Prabhupada life-story 03 – The dedicated disciple takes up the mission

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
to our series on Krishna Prabhupada’s life story.
We are now discussing about his getting spiritual initiation from his spiritual master, Bhakti Siddhant Sri Thakur. In the previous episode, we discussed about how his trajectory of life changed. He was a committed person, participating in the Indian national movement, wearing khadi, rejecting the degree that he had got.
And yet he left it all because his spiritual master convinced him that the mission of raising human consciousness was the most important mission. And he decided to assist his spiritual master practically through his contacts and through the financial support that he could get through his business in pharmacy. In 1932, when Shri Bhakti Siddhant Sri Thakur came to Allahabad, there he offered to initiate Abhay.
Now, normally initiation in the Gaudiya Vaishnav tradition as instituted by the recent acharyas, Bhakti Siddhant Sri Thakur and others, that two-phase process. First, there was a Harinam initiation where the person would be invited, would be given the mantra for chanting the holy names of Krishna, the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Ram, Hare Ram, Ram Ram, Hare Hare.
And thereafter, there will be Brahman Diksha where a person would become, by initiation, qualified to worship the deities and to speak on scripture. Now, initiation is a fundamental marking point. It’s a significant landmark on the spiritual journey for a seeker who is serious in one’s seeking.
Now, to develop a committed relationship with a master ensures that the seeker progresses seriously. Just as in sports or any field where we want to grow, we have a coach, we have a guide. We need the guide all the more in the spiritual field and we need to be committed to submitting the guide and letting that guide guide us.
That formal commitment to the cause of spiritual growth is signified through initiation. The normal system was that the master would come to a place and then the local disciples of that master would recommend candidates for initiation. He’s a good person.
He’s been practicing like this. He’s been doing like this. Please initiate him.
Now, Bhaktisiddhanta Sri Thakur, when Abhay was brought in front of him, Bhaktisiddhanta was pleased and he said, yes, I will initiate him. He is, I’ve marked him. He likes to hear.
Now, the local devotees, the followers of Bhaktisiddhanta Sri Thakur at the Gaudiya Mati in Allahabad, they’re surprised. When had Bhaktisiddhanta seen this young pharmacist? When had he formed his opinion that he likes to hear? Now, this was at Koshi in Vrindavan, where Bhaktisiddhanta Abhay had sat and heard for hours and hours. So, because of his eagerness to hear, because of his spiritual sincerity, because of the recommendations which he had got at how he has helped the local temple so much, Bhaktisiddhanta decided to give Abhay both first and second initiations.
Both the initiations he was given together and thus he was authorized and expected to speak on the bhakti wisdom, which Bhaktisiddhanta Sri Thakur was teaching. And after this initiation, Abhay started centering more and more on his spiritual contributions. His business, he hoped, would expand and he was trying for that, but he would give medicines on loan and then he had to travel to collect the money and many of the people did not give the money back and thus he found himself in debt.
He had given money to the sellers, to the wholesalers and he could not get the money back from the retailers. So, he had to liquidate his business to hand over the money to the people from whom he had purchased the money. So, he found himself without any business and without any employment, but there were signs of auspiciousness that he could continue on and he tried another business.
Although some of the devotees told him that you just leave everything and devote yourself to Krishna, to the mission, he said, no, I have my family responsibilities. How can I give them up? His family had been growing now. So, he again resumed his business and he continued on.
Whenever his business allowed, he would go and meet his spiritual master in Vrindavan or in Kolkata or in various other places and as their meetings, although they were infrequent, whenever those meetings happened, Bhakta Siddhanta paid special attention to this young man and at one particular point, Abhay wrote an offering of his gratitude, of his appreciation to his spiritual master and therein, he captured the mood of his spiritual master, the mood of focusing on devotion to God as a person and avoiding the deprivation of the fulfillment of the heart that comes when we conceive of the absolute only in impersonal terms. Absolute is sentient thou has proved, impersonal calamity thou has removed. So, Abhay had a poetic bent of mind and he composed these poetic lines as a part of a poetic offering to his spiritual master and his spiritual master was immensely pleased.
