Can a devotee do karma-kandi rituals for earning a living?

Answer Podcast:

ok can a Karmakandi Brahmin continue his official duty after becoming a devotee or can a devotee do Karmakand for his livelihood yes yes as I talked about how the Chaitanya Mahaprabhu presented bhakti wisdom in terms of asatraksha similarly we have a Bhopal Bhatt Swami he wrote Hari Bhakti Vilas where he presented transcendental principles of bhakti through the medium of the Karmakand and Chuladhar so yes how many Karmakand rituals can be spiritualized that is what our Acharyas have explained and so everybody when we are living in the middle world we have to go through certain ceremonies if we take a new house in Boston if we get married if we have a child we name that child Namakar these are all various samskaras that we have to go through and these samskaras if we can perform them in a devotional way then that ensures that we are preserving the culture continuing the culture at the same time we are spiritualizing the culture that is something the devotees can definitely do and there are some who are doing that and more devotees can take it up and actually if the devotees become priests like that there is a lot of advantage because not only does the existing culture be spiritualized but people do appreciate because when devotees perform any rituals they also explain what is going on and people like that most of the times the priests who come and do the rituals they just take the money and go away nobody understands what is happening, why it is being done so in that way we can not only spiritualize the rituals for us but we can also elevate people’s consciousness that is with respect to the standard samskara that I talked about in our tradition now about other karmakantya rituals that is as the body is still evolving and there is no direct policy for example there is Satya Narayan so now this is talked about in the Skanda Purana but it is entirely karmakantya so can devotees do that? it is not necessary for devotees to do that but it is a new official of Narayan Satyasya Narayan that is due to Narayan he is being involved so as of now the devotees most of them go to Satyanarayan but if somebody is going to choose that as a profession then one will have to decide that based on consulting one’s own spiritual guides and based on one’s specific situation so the principle is that according to the culture that we are in we try to bring spirituality as it is possible so doing the standard samskara which I mentioned and doing it in a spiritual way is excellent, for other rituals it is best to take guidance and then make a decision based on case to case basis