KC and World Religions 6 – Sikhism

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
discuss about primary Sikhism and if time permits we’ll discuss briefly about Jainism also a brief recap of what we discussed till now we have discussed Judaism, Christianity Islam and Buddhism so now we’ll be discussing these things and what is our objective first of all what is our objective in these things we can have multiple objectives one is just we want to increase our general knowledge so that we are aware of what are the different people and what are they believing and following but from a practical point of view there is so much that we can know so one objective is to deepen our appreciation of what we have got another objective is if we have to interact with people from these traditions what is the best way we interact with them so in the various religions one superficial religion says all religions teach the same thing and at a another level they can say actually they are all complex because they are all different and then we can go to a deeper level and see how all religions have some common universal principles but they have some significant non-trivial differences the differences in the Abrahamic traditions and the Sanatana Dharma especially with respect to deity worship is not non-trivial it’s significant and it has been the cause of significant antipathy antipathic opposition violence between the two traditions so we need to be aware of these differences so that at one level we, if we are interacting with these people we don’t antagonise them further and we also are aware of the dangers involved in the interaction of where things can go wrong so that means I talked about three levels at a superficial level we can say all paths lead to the same thing because that is a very convenient way to believe everything is the same so that we don’t have to strain our intelligence if we can imagine that yes, all religions are the same thing we can just be simplistically harmonious but at another level we go and we say everybody has their different rituals everybody has their different ways, beliefs, systems so they are all different and they are the cause of conflict at a deeper level we can go beyond to see what are the essential similarities so for the first reason Prabhupada says that if I am in darkness everything appears one to me isn’t it? because I can’t see anything so everything is uniformly same, everything is uniformly dark so at a sentimental level which is almost like at the level of ignorance we may think all religions lead to the same thing in the mode of passion we say all religions are different when we come to goodness we don’t see we have an enlightened perspective that goes beyond externals so actually in ignorance we practically don’t see anything except what is immediately providing us gross and subtle or threatening that in passion we tend to see only externals in goodness we can see the externals but we can see beyond the externals to the internals and when one comes to the transcendental level then one can see underlying spirit that is all to elevate the consciousness of people maybe it will not be a complete elevation a partial contextual elevation maybe so we primarily are trying to cultivate a perspective of goodness and for the perspective of transcendence we need to be transcendental so then we can actually see how ultimately all religions are serving the same purpose so last time we had a lot of Buddhism at one level we can see there are so many differences between Buddhism and Hinduism but then at another level we understand that it is the same God who has come as method to elevate the people Vishal Prabhupada writes in the chapter of Krishna this was called incarnations in Mahabharata that Lord Buddha is the emblem of theism for the atheists it’s a very interesting phrase, the emblem of theism for atheists so atheists don’t believe in God so they don’t believe in God so an emblem is an abstract something which represents something else so they don’t accept God but they accept Lord Buddha and by that they indirectly are going to elevate themselves so it’s the emblem of theism for atheists so in this way the Acharyas have a transcendental perspective and they can give us a transcendental perspective so then we can understand what are the underlying similarities by being aware of the non-trivial differences also so now historically speaking Buddhism or Sikhism emerged at a time when India was torn apart between Islam and Hinduism so the word Hindu was a reference of the Muslims or the invaders over there to those who live on the other side of the Hindu River but still there’s a substantial difference within the culture Hindus were not called as Hindus so at one level Muslims were aggressors and they were ravaging the temples and forcibly converting people of course it was not that all the people were on the side of Islam Hinduism has its own skeletons in the cupboard there was a lot of discrimination because of the caste system and on one side Islam did not have a caste system so that had its peak so historically speaking, Sikhism is a sort of blend between Hinduism and Christianity when Sri Aurobindo was asked about Guru Nanak Dandadeva and about Sikhism he said, basically the same he tried to bring together the Hindus and the Muslims so before we see how he tried to bring them together let us have a quick look at the history so overall we see 1486 was the time when Chaitanya Mahaprabhu appeared so that was a time basically the 14, 15, 16 centuries when there was a sort of devotional revival within Hinduism if we see when Chaitanya Mahaprabhu preached in Bengal, he preached in Vrindavan and he not only preached but he had his devotees in Bengal, Vrindavan as well as in Puri so all of the Puri, the huge temple was there, Jagannath Puri but we don’t see Chaitanya Mahaprabhu instructing any of the Navadvip devotees to construct temples we don’t see