He says, he has captured my mood. He has understood my heart and the master was so pleased that he told that whatever he writes, publish it in our magazines. So, now, this was again a very strong recommendation because whenever a magazine is written, the magazine has its own editorial body and the editors make sure that whatever is written is according, is approved doctrine.
It is in consistency with the teachings of the philosophy that a particular magazine is meant to broadcast and this, you could say almost like blanket support was indicative of the immense faith that Abhay, who had after initiation become Abhay Charanarvind had earned from his spiritual master. He had been given the name Abhay Charanarvind. That means, Abhay means fearless, free from fear.
Charanarvind means lotus feet. So, that means that this Abhay had become fearless by taking shelter of the lotus feet of the Lord. So, we can all strive to be fearless, but fearlessness becomes more solidly established when it is founded in the Lord and we take shelter of him.
He is the source of all fearlessness. So, Abhay had himself become intensely devoted to the Lord in continuance with his childhood upbringing and now in future, he would give that shelter to many, many people also. So, as he continued thus in his devotional practices, he was having his professional practices as a businessman and wherever he would go, he would share whatever he knew.
He would read books heavily, especially while he was traveling. He would read the books of his spiritual master. He would read the books of the predecessor teachers in the line and thus, he would nourish his head, his heart and prepare himself to share this wisdom with the world.
And wherever he went, he was fairly good at English and at that time, English proficiency was not so common among Indians and that marked him also among the disciples of Bhakta Siddhanta Sohya Thakur and he would give discourses, he would sing kirtans and although he was a householder, he was still very much adopting that missionary mood of sharing and his spiritual master revealed many special secrets to him. Not secrets in the sense that they were unknown to others but they were what was concerning his heart the most. India at that time was a very religious country but that religiosity had become contaminated with excessive ritualism and it had been controlled and dominated by people who had vested material interests, who were not really interested in spiritual growth.
So, many of the temples had become places simply for exhibiting the deities and collecting donations from the worshippers. There was no spiritual vibrancy, there was no spiritual education, there was no spiritual inspiration for people to turn their hearts and dedicate themselves to God which was coming from those temples and Bhakta Siddhanta spoke against this and those who felt their interest threatened the owners and the the priests of the temples, they conspired to threaten against him, to act against him, to threaten him, to even have him assassinated. Fortunately, by Krishna’s arrangement, he was protected.
When Abhay heard about this, he was he was astounded at the courage of his spiritual master and deeply troubled at the level of religiosity that is going on even in the religious circles and then these troubles which were some of the trouble that were burdening Bhakta Siddhanta’s heart, Bhakta Siddhanta Sri Thakur spoke those to his disciple Abhay. He said that Bhakta Siddhanta had established a magnificent mission, there were 64 temples in India and three temples outside India that he had established on the Gaudiya Math. One was in Rangoon in Burma and one was actually in also they had established a center in London and also center in Montreal.
So, like that they had various, it was actually their temples in Bangladesh also at Burma. So, now what happened was that after the mission became strong, powerful, somehow as it got resources, some of the leaders that is among the disciples of Bhakta Siddhanta Sri Thakur, they started fighting over power and privilege and Bhakta Siddhanta was very distressed by this and he told there will be a fire in the mission. He spoke this privately to his disciple Abhay and he told him that I have built these big temples but I am feeling that instead if I had printed books that would have been much better.
So, ultimately temples are meant to be places for spiritual education, spiritual elevation, but seeing the opulence of the temple if people become attached then that defeats the purpose of the temple and then he turned to Abhay. This was a conversation that took place at one of the holiest places for Gaudiya Vaishnavism. This was in Radha Kund which is the place where Radha and Krishna, the divine couple are said to have performed very intimate pastimes and there is a pond where Radha Rani, the supreme goddess of fortune has bathed and there is Shyam Kund where Krishna has bathed.
