How can we give bhakti to beggars and other poor people?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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life.
So slow and steady. Thank you. So how can we preach to, say, poor people who are children or beggars or elderly, who may be on the streets or on the railway stations? How can we give them Krishna Consciousness? See, there are two different forms of benefiting people, and both are important.
One is material welfare and the other is spiritual welfare. And we need to recognize that both have their importance. So normally we say social welfare is not all that important.
We have to give Krishna Consciousness. That we say because primarily that people have the idea that social welfare itself is spiritual welfare. That if I’m doing social welfare for people, then I don’t need to do anything spiritual.
And that is what we need to, we say that is not true. People will be socially welfared, economically secure, and still they may not be spiritually inclined. So first point is that we need to recognize that material welfare in and of itself is also an important activity.
In the Bhagavatam, we have examples of Maharaj Rantidev or Maharaj Shibi. They are arranging for the material well-being of their citizens, even non-human citizens like birds and animals. And Prithu Maharaj also arranges for the, for when there is starvation in his kingdom, in the fourth canto it is described, then he actually aggressively intervenes and arranges for the earth to produce the necessities by which the starving citizens can be provided for.
So provision of material things is also an important way of helping people. So if we consider Varanashram as a whole system of social organization, in that it is the Brahmana’s duty to provide spiritual knowledge. And it is the Kshatriya’s duty to arrange for material welfare.
So the Kshatriyas have to make the administration in such a way that the basic needs of people are provided for. So today it’s the government which is supposed to provide say food, clothing, electricity, shelter, water, whatever, things like that. So we as devotees, we have to recognize that our primary resource that we can provide people is spiritual knowledge.
So there are some devotees who may get into, who may combine the spiritual with the social welfare and do things like food for life, midday meal, where they are feeding the hungry. That is a special endeavor which some groups, some devotees can do if they are especially inspired to do that. But in general, we are primarily focusing on giving spiritual knowledge.
And now we are not actually giving only spiritual knowledge. We are also sharing spiritual culture. Spiritual culture means, you know, there is chanting of the holy names, there are festivals.
So their knowledge transfer may not be the primary thing. It’s the cultural dissemination that is the primary thing. So we have to see how we can benefit different people in different ways, in ways that are appropriate for them.
So if people are very, people are say very in material distress, if somebody is very poverty stricken, somebody is very hungry, and if we feel a mission of wanting to help them, then first thing is we should give them some prasad and not just a morsel of prasad. Give them a significant quantity so that if they are hungry, affection needs to be expressed in a language in which people can understand affection. Otherwise, we may express affection for them by giving them Bhagavad Gita philosophy, but they may just not understand it at that time.
So we may have to provide for some prasad or something like that for them. And along with that, we can once generally sharing spiritual knowledge requires first of all creating trust in the audience that we are their well-wishers. If people think that we have some agenda in approaching them, then whatever we may speak will not benefit them much because they’ll always be suspicious.
Why this person? What does this person want from me? So by our conduct, by our words, we need to slowly but necessarily help people develop the faith that we are their well-wishers. So simply by giving prasad, people say, oh, this person is a good person. They’re giving me water.
They’re giving me the food that I so desperately need. And then we can share spiritual knowledge with them. Or we can give them a… we can just ask them to chant the holy name and can tell them that this will give you relief when you feel very distressed.
Just chanting the name of God can give you relief. And then if they are literate, we may be able to give them Bhagavad Gita and maybe they can read it. If they are not literate, then we just encourage them to chant.
You know, helping people to come to Krishna is not just about a one-time interaction. It’s about helping them to adopt the process of personal transformation. And that requires often facilitating things.
So sometimes if this is… if such an endeavor is to be done at an individual level, I feel, we can give prasad and we can just tell them to chant the holy names. If they’re literate, we can give them the Bhagavad Gita. Otherwise, we can just tell them some philosophy in brief.
And we can try to connect them in some way where they can get some more spiritual knowledge. So that is often not so easy. Just like there are… we have a whole… it’s called prison ministry where now if you are going to share spiritual knowledge with prisoners, there are a whole different set of… it’s a very different audience.
So we need a whole team working for that, focus on that audience and having proper infrastructure for doing that. So for example, it’s unlikely that if somebody goes for preaching in prison, they’re not going to get any donations. So they may have to arrange for the funding for themselves.
And it’s possible to get the funding also that say people… if we tell people that we’re doing some prison outreach, people give some donations for prasad, people may give some donations for distribution of Bhagavad Gita to the prisoners or whatever. So it’s possible to do that. But it requires some special effort.
So Prabhupada’s vision was that if we can influence the influential members of society, then they can influence others. See the Bhagavad Gita also stated, that in this way, this knowledge was given down to the Rajarishis, the saintly kings. Krishna himself is giving the knowledge to Arjuna, who is also a saintly king.
So why is that? Because kings have enormous influence. Kings have all the state resources with them. So if a king becomes spiritually inclined, if a king becomes spiritually enlightened, the king can use the state infrastructure for directing the citizens in general towards spirituality.
So we too right now are a small movement. And our resources are limited. And that’s why our focus is on influencing the influential people.
So that means that we focus on reaching out those people who are likely to become influential. So for example, if we go to students, then students, if they become spiritually inclined, they’ll have their whole lifetime ahead of them. And their life, they will continue to be spiritual and they will continue to share spiritual wisdom with others.
And in that way, they can actually help a lot of people to come closer to Krishna throughout their life. If they go into a leading position in society in future, they can also influence a lot of people. So the example is given like if there is a war where the Red Cross doctors go, there may be hundreds of wounded soldiers over there.
And sometimes some soldiers may be so seriously wounded that taking care of them is almost hopeless. And if the doctors have limited resources, then doctors may just decide that doctors would like to save everyone. But it may not be possible to save everyone for them with their human limitations.
So sometimes they may focus primarily on saving those who are savable. And then sometimes if the savable people are at least healed, they become functional, they can assist in saving the others also. So this is not necessarily a universal strategy.
But that is often something which has to be adopted with hard-eyed realism. That means, although they would like to save everyone, they have to be hard-eyed. You know, hard-eyed means that is unsentimental, realistic, recognizing that we just can’t help everyone.
Similarly, at our stage, we can give some prasad, tell them to chant Hare Krishna. But systematically helping those who are financially deprived, it requires a significant amount of infrastructural help also. So if we feel very inspired to do that, then in future, we can try to create an initiative like that.
It’s possible that if we have a strong desire to serve Krishna in a particular way, Krishna can arrange things. And as I said, there are already initiatives like Food for Life or Midday Meal, which is helping people both physically as well as spiritually. And that kind of initiatives can also be created in other places.
But when we are thinking of helping others, we should not just get carried away by sentiments. Sentiments are important, but they are not all important. So if we can influence the influential members of society, then also we are actually benefiting everyone in society through that.
And within our capacity, we can also help people who are poor by giving them