as adventurous and as miraculous as some of the most astounding stories that we may hear.
In fact, one historian of religion said that on reading the story we can say that facts are sometimes stranger than fiction. So, it was at the age of nearly 70 that he went from India, a country which he had never left throughout his life, all the way to America on a cargo ship. He went alone and was practically penniless and he went on a mission of spiritual service and contribution.
He believed that the wisdom of spiritual India could offer people everywhere, including people in America, resources for finding inner direction and fulfillment in their lives. And what happened? Just 11 years later, this person who had been elderly, sickly, alone, he had built 108 spiritual centers across the world which offered people resources for their enrichment. He had written 70 books, many of which have become international spiritual bestsellers and millions and millions of copies of those books are being distributed even today in all corners of the world.
These books offered simple and powerful principles and practices for spiritual enrichment and despite his advanced age, he circumnavigated the globe 14 times to share spiritual wisdom and during these talks and counseling and guidance sessions and through his example, he inspired millions to live more meaningfully, to align their lives with a sublime sense of purpose and meaning. What was he offering that had such an impact, that had such a reception? He offered the spiritual wisdom of the eastern spiritual texts, the Indian devotional spiritual texts and he specially offered spirituality that was characterized by three T’s, it’s tangible, transformational and trans-sectarian. Tangible, many people think of spirituality as some kind of vague good feeling that we get when we do something or when sometimes something just happens to us and we feel good.
So, Prabhupada brought this spirituality from the domain of the vague and the amorphous to the domain of the tangible. Tangible in the sense that he provided people tangible resources in the form of specific practices and clear guidelines by which spirituality could be experienced on a regular and repeatable basis. He recommended especially sound, spiritual sound in the form of mantras as a means for experiencing spirituality.
But essentially, he brought spirituality from the ethereal to the real. Ethereal again, it means something which is up there, vague, sometimes we experience it, sometimes we don’t. But he made spirituality real.
So, through these resources, people who were either seriously seeking or just casually checking out life’s spiritual side found something tangible which they could lay their hands on and they could experience for themselves whether the spiritual stuff was real. He offered not just things to do but things to think about. He appealed to both the practical side as well as the logical, the rational side.
He offered spirituality that made sense intellectually and that worked practically. In what sense did it work? It was transformational. Prabhupada went to the west at a time of severe cultural effervescence.
There was the counterculture where thousands and even millions were getting into drugs, hoping that drugs would form a way for them to get spiritual experience. But unfortunately, what they got was not a spiritual experience but more of an addiction experience. Either they got addicted or they were on the way to get addicted.
These people, many of whom were known as hippies, they were a national crisis in America. That was spreading across the world and Shila Prabhupada appreciated their nascent spirituality, their longing for something more in life beyond the humdrum daily routines. And he provided them pathways, practices to find what they were looking for.
And when they savored sublime spiritual satisfaction through connecting themselves with a personal divinity as described in the Bhakti Yoga texts of India, they experienced such enrichment that they gave up their bad habits and it was without any rigorous effort. It was just by experiencing a divine taste. And this transformation from dependence on substances that were harmful to freedom happened not just with a handful of people in America, but it has happened repeatedly since Shila Prabhupada introduced Bhakti spirituality.
To the western world, it has happened in every corner of the world. In fact, the message of spiritual love which is called as Bhakti Yoga that Shila Prabhupada offered is now being practiced in every major city, in every country, in practically all parts of the world. So, it is powerfully transformational.
The spirituality that he offered was also trans-sectarian. He broke down conventional barriers of caste, race, religion, gender, nationality and he opened the doors for spiritual enrichment for everyone. He in fact explained that spirituality was not the monopoly of any religion or any path.
He explained that this was the innate nature of the innermost core of our being. Within all of us is a spark of spirit that longs for lasting love, lasting joy and that spark of spirit is meant to be united with the supreme spirit, the ultimate reality. That ultimate reality is an all-loving, all-attractive, divine person and everyone of us has a right to relish that endless love in relationship with the ultimate reality.
So, he offered an inclusive, non-sectarian and universal presentation of Bhakti spirituality and Bhakti itself means love, divine love and what he offered was Yoga. Yoga means connection. So, Bhakti Yoga, the connection through divine love, that’s what he offered for everyone and people from across the world found themselves enriched by these practices and he, this tangible transformational trans-sectarian spirituality that he offered is being continued by his followers across the world.
He came to the West in 1965 and he departed from the world in 1977 and he empowered all those who were ready to assimilate the teachings of Bhakti Yoga to themselves become sharers of this wisdom. He democratized spirituality by making everyone a potential leader, by telling everyone that there is a spark of divinity within them, that everyone has the potential to make a difference in the world. Every one of us is a part of the divine and everyone has a part to play in making the world around us better, by making the world inside us better, by growing spiritually and then by contributing socially.
So, this message of enrichment, of spiritual enrichment that he offered set a trajectory in motion that is going on even now across the world. So, with this brief look at his teachings, now let’s look at his life in brief to get some pictures of what he taught and what he did. This is Swami Prabhupada at the age of 65.