any of the Navadvip devotees being told to construct temples at one level there were a few temples over there but if we read CCCB there is no temple where congregational kirtans happened the kirtans happened in Shiva’s father’s house so overall during, as Islam came to India at about 1000 and by 12,000, 3,000, especially in North India had got common Islamic stronghold and so overall we discussed how they have anti-antipathy towards idols and so therefore, the devotional movements, they did not necessarily deny devotion but they downplayed them and replaced them with kirtan with chanting of the holy names and doing kirtans and bhajans which, it is nice to have a detailed but I think not necessary we see that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was also doing harinams and kirtans in Shiva’s father’s courtyard, there is no mention that there was a deity in the courtyard idol kirtans, Shiva’s father had no deity, most of the time the deities which the Brahmins had were Shaligrams and Shaligrams were never considered by the Muslims to be a threat to their religion, because there are there are there are there are two kinds of sort of, what shall we say representations of God iconic and uniconic iconic means that you have a particular shape and it is assumed that that shape represents the original shape of God so the deity of Gopinath is an iconic representation of God whereas the Shaligram sheila, Shaligram sheila is the material which looks just like a stone and in one sense, there is no form of Krishna that is Shaligram eternally in the spiritual world so, similarly the Shivalinga there is a deity of Shiva which looks like Lord Shiva that is an iconic representation of Lord Shiva and the Shivalinga actually, there is no deity of Shiva, there is no Shiva loka where there is actually a Shivalinga Shivalinga is from the past Shivalinga is a manifestation of Lord Shiva Shaligram may in one sense reciprocate with the devotee who is worshipping, but there is no Shaligram loka in the spiritual world where there is no, Shaligram is not directly a form of God in the spiritual world so these are uniconic forms of God so these were not so many targets of the Islamic invaders, so we will see most of them had uniconic forms of the Lord, Shaligram of course, this is also the tradition Ram and Shiva worship Shaligram but the point which I am making is I am building up to the essential point that Sikhism, in its blend of Hinduism and Islam rejected deity of Shiva you can say they rejected idol of Shiva but it was overall the culture at that time that they focused on more on doing adopting forms of religion that could be easily practised, now it is not that this was something which was invented at that time this was already there in the tradition for Kalil Gavinam Sankirtanam the primary means, and it was practised but it developed more at this particular time, and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was the most fervent proponent of chanting of the holy names there were many others also, but Chaitanya Mahaprabhu extensively propagated it, and more than that, here, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu through his follower, Ekambhu Goswami built a whole theology around the holy name, how the holy name actually got and how the holy name in Narasimha’s chant actually had a direct representation of God, which was the easiest access to God, but anyway this was the cultural scenario in which Hinduism emerged so overall, in this period Hinduism was more defensive and Islam was more offensive so there were pockets of resistance, in South India there was the kingdom of Vijayanagar which offered resistance and later there was Shivaji Maharaj and here along, the sixth there was Ranjit Singh there were pockets of resistance there, but overall, Islamic rule was quite strong in India so now, Shri Guru Nanak appeared in four dictionaries around 15-17 years ago, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and some religions say that he also came to Puri and he and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu danced together in Jagannath Yatra but none of our Acharyas have either specifically stated it or rejected it so that’s why I used the word religions, may or may not be true so, in 1500 he was born in a Kshatriya family Guru Nanak and he was quite a religious person throughout his childhood he was fascinated by God and when he got married as was common, by the age of 20 he had two children and one day he went to Bela Vrindavan at that time, he went to Bela Vrindavan and disappeared for three days so, when he came back after those three days he said that actually, through the river he had been taken to God and he had been taken to God he had actually not exactly had a darshan of God because one of the aspects of Sikhism is they consider the Absolute to be formless so then he said that actually, it’s formless but not impersonal, something like Islam do you know the right way to do such things? now, Vaishnavism is God has form and God is a person Mayavastu, God has no form and is not a person so, Islam says God has no form but is a person so, it’s in between so Sikhism also has that idea they don’t consider God to be impersonal God is a person, but he does not have any form so he either went to Swarga or whatever he went somewhere where he had the experience of God and at that time he was given some pot to drink from called Amrit and he was told, let the holy name be your refuge and meet and share the glory of the holy name with everyone so then later on when he came back from the place where eventually Sikhism became strong because of that Amrit which Guru Nanak had got from that he gave Amritsar the place for Amritsar that’s how it’s called Amritsar so then afterwards after he became enlightened he was a householder and as a householder he still travelled around went to lots of places and he had a reception at that time there were some