Odana Sasthi – A Glimpse of Intimate Devotion

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you.
Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna. On the sacred day of Odhansashti, let us try to understand the speciality of this festival.
The Vedic culture describes that God is a person and the highest way of approaching him is by serving him as a person. So, we serve him by serving his deity form. We dress him, we bathe him, we feed him.
And in this way, a personal relationship with the Lord becomes very intimate, intense and sweet. And centered around the deity, the whole life of the community is built. And there are many living models of this even today.
What has been going on for a century and even millennia in the traditional Vedic culture is still going on in various pockets of Vedic culture all over India and by Shri Prabhupada’s mercy, all over the world. So, Jagannath Puri is one such place where practically the whole town is centered around Jagannath. And Odhansashti is a day when the Lord is dressed with new starched clothes.
The idea is that now winter is starting and special cloth is offered to the Lord, a covering is offered on his body. And the whole focus of the festival is that we treat the Lord with love as a person. And on this occasion, a grand festival is held.
And the word Odhan has many meanings. One of the meanings is rice, arch rice. So, special delicacies are offered to the Lord on this particular day.
We have many items which include rice also. And Chaitanya Mahaprabhu himself would come to see this festival and he would delight in observing the beautiful darshan of the Lord as he was dressed opulently and fed sumptuously and entertained graciously by the presence of the devotees who dance and sing his glories. And Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is himself Lord Krishna.
So, it was Lord Krishna himself in two forms, reciprocating love in a most inconceivable way. So, Chaitanya Bhagwat describes Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s devotionally intimate and intense observation of Odhansashti. And Chaitanya Jatam would describe another festival wherein Pundrik Vidyanidhi misunderstood seeing that according to the Smartha rituals, the dress of the Lord was not proper.
He got upset and he started mentally offending the servants of the Lord of Jagannath, Daita, saying that they are not serving the Lord properly. They are not removing the starch from the clothes before offering the clothes to him. Normally, starch should be removed.
So, according to Smartha rituals, that’s what is to be done. But he didn’t do that. And then the devotees around him, Prudhvi Sava Damodar told him, actually, you know, here whatever happens is by the will of the Lord and one shouldn’t offend his integral servants.
Pundrik Vidyanidhi was not satisfied by this explanation. And Lord Jagannath gave a special mercy to him at that time. That night he came and started slapping him on his face.
He said, how dare you question the actions of my servants? And in this way, Lord Jagannath actually revealed two things. One is the intimate relationship between him and his Pandas, those who are serving him and also the intimate relationship between him and Pundrik Vidyanidhi. There are so many people who offend the Lord, but the Lord doesn’t come and slap everyone on the face.
That the Lord chose to do this for him indicates that he had a special relationship with the Lord. And that way, what we recognize is the sweetness of the relationship between the Lord and the devotees. And that sweetness is the supreme shelter of the devotee, is aspirations of the heart.
So on Odhansashti, we can remember all this intimacy in the relationship between the Lord and the devotee, how the devotee serves the Lord as a person and the Lord treats those who are serving him as persons. And when they, in their own devotion, want to offer him clothes with starch not removed, he takes this, this is the way they are serving and he accepts this. And if somebody wants to correct Pundrik Vidyanidhi, he’s also a great devotee and his desire is also to please the Lord, to offer the best quality of service to the Lord.
The Lord also feels that this is, this devotee is also loving me, but he’s not understanding the way I am reciprocating with these devotees. So the Lord corrects him. So essentially this pastime gives us a peek into the spiritual world where there are intimate reciprocations between the Lord and the devotees.
And by such peaks, we can cause the desire in our heart to return back to the spiritual world to peak. And as it becomes stronger and stronger, our material attachments will fall away and we will fall in love with Krishna and ultimately return back to the eternal world where every day is a festival. Thank you.