How can Lord Chaitanya have initiated Saint Tukaram when they lived at different times?

From: abhaycharan das

SP says in introduction of SB that Lord CM  initiated Saint Tukaram . But LCM appeared 500 yrs ago, and it is said Saint Tukaram was there, 300 yrs ago. How  to reconcile these two facts?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Abhay Charan Prabhu Prabhupada says in the introduction of Srimad Bhagavatam that Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu initiated Santukaram but Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu appeared 500 years ago and it is said that Santukaram was there 300 years ago how do we reconcile these two facts? answer often we have a very rigid and institutionalized understanding of the word initiation we who have been connected with spirituality largely through the Krishna Consciousness movement often think of initiation only in the specific terms of a guru with a pious sacrifice handing over the beads to a disciple and the disciple taking vows initiation traditionally does not necessarily have to be so ritualized or institutionalized in any way in Srimad Bhagavatam, Parikshit Maharaj is referred to as having Shukadeva Goswami as his spiritual master but there was no performance of yajna over there there was just the transmission of knowledge so essentially Gita is not just the ritual of initiation but the transmission of not even just knowledge but primarily inspiration of how to love and serve Krishna so Vishwaprabhupada when he wrote this Srimad Bhagavatam obviously knew that there was a significant historical difference in their lifetimes and so it was he didn’t have this idea of performances of pious sacrifice and giving of initiation when he refers to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu initiating Santukaram now we have a general example of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in one sense inspiring and transmitting his potency to Narottam Das Thakur although the two of them were not contemporaneous at all and in fact their lifespans didn’t overlap for all practical purposes so Chaitanya Mahaprabhu invested his love for Krishna in the Padma river and then later on when Narottam Das Thakur entered he got that same potency and not only was he spiritually enlivened but it is said he was also bodily transformed to some extent his complexion became effulgent so the lord can give this sort of inspiration to people who are not even living at the time of his life so firstly from Sri Prabhupada’s point of view the use of the word initiation is not in the technical sense of the guru-disciple sitting together at a fire sacrifice and there are examples of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu transmitting his potency through extraordinary ways to subsequent devotees now let us look from the perspective of Santukaram now Tukaram Maharaj says that in one of his well known abhangas where he talks about his guru he says Babaji Chaitanya Sangeet Lena Mantra Dila Ramakrishna Hari so now if we look at the historians of Santukaram’s life although his life has been fairly well researched there is practically no knowledge about who this Babaji Chaitanya was precisely and of course some people have made an image of an old man with a beard and things like that but precisely who he was where he lived, that is not known so Tukaram Maharaj there are a good number of indications that he got a dream in which Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu came and gave him that potency now if we look at the essential teachings I mentioned how the primary connection between the guru and the disciple is through teachings so if we look at the teachings he is clearly mentioning Ramakrishna Hari and these are the seed letters of the Hare Krishna Mahamantra in fact in the Chaitanya Upanishad and other places Hare Krishna Mahamantra is referred to as the mantra with the seeds of Ramakrishna Hari so in that sense the mantra is the same and if we look at the teachings of Tukaram Maharaj there is a remarkable similarity between his and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s teachings our devotee scholar Nidavan Prabhu has written a book which shows the remarkable similarities between the teachings of the Gaudiya Sampradaya and Tukaram Maharaj so if we look at it from the teachings point of view there is remarkable similarity so if we look at it from a historical point of view although there is no overlap of their life spans there are indications from both sides that just as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu invested his potency in the river for Tratambal Thakur to take it so when he came to Maharashtra he might possibly have invested his potency in a particular place and when Tukaram Maharaj went to that place or he interacted with that potency in some way that’s when he was spiritualized and then that’s how he wrote this mantra also that Ramakrishna Hari Baba Chaitanya was my guru so there are two important points to understand in this when we talk about Tukaram Maharaj being a disciple of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in general we should not impose our beliefs on others especially if others are also practicing devotional service to Lord Vishnu so Chaitanya Mahaprabhu we see that did not insist that Murugai Gupta worship Lord Krishna only and not Lord Ram and so was Anupam the brother of Rupa and Sanatan so somebody is performing devotional service in a way that will lead them to the spiritual world then there is no need or compulsion for us to impose our beliefs on them and to hurt them by that so if some of the faithful and devoted