Buddhists also so he had receptions with them and he split Sikhism more as a way of life which is devoted to God not so much as an elaborate philosophical system it is more a way of life that is devoted to God and I’ll come to this point later once again but then since then there were these ten Gurus of Sikhism so when Guru Nanak was last days he called one of his closest followers and he told I gave him the name Angada and he embraced him so Angada actually means Anga is the water I am giving myself to you so in one sense they consider that the power of Guru Nanak was transferred to him and then like that there are many Gurus Guru Amar Das, Guru Ram Das during Guru Arjan’s time most of them were like either very close disciples, no Guru Arjan was the son of Guru Ram Das but he was not the youngest son he was not the oldest son so Guru Arjan, he started the process of sort of systematising Sikh teachings that means whatever Guru Nanak had said and whatever was considered sacred, he started systematising it and I’ll come back to this point later now now during the time of Guru Tej Bahadur there were Aurangzeb was the ruler Aurangzeb and Jahangir both were quite vicious in their own ways Akbar was relatively milder but so the Kashmiri Pandits were being persecuted and they were being threatened either you convert to Islam or you’ll be killed so from Kashmir Punjab was not very big and Guru Tej Bahadur, he was like the leader and all of them were Kshatriyas now initially when Guru Nanak came out of that pond and out of that glance he had gone into he said, I am neither a Hindu nor a Muslim he says, I am a worshipper of that one Supreme Lord so he basically sort of denied identity with the Lord but he said beyond that there is one so at that time he did not talk about any externals, so the word Sikh literally in Punjabi means disciple so those who followed Guru Nanak subsequently they were called as disciples so during Guru Tej Bahadur’s time the Kashmiri Pandits came and asked him for protection because they were all, although they were Gurus their conception of Guru is different from what we may have conception of Guru we think of Guru as a Sanyasi but they were Gurudev Kshatriyas also so they hired Guru Tej Bahadur and of course Guru Tej Bahadur agreed to protect them and this enraged Aurangzeb and then Aurangzeb had acted with his full force there was a very severe fight and Guru Tej Bahadur repulsed them several times but eventually their military mind was too much and he was arrested tortured and was killed so Guru Arjun who had made the the design, compiled it together he was also killed so many of the Sikhs were persecuted so Guru Tej Bahadur was so many Sikh Gurus Aurangzeb had a very diabolical way of tormenting people and he thought that he was in a moving crusade so like so he practically you know killed Guru Tej Bahadur by building a wall around him building a wall around him and so then at that time his son Guru Arjun was practically just 11 years old so he became the inheritor at that time he formed something which was called the Khalsa so before I go to the Khalsa ok I’ll just come back to that so Khalsa is a sort of Sikh army so he when he appeared in Vaishya Kirti he appeared that the programme was there he came there with two swords one sword was called the spiritual sword Piri and the material sword Miri so he said a Sikh should have both these dimensions that he should be spiritually powerful as well as mentally powerful and at that time he said he took out his sword and said my sword wants a head who will offer us a head so they were all shocked so then one person somehow came along and he took him inside his tent and when he came out his sword was all red he said my sword wants one more head so at that time another person came along and then afterwards he came out again his sword was red and then again he said my sword wants one more like that five times it happened and then afterwards he said my sword wants one more head everybody was horrified some people started talking but then he went inside and he came back with all these five people and he said these five people are ready to lay down their life for the cause of Sikhism and he said they are all the Khalsa so from that time onwards Sikhs started having a distinctive identity a distinctive identity they have their own like having long hair not shaving their hair and carrying the dagger and wearing shorts they have various things like that which they practise so that distinctive cultural identity was assumed during the time of Guru Gobind Singh and he seeing how Guru Gobind Singh had been killed decided to militarise Sikhism quite a bit they were already Kshatriyas but they were focussing to some extent on God but the militarisation happened substantially on Guru Gobind Singh’s side and of course Guru Gobind Singh was also ultimately killed but at that time he said that afterwards there will be no more Guru now the Granth Sahib will be a Guru so in one sense if you look at the again I had told you earlier that how the Abrahamic religions are more institution centred the Dharmic religions are more person centred in the sense that there is a Guru and himself I saw some standard Abrahamic Dharmic religions are they Abrahamic religions? yes there may be a Pope and then a successor Pope but actually it is more institution based so Sikhism is sort of blend of those there are these Gurus but eventually instead of institution they made a scripture the centre so the Guru Granth Sahib is considered to be the Guru for all Sikhs henceforth now going back so what exactly is the Guru Granth Sahib? this will give us a further idea of the eclectic nature of Sikhism, eclectic means sort of drawing from different places together so it is that’s a huge book one thousand four hundred thirty pages if you read the novel it is entirely rhymes and it is the longest book of rhyme poetry so again it is poetry and you