Did Uttama die because of his mother’s offense to Dhruva?
Hare Hare Krishna. In the Bhagavatam, it seems to be said that Uttama had to die as a reaction to his mother having offended Dhruva Maharaj.
So is it that one person's offense has to be suffered by others also? There was no fault on his part. No, not exactly. Three things are involved over here.
What the Bhagavatam states specifically is that Vishnu predicts that in the future Uttama will be killed by the Yaksas and his mother will go mad because of that and when she goes mad she will she will be devoured by a forest fire. So Prabhupada writes in the Purport that his mother's madness, the cause there is often a trigger and there is a cause. It's like if I have a bullet in a gun when I press the trigger the bullet goes out and it shoots a person but if there had been no bullet in the gun pressing the trigger would not have caused anything.
So in that sense pressing of the trigger is equal to the immediate cause of the death. But the presence of the bullet is the actual cause. If the bullet had not been present the trigger would not have caused anything.
So, like that here, Dhruva Maharaj's mother went mad after her son was killed and she went, a step-mother basically not his mother, so and then she went to the forest to try to find her body or whatever. In that process she got she died in a forest fire and he was devoured by a forest fire. So now certainly grief at the death of anyone, especially a son for a mother, that's natural.
It can be overwhelming. But still to live on forest fire and just rush off in the jungle alone that's an overreaction. And then to go alone for a royal lady like that, that is an overreaction which she did.
And then in that process she was caught in danger and she was killed in a forest fire. So that overreaction that it is said was a result of her past offence. So, you know things have complex levels of causal connections.
You know, I go to some senior devotee and ask them something what can I do? They just blast off. You know, you are just whimsical. What has happened is, I say, you know, it's just a small incident, why do you have to get so angry? So you will find out that their reaction was not just to what he said.
Maybe somebody else had done something very whimsical and that was just stating that was just burning in their mind and then suddenly this became a trigger for that. So, things can have multiple levels of causes. So, it's not that Uttama's death was because of Suruchi's offence.
Rather, Uttama's death had its own cause and the lord is simply predicting that this is going to happen. He is going to inform him that this is what is happening. That had its own cause but the effect on Suruchi of Uttama's death, that the lord, that is actually also predicted by the lord and Prabhupada says, Prabhupada ascribes in a sense of Vaishnavapuram that overreaction was the result of the offence.
So, we see in the Ramana, in the Ramachandra Puri pastime also there didn't seem to be any immediate reaction. Ramachandra Puri is displeasing and criticizing his guru, Madhavendra Puri when he departed. But what happened was, he developed a hypercritical attitude.
So, that hypercriticality itself was a result of the offence and eventually that hypercriticality led him to criticize Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and then it is said eventually he fell away. So, the point is that offence may not produce an immediate result in terms of fall down. Offences may make us more vulnerable to certain offences.
So, in anger or hypercriticality or frustration we may become more vulnerable to them because of offences and then eventually when a trigger comes, we overreact and then that is a consequence. So, uttama's death is not a consequence of Suraj's offence. That is a.