followers of Tukaram Maharaj find it difficult to accept that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is the guru of Tukaram Maharaj and if they start seeing that this is just a stratagem used by us to try to prove our superiority over Tukaram Maharaj then we don’t have to alienate them in any way because ultimately it is the practice of devotional service that is going to purify and elevate people so if they follow Tukaram Maharaj faithfully they will get elevated and they will get purified and liberated also if they are following him properly that’s why our goal is to enhance our faith sorry, our goal is to enhance others’ faith and not to damage others’ faith and not to alienate people by what they may perceive as our chauvinism that’s the first point self-serving chauvinism second point is that we may at times experience statements from gurus, sadhus, shastras which seem not to reconcile with normal historical knowledge normal historical or geographical or knowledge from other sources so at that time Baldev Dev Vashan explains in his Govinda Vashya commentary on the Vedanta Sutra that we have to use shastra moolak anuman he uses the word uha for it or another word for it is vichar so normally we consider speculation as very negative and undesirable but Shri Prabhupada differentiates between mental speculation and philosophical speculation so philosophical speculation is what Baldev Dev Vashan calls as uha and what the Indian wisdom tradition calls as vichar so anuman is just originating from the mind and moving along the chariot of the mind towards a destination determined by the mind but shastra moolak vichar or rather anuman that is according to shastra is called as vichar so shastra moolak anuman or vichar originates in scripture and ends in scripture but if the link between the beginning and the end is not visible in the scripture for us to see then we can use our reasoning to establish that link and in that way we can try to understand how the statement can be understood so our acharyas have done this repeatedly and Baldev Dev Vashan uses this in several places to reconcile and explain statements of vedanta sutra so with respect to this particular statement of Srila Prabhupada we have to do this shastra moolak vichar that means we accept Srila Prabhupada’s words as true and we try to see how it can be true now we don’t have to go to the extreme of saying that the historical dates of Duparam Maharaja are wrong, it should be absurd we don’t have to go about saying that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu dates were different from what we know we understand that there are things which can happen in the spiritual realm in mystical ways so what I answered is a possibility as far as shastra moolak anuman is concerned or shastra moolak vichar is concerned at that time there may not be any certainty about the specific way that the reasoning is done and there can be multiple reasonings and as long as there is an agreement with scriptural conclusion they are fine and we see this different acharyas may interpret different verses in different ways so it is said that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu interpreted the Atmarama verse in 64 different ways so what does it mean is there no one interpretation which is final? No because shastra is unlimited so the devotees can relish it in different ways and by relishing it in different ways they may get different insights into its meaning so just as as long as there can be different interpretations of the same verse and all those interpretations can be accepted as long as they do not contradict the word of scripture so similarly we can do shastra moolak anuman or vichar to reconcile this particular statement of Srila Prabhupada, the historically known facts and there may be other devotees who may try to do this sort of vichar in different ways and that is also acceptable so we can look according to desh kala patra time, place, circumstance and see what explanation makes sense to us and what explanation is the best to speak to others scripture is not just like a one line of truth coming down in parampara, yes there is a one line of truth coming down in parampara which is the core message that we are not devoid of the souls and Krishna is God, soul can attain real happiness in service to Krishna but beyond that there is a periphery and we need to recognize that in the periphery things can be different according to different time, place, circumstances so if you are a little more interested in this, you can hear the answer to the question on how do we know whether somebody is following the parampara or not but suffice it to say, I will quickly summarize the point, that historically just as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu invested his potency in Padmarevar for Tamdash Thakur to take, similarly Chaitanya Mahaprabhu may have done something like this and Tukaram Maharaj received it earlier and historically Tukaram Maharaj does mention Chaitanya Baba as his guru and secondly we don’t have to have a rigid institutionalized idea about initiation, but it is a transmission of inspiration and knowledge and that link of inspiration and knowledge can be seen in both the message and its potency, so Chaitanya Mahaprabhu inspired thousands and thousands, millions of people to take chanting of the holy names practically the same thing was done by Tukaram Maharaj, with the same Seer Mantras, so through the teachings we can understand that there is a link and we can infer using our God given intelligence how that link might have been and that methodology is called as Vichar, thank you