will see a specific script called Guru Mukhi was devised to have these verses written down so that’s Guru Granth Sahib is written in Guru Mukhi and if you look at the context you will see something very interesting here so these thousands of verses they all come from different sources so 974 verses come from Guru Nanak, 62 couplets from Guru Angad and different Gurus have certain number of verses within them and they accept certain devotees also, Hindu devotees so there is Namdev, Kabir Ramananda, all these people are there and they have taken some verses from there also and there are some Islamic Sufis Sufism was a more devotional and spiritual option within Islam that focused more less on worldly acquirement and political power and more on a direct experience of God so it is similar to Bhukti somewhat although there are substantial differences so basically they took these teachings from different places and they combined them all together in the Guru Granth Sahib so the fundamental principle is there is only one God, Ek, Omkar, Sat, Naam, Truth is its name so His name, they say the derivative names are Anva, Raam but ultimately its Truth and they have these three principles of Seva, Langar and Sangat so Langar is something probably all of us know so it is the Sikh version of Food for Life actually it was Govardhan Amritsar and he went to the Amritsar temple there and he saw how efficiently the food was being served and he appreciated he said we should be able to cook and serve Prasad like that so he appreciated that so Langar is a tradition of offering free food to anyone who comes to the Gurudwara and especially they have been continuing that for hundreds of years at Amritsar and on special occasions they also offer free food to everyone not just to the Gurudwara, sometimes on their holidays they may stop travellers who are going on the roads they will offer some food to them some free food, some drinks so that is the tradition of giving free food now Seva is service so you will see in this Gurudwara people come inside, they actually take their shoes and polish their shoes and they make big big business with Gurudwara so this is also in one sense a devotional activity but if you go inside the Gurudwara, there is no deity it is the Gurugand and ultimately the tendency to worship is there so what we will do in deity dressing they do scripture decoration like that it is very artistic because ultimately the human urge to glorify the absolute truth with our aesthetic sensibility is integral part of the spiritual quest we can’t just conceptually look at God is there God has to be approached in the aesthetic side of the human personality and one aspect of it is glorification and Sangha let’s say, like we had in the Buddhism, we had Sangha association there is something universal in all religions because every religion has some kind of values that are different from the social values and to sustain the spiritual for those values, the Sangha is required the association is required so Tushar Prabhupada asked this question, is that actually a real scripture, was Gurudwara actually a body or is that not correct? they created a system of religion which can include Hindus and Muslims that was at the time needed but it’s not a good system so what does it mean by not a good system? Tushar Prabhupada does not have any critical statements about Sikhism directly, but the idea is that in the principle of blending some things happen which may not be the most desired so in the blended they accept karma and incarnation accept chanting the holy names accept the code of liberation now they reject caste system they reject idol worship they reject the authority of the Vedas I’ll explain this point and they reject the idea of renunciation so there are no Sikh Brahmacharis and Sanyasis of course, at one level we can say for Kshatriyas it’s not practical for Brahmacharis and Sanyasis at another level, this is also a concession to Islam Islam considers either vegetarian celibacy to be a sin against God celibacy to be a sin against God and of course every tradition has it’s own roots, and Mohammed at his level if you look at to whom he was preaching he had to tell them that you should not have sex with your mother at that level he was preaching to tell people to at least stay restricted with your wives so there are quite strong conjunctions in Islam against adultery sex outside marriage so at that level there is surely some elevation of consciousness that happened but the kind of people that Islam preached to it was impossible to conceive of celibacy for them so we see this as a contextual principle but certainly there are some talks in Islam also about not being too attached to material pleasures at a gross level but generally speaking a religion is shaped by the example of its founder so if the example so Shri Prabhupada was a Jnansi naturally in his time, there was an emphasis on the non-stop, Shri Prabhupada has a lot of statements in Kirti Puranas also so if you see Islam was founded by a person who was not only married but he had many wives and as a Kshatriya Muhammad was primarily a Kshatriya playing a Kshatriya role at least so in that case in fact to strengthen his hold on the army also, he had to marry many times so we don’t necessarily have to look at it negatively when we consider Shalini Maharaj to be a great protector of any dharma but we see that he also had many queens not just one, 10 queens or something like that so for Kshatriyas it was required as part of the political arrangements, so marriages used to solidify the kingdom and expand its influence also so this rejection of renunciation is in that sense not something which we need to worry about even most Sikhs, they appreciate the point that somebody was devoted to God, at a practical level they may not do it themselves but they appreciate that point and beyond that regarding the authority of the Vedas it is not that exactly