He did what can well be called one of the most courageous acts in recent human history. When he was 65 and he knew no one in America, he alone decided to go aboard a cargo ship which symbolically and prophetically was called as Jaladhoota, the messenger who came by the waterways. So, although he was alone and he knew no one in America, his sponsor was just the son of a casual acquaintance of Prabhupada, but still Prabhupada went abroad and when he did so, it was because he had that longing to share spiritual enrichment with everyone.
Swami Prabhupada had lived his life in India sharing spiritual wisdom with whoever is interested. He had himself lived a very spiritual life while living professionally as a pharmaceutical agent and pharmaceutical pharmacist. But over the years he felt that somehow Indians had lost interest in their own spiritual wisdom because they felt the way to the future was in the West.
Therefore, Prabhupada decided to go to the West and show the West that the way to the future was in the spiritual and then thus by getting the spirituality of India, the bhakti spirituality accepted in the West, he just hoped to make it acceptable even to India. At an age when most people are likely to settle for a peaceful life of retirement to rest on their laurels, Srila Prabhupada embarked on a courageous journey where it was filled with risk and almost a universal prediction of failure by whoever he talked with. He, everything material that could be stacked against him was stacked against him.
He had a heavy Bengali accent. He was a pure vegetarian at a time when vegetarianism, vegetarian food was hardly available in the West. He was culturally, educationally, religiously, philosophically, from a background that was very different to his targeted audience and yet he was unfazed because his compassion was such that it kept him awake at night.
His compassion was such that it couldn’t stop him from taking this final effort in the sunset of his life which would actually become the sunrise for the whole world to try all that he could and this is Swami Prabhupada, his vision for the spirituality of the East as seen from the temple here and the culture of freedom as seen by the Statue of Liberty. He wanted to bring the East-West synthesis where Eastern spirituality and Western technology could be brought in together to bring an era of all-round human flourishing. When Swami Prabhupada landed in America, he had just survived a difficult 40-day voyage and he had suffered two debilitating heart attacks apart from a very exhausting seasickness and yet when he landed his prayer was not where he would get a doctor but his prayer was to the divine, please make me an instrument of your compassion.
Please make my message understandable to people so that they can become benefited and transformed. Swami Prabhupada in the early days in 1965, he was alone and he had no resources, their financial or human resources to help him. So he would just go on long walks in the streets of New York and talk with whoever was ready to meet and talk with him and share his spiritual wisdom with them.
He was alone physically but he was never lonely because he had faith in the divine. He worshiped the divine in the transcendental form of Krishna. Krishna is all-attractive blueish black cowherd boy who is a very personal and personable divinity.
Prabhupada was always in that divine presence and he had the divine purpose and everybody who met him right in those days when he was alone and unknown felt that they had met somebody who was at a different level of consciousness, who was internally enriched and internally poised far beyond the hustle-bustle that characterized the streets of New York, far beyond even the whole mundane sphere of existence. He was grounded in a higher truth and just by interacting with him more and more people wanted to know about that higher truth. And then as people started getting interested, Prabhupada started sharing his spiritual wisdom with them and people who many of whom were hippies addicted to drugs, he gave them a transcendental chant, a transcendental practice by which they could experience sublime enrichment and they became transformed.
They started practicing devotion and they started becoming enriched and these young people who were just frittering away their lives in sensual dissipation became so spiritually surcharged that they became his assistants and they started sharing the message that he had given them through love, through trust, through empowerment. He encouraged them to share spiritual wisdom in a world that was increasingly spiritually bankrupt. And as this started spreading, he started singing.
His message centered especially on chanting the Hare Krishna mantra. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare. He taught that sublime power lay in the sound.
He offered a form of sonic meditation that could be practiced individually through personal meditation and collectively through musical dance and community meditation and through it all he gave a pathway to spiritual enrichment that was accessed and relished increasingly by hundreds and then thousands and then millions across the world. Here Shri Prabhupada offering a spiritual message under a tree. It was when Shri Prabhupada was in the west.
Whatever resources he got, he used to share spiritual wisdom whether it initially had no centers. So, he would just be in small places under trees, in parks, on the streets, in the houses of whoever invited him, in storefronts. He would start sharing spiritual wisdom.
He taught by his example that spirituality could be accessed and shared everywhere and then he started festivals that were shared all over the world. One of the most visible and popular festivals that he spread across the world was the Ratha Yatra festival, the festival of chariots which is traditionally practiced in India in the province of Orissa in Jagannath Puri. This festival of chariots is now being practiced all over the world from Dubai to Dublin to Dharam.
All over the world this festival is being practiced and millions and millions of people come out on the streets and experience spirituality. On the very streets they are usually caught in the busyness of their humdrum lives and he established temples as centers of spiritual excellence, not just places for cultural worship but also for philosophical education. Through these centers he offered everyone an opportunity to intellectually, culturally, emotionally, relationally and practically experience spirituality and many of the temples that Srila Prabhupada established are among the most beautiful manifestations of architecture and culture both in India as well as in the western world.
Architecture and culture used to demonstrate spirituality in the mundane world of today and Srila Prabhupada’s teaching was that rather than waiting for outer change to happen, we focus on inner change. His message as summarized in this one quote of his was, there is no use of crying for world peace unless there is awakening of divine consciousness in the individual and he provided each one of us the resources to awaken the divine consciousness within us and to thereby play our part in bringing about a better world. Thank you very much.