they reject it it is something like they transcend it in the sense that even Bhakti Krishna has said, so what Guru Nanak says is that just by study of scripture you cannot know God and that is something which we also agree with so in their tradition they consider the Guru Granth Sahib to be the revealed word of God, now how is it revealed if it is all coming from different saints, their idea is that these saints are all inspired by God and they are all inspired by God and it is interesting that they may not accept everything that all these saints say they select and then say which of these saints are the weak because now if you look at many of the other saints, they are not necessarily rejected in their deity worship entirely in their practise of deity worship also so they select these things and integrate these things so this is a lot of attempted synthesis which might not have been a conscious effort it could have been a deeper or subconscious effort but that is how it is worked out now historically speaking historically speaking Hinduism although it was a sort of attempt to blend Hinduism with Islam it had much more similarity with Hinduism than Islam it had much more similarity with Hinduism than Islam and that is why when India was partitioned so actually Ambedkar accepted Buddhism as I was talking about last time as a way to rebel against the caste system but in his own way he was intelligent so he had proposed that when partition takes place that let all Muslims from wherever India is, let all of them go to Pakistan and let all non-Muslims leave Pakistan non-Muslims means Hindus, Sikhs, everyone so Gandhi said no, because I will not let partition happen I will not let partition happen partition will not happen I will fast today so eventually Gandhi was in his own way a noble person he was non-violent, he was exemplary Prabhupada had many appreciative things about him to say also but actually when the time of partition came Gandhi did not go and he fasted he said I will fast today, he did not go and the way the British government did the whole thing was till the day the countries became independent they did not reveal the boundaries that means in January 15 I watched India became independent in August 14 Pakistan became independent so in August 14 Pakistan became independent that nation was independent but they didn’t know what was their boundaries so what was their independence and then suddenly they came to know it was mass fear and terror and anger, so that time Pakistan was very very turbulent and thousands and thousands of people had to both Sikhs as well as Hindus had to flee from Pakistan and actually according to some statistics themselves are very unpredictable but the kind of killings that happened during that time was horrible and of course it did not only happen in Pakistan as a reaction to the killing of Hindus in Pakistan, there were killings of Muslims in India also but a huge number of Hindus, around millions actually so at that time many of the Sikhs, so Punjab why we are talking about this partition is that Punjab was the area which had a maximum number of Sikhs even now the majority is primarily Punjab so Punjab got divided even in Pakistan there is Punjab and in India there is Punjab so then the Sikhs had to flee from various places because although they did not accept the universe but still many of their cultural forms were more similar to Hinduism than to Islam so now with respect to similarities they also talk about the chanting of the holy name of Lord Ram, Lord Krishna there is an answer Dr. Naseer Hoshda Prabhupada, the Sikh yogi and then he asked so he said, what is your understanding of God? God is the item, the goal of life, God whom we should love and then he says Prabhupada says that Bhagavad Gita says Krishna is God he says yes, we accept Krishna as God and then he says, yes Krishna is talked about in our Guru Vatsaayi also so now some of the bhakti poets would say that actually Krishna and Allah are the names of the same God and this could be accepted within the purest ethos of Hinduism but this was not accepted by the Muslims at least the mainstream Muslims so what happened was at that time Sikhs fled over to India and then there was, the Sikhs also felt that we still have their land Hindus have got their land, we also have their land so there was a separatist movement they wanted Khalistan and overall that was jacked so there is the Raghanti Geeta operation Blue Star, where she had the Indian army enter into the, what happened was there were these Sikh separatists who were doing a lot of terroristic sort of violence and then they had taken shelter within the in the Golden Temple the idea was that because it’s a sacred place nobody will come inside but inside the sacred place they were actually more militants than religious and they were doing a lot of anti-devotional activities not just in terms of being violent or militaristic but also they were disrespecting the the Sikh holy places also, but this was not no content so when the Indian army entered into the into the Amritsar temple and then it killed these people, that upset angered many of the Sikhs and then that led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi and then that led to further violence against Sikhs that led to further violence and retaliation so those scars are still there among the Sikhs but overall if you see Sikhism among these religions that evolved in India Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism the Sikhs are are the closest to Hindus they are very close to Hindus Jains as in culturally are close but Sikhs not only culturally but even devotionally are close and we also have this whole principle that as devotees Shri Prabhupada actually we look at the similarities and encourage people to practise God consciousness so Shri Prabhupada was appreciative of the the Amritsar temple is also appreciative similarly in general our tradition we look at it see how things work out is that because Sikhism was not a very widespread religion there have not been many interactions between our Acharyas and Sikh leaders so that’s why we don’t have many statements to go by we don’t have many statements to go by but overall if you look at the way we interact with Sikhs we will see that many of the Kshatriyas in one way they were trying to protect the Vedic Dharma in their own way and historically circumstances such that things evolved in a particular way so if we go for any interactions with Sikhs there was a back to God issue which had been published also Vaishnavism and Sikhism there is a disciple of Gopalakrishna Maharaj who has written a book Mataji Disciple Vaishnavism and Sikhism Vaishnavism and Sikhism so now she herself was born in a Sikh family and she has become a Vaishnav devotee and if there were some difficulties for her she would become a Vaishnav devotee, it’s acceptable and she has also traced the similarities in the teachings now of course her vision is to highlight how the traditions are similar so that’s why in her book she will not talk about any of the dissimilarities so there are three kinds of preaching there is polemic, ironic, and apologetic so these are just English words you don’t get surprised or intimidated by the words so polemic ironic and apologetic so polemic means you are wrong so polemic means you are wrong polemic means criticising others pointing out the faults against them ironic means both of us have so many similarities and apologetic apologetic has nothing to do with the word apology although the word sounds similar apologetic means to explain how I am right so all these three are ways of preaching so for example when she is talking about how evolution is wrong so that is a polemic sort of preaching and she was saying how Mayavad is an incorrect interpretation of the Vedic literature that is polemic now ironic means Lakshmi Prabhupada saying that yes, if you have a question, please come to me and ask him what do you think of Jesus? he says, he is so good he says, except him as a guru that is ironic and apologetic would mean don’t think that the GD is ironic the GD is different from the ironic so that means we are explaining logically how what we are doing is the right thing so these are different kinds of preaching and Avarachalans will use different strategies according to their circumstances so so in general, if you look at Lakshmi Prabhupada his approach to other religions was really ironic he talked about Christianity about even Islam he knew the differences but he did not highlight the differences and generally we get a sort of tickling for our various whatever is there when we hear Lakshmi Prabhupada talking about Mayavad so Lakshmi Prabhupada was polemic against Mayavadis but there are several occasions where Lakshmi Prabhupada was also ironic for example, Lakshmi Prabhupada said the second chance that the Buddhists the Mayavadis and the Vaishnavas may differ with respect to the vision of the absolute truth but as far as Brahmins are concerned all of them agree all of them say that yes we have to be detached from worldly pleasures so ironic and Shri Prabhupada was rarely apologetic Shri Prabhupada was more often offensive and wordy, not that I don’t think I am wrong, I am right so that word apologetics are also required when some people say I am misunderstanding what we are saying so for example, Shri Prabhupada says whenever we talk about Varanasi don’t confuse Varanasi with the caste system this is not my property so Shri Prabhupada would say that Shri Sanatana Dharma is not Hinduism don’t think this is just a sectarian belief system or thought system so in that sense, in politics we can be apologetic whenever we go for any if at all we interact with any people of other religions the primary mode has to be ironic we start off with talking similarities if we start off with differences, then there is no way of improving anything we start with differences, we end with more differences if we start with similarities, there may be the possibility of deeper understanding so in general, it is quite possible that for many sects to become devotees and it also depends on how conservative those sects are I will say Shri Prabhupada’s strategy or approach, if somebody is a committed Christian, encourage them to become better Christians if somebody is not, is just a normal Christian, encourage them to take to Krishna Consciousness in general na buddhi bhenam janeyam that’s how we have to sensitively practise and generally speaking most people don’t know much about their religious beliefs so there was one Sikh boy who had come from IIT Kharagpur he had come and asked him a question about Sikhism so I asked him a question, he said I am a Sikh but I don’t know anything about Sikhism so Sikhism was more a culture than a sort of belief system and in fact we can’t blame him for that probably maybe 15 years ago somebody had asked us about Hinduism, we would have said the same thing so we many times if we focus on the differences then unnecessarily we hate people so if somebody says yes the chanting of the names of Ram of Krishna is talked about in the Sikh scriptures also that’s what we are also doing encourage them for that and if at all say we have to go through the programme where Sikhs are there and that book of Vaishnavism there are a lot of verses which talk about bhakti and those sort of verses are the ones you should quote and by that we can actually build the bridges so before we go to Jainism I’ll stop here, are there any questions? yes any comments? ok yes ok so so when we speak to people of some other religion even if we tell them about bhakti and tell them about the similarities in their religion they will become interested in their religion more rather than Krishna consciousness so we have to see this at two levels in one sense Bhaktivinoda Thakura says in Chaitanya Shiksha Amrit that whether it is Socrates from the west or whether it is Patanjali from the east they are all looking at the same absolute truth and the vision of the summit of the absolute truth that they have got they have expressed it in words so he is saying that all of them are looking for the same absolute truth and they are seeing it in different ways so now we are not exclusivist we don’t say that Krishna consciousness is the only way to approach God at the same time if we say that all religions are equal ways to approach God no, they are not equal ultimately if you have to go to a mountain peak I can go from this way I can go from this way I can go from various ways to the top of the mountain so different religions in one sense are like pathways to go up to the top of the same mountain so now some pathways actually may start off climbing up to the top of the mountain and they may become denizens at a particular point like Buddhism they may take people from atheism and violence and bring them to non-violence and basic level of goodness it doesn’t take them much further but still they are climbing up the mountain so now those religions which are devotional they can take people to the summit of the mountain they can take people to the summit of the mountain so then is it necessary for us to convert them actually there is no concept of conversion in the materialistic sense there is a conversion which is horizontal and a conversion which is vertical horizontal conversion means a person is a Hindu materialist he converts and becomes a Christian materialist so that is no conversion at all for practical purposes people are just being materialists but when a person becomes a devotee he may be a Hindu materialist or he may be a Christian materialist he is becoming a spiritualist the values are changing the goals of life are changing so if at all we want any conversion we want a vertical conversion we change people from being lovers of matter to lovers of God from being materialist to being spiritualist now originally speaking whether it is Christianity or Islam or Sikhism they are meant for this conversion from materialist to converting people from being materialist to becoming spiritualist but as the religions exist today this conversion may not be very much emphasised this conversion may not be the practical focus of the lives of those people in fact they may not even be aware of the emphasis of this conversion in their tradition because most religions at an operational level serve as social cosmetics now what do you mean by social cosmetics? now cosmetics makes a person look good so in the public eye if I am religious I look good so at a level most religions serve that purpose in society I should appear good in society so I should go to a church, I should go to a temple I should go to a gurdwara so most religions at a functional level are not really converting people from being materialist to spiritualist and this is true even within Hinduism so if people become aware that the ultimate goal is to convert to change from being materialist to spiritualist the pathway in the bottom of the mountain is materialist level the top of the mountain is the spiritualist level so all religions are meant to offer a path to go up like that now we don’t claim that the Gaudiya Vaishnava path is the only path but we do say that this Gaudiya Vaishnava path is an easy path it is a smooth and swift path why is it smooth and smooth? because of the special concept Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and the potency of Hare Krishna Mahamandir so it’s not that this is the only religion but this is a special religion Kalyuga, Hare Krishna Mahamandir is very powerful and this is not just an antique religion you will actually see also that devotees serious devotees are able to practise lives of renunciation and devotion to God that are quite unimaginable not just for materialistic people but for many religious people so Ravindra Sarovar tells about one incident, I don’t know if I mentioned it earlier that he had gone to some Christian seminary to give a lecture and after he spoke of the lecture then he initially spoke about how the names of God can take us up if you are interested then he talked about four religious principles and they got into a lot after that they went away the lecture ended some of the students stayed around now all these students are in seminary they are all going to be priests so as he was talking within a few minutes several of them took out cigarettes and started smoking the future priests they are smoking so Ravindra Sarovar just casually asked them is it so difficult for you to give up smoking? now all of them were not supposed to be priests some of them were supposed to be monks so Ravindra Sarovar adds I was not prepared for the reply or the vehemence of their reply he said that if only I could take a girl out on Saturday night I wouldn’t have to smoke this man so Ravindra Sarovar says actually speaking we have celibacy in our tradition and yes some celibates may have difficulty but nobody has this level of resentment and then he started he said I am married and we have marriage also and he told about how in marriage we focus on sexually before procreation that sounds worse than celibacy that’s what he said that sounds worse so then he asked about their lifestyles and then he says that actually in their monastery itself they had television they had magazines they had mundane music they had non-vegetarian food and they were told to be celibate so Ravindra Sarovar said when I heard this I had tears in my eyes he said there is not a if somebody has so much Rajasic exposure and somebody has such a Rajasic diet it’s impossible to be celibate so the point which I am making over here is that the practises of Krishna consciousness are very high even for other religionists and that we are able to practise it there is some struggle but without much difficulty it’s not impossible to be celibate it’s difficult but it’s possible surely that we are able to practise it is itself the testimony the evidence to the special potency of Krishna consciousness special potency of Krishna consciousness most Christian traditions have given up monkhood as a requirement for their churches only the catholic churches have it protestants have given it up mostly so the point which I am making is we do claim that there are various ways to climb up the mountain and Krishna conscious way is the smooth and swift that is because of the special potency of Krishna consciousness and this is something which people can themselves experience and they can experience if they practise it they can observe it if they interact with devotees and see the standards according to which they are living so therefore we can object to the present as we have both passed the same goal if you want to practise this you make smoother and faster advancement but we don’t claim that you can’t make advancement by that generally speaking it’s best to let people make their own choices after they are informed about what the choices are that means we don’t have to go about educating people about their tradition that is not our goal one time Christians had come and Srila Prabhupada was talking there was one devotee who had already studied the bible before he was introduced to Krishna consciousness so he started voting for the bible and debating with the priests with the Christian priests then after they went away Prabhupada told him to debate this with the bible he says they are never going to accept us as authorities of the bible so don’t bother about that focus on universal principles I encourage them to become more god conscious so if somebody is a committed practitioner then no need to convert him just encourage him to actually start taking up the journey from materialism to spirituality but if somebody is not a committed practitioner and by our teaching of Krishna consciousness they start becoming committed there then in a non-threatening non-critical objective way we can talk about the comparative ease or difficulty of the various paths and it is objectively speaking very difficult for people in any religious tradition to at least from what I know practically apart even in the four sampradayas that we have how many people are actually following the four regulative principles they may be devoted and want to speak of other religions not many so how many people are living the whole programme of sadhana that we have for 5-6 hours nobody has like that that’s why we can tell them about the ease in the facility that is there when we practise Krishna consciousness but we don’t give the choice to them we needn’t feel discouraged because at least the person is increasing his god consciousness that is good actually Jainism we will talk later because I am not approachable to that then when we we appreciate his religion he goes to his Jain and he asks about the Krishna there and he comes to know that Krishna is like that because he had done so many mistakes so he is in the hell now and he will come in the 24th yantra next time along with the Ravana also so that kind of you know as you said in the last class that they were told all these things so that they can have something to tell about now when he comes and asks me this is the thing then you have to tell them the fact what Krishna actually means it means that you have to tell about the leaders also how we can help the siddharthis so that will be some sort of so generally speaking everybody if they are committed to a particular path they will have to make a choice at some time or the other so like Krishna consciousness is like one mountain and that person may go on a particular path that is like another mountain so our preaching to those people is like building a bridge it’s like building a bridge that bridge helps them building a bridge means helping them firstly get agnath sukhruti by appreciating what we are doing by appreciating what we are sharing and then gradually helping them to adopt the path so adopting the path is like they start coming across on the bridge when they come across on the bridge to our side then at one particular time Krishna will arrange through circumstances in their life that bridge will have to be broken not broken in the sense of rejection of that tradition but it’s contextualisation so now what we shouldn’t do is break the bridge before they cross it that means they get stuck over there and worst of all we shouldn’t break the bridge when they are on the bridge that means what somebody is a Ganesh worshipper and he says Ganesh is not supreme, Krishna is supreme and he goes to some other place and he reads some other books and he says Ganesh is supreme he gets confused, he says who is supreme? Ganesh is supreme, Krishna is supreme, just forget the whole business I won’t get into this one that becomes a person who is a materialist so sometimes that choice, critical choice that they have to make I think that may come too prematurely because of the force of circumstances so if that happens we should not make that choice to insist we can tell you, you can be practising bhakti at whatever level you can and these things can be discussed later see they have to be ready for it if circumstances force it then we have to talk about it at that time but generally the confrontational things should be talked about when they have developed sufficient faith and if you see that’s the whole strategy of the book Journey Home most of the teachers that Radhanath Maharaj met were impersonalists but he talks about all of them and then talks about how in this spiritual search he found bhakti to be the highest and a bhakti saint to be the highest so I think beyond that everything will have to be discussed on an individual level how things can be specifically talked about but the broad principle is we shouldn’t challenge their faith too prematurely