So, this is considered the holiest among holy places for the followers of Gaudiya Vaishnavism and it was at this place that Bhaktisiddhanta Thakur gave an instruction to Abhay. He said if you ever get money, print books and we’ll see in future how this instruction had such a formative, decisive, consequential influence on shaping the mission of Bhaktisiddhanta Swamishla Prabhupada and of flooding the world with spiritual knowledge. As the years passed, Bhaktisiddhanta Thakur’s health went down and during one of the last interactions, Abhay had written a letter to his spiritual master.
He said that I am a householder. I have so many family responsibilities. I cannot assist you like your renunciate disciples but how can I serve you? This had always been his question to his spiritual master.
So, Bhaktisiddhanta Thakur wrote a letter in which he said if you can share the wisdom of bhakti in the English language, that will benefit you and that will benefit your fellow human beings. Do this all over the world. Abhay recognized that this in the late 1930s, an instruction which we had got was the same instruction that he had got in the early 1920s, in 1922, when he first met his spiritual master and Abhay took this instruction wholeheartedly and he decided to dedicate his life to sharing this message as much as he could.
His spiritual master thereafter departed from the world and as he had prophesied, as he had feared, his mission split apart because of various issues. The disciples started having infights and the great sharing of bhakti wisdom that Bhaktisiddhanta Thakur had inaugurated that got very much fractured. Abhay was immensely distressed on seeing this and he felt the burden as well as the empowerment of the responsibility that his spiritual master had given him and now with his spiritual master no longer there on the planet, with the senior disciples of his spiritual master not really carrying on the mission of the spiritual master, he felt it was his responsibility to take things forward.
So in 1944, he decided to start a magazine and that was back to Godhead. He decided that he would distribute the magazine wherever he could and this was a phase in his life when he was going, when he was transiting. He had his business and he was focusing some time and energy on his business but he also wanted to focus time and energy on his programs of spiritual outreach.
So he started working to single-handedly write the articles, proofread them, type them, then take the paper to the printer, get the books printed, get the magazines printed and then personally carry the magazines for distribution. Now the very activity that often requires a whole team of people, Abhay was doing all alone and by now Abhay was in his 50s. He was nearing 50.
And this was also the time when the Second World War was coming to its peak. Now paper was in acute shortage and the British government had a restricted paper supply because they did not want any propaganda of incendiary material against their governance to go on. So when the whole focus of the world seemed to be on political complications and political resolutions, Abhay broadcast the message that it is only spiritual elevation that could solve human conflicts.
We needed a raising of consciousness and he would address contemporary issues, quote contemporary leaders and present contemporary issues in the light of the timeless wisdom of the Bhakti tradition, in the light of the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, of the Srimad Bhagavatam. These were extremely difficult times. He had not much money.
As he kept publishing back to God and kept distributing it, it was a challenge. Some days he had to choose whether to put his, spend his time and money, whatever little money he had, whether to spend that money on getting his own food or to use that money to print the back to God magazines, to purchase paper for printing that magazine. And on many days he would choose to print.
Starving his own body, he would eat as less as possible, sleep as less as possible and work as hard as possible to try to share the message of spiritual love. Unfortunately, this was a time when India was either too captivated in politics, too crippled by poverty or too enamored with the West to actually take its own spiritual legacy seriously. Although he would go from street to street distributing this magazine, he would go to shops where people would be taking tea, urge them to read this magazine, most people were not interested.
And at this time he was mostly in the Delhi area. So Delhi was incredibly hot. And at one particular time, when Abhay was walking along the streets, this heat was so much that he got a sunstroke.
He fell on the ground and fainted. Fortunately, although he was alone and no one knew what he was doing, there were no acquaintances, no relatives to take care of him. But there was one person who always takes care of everyone.
That was God, Krishna. Krishna was present in his heart. And by the event of Krishna, at that time, a person who had been an old acquaintance of Abhay was going by in his car.
And when he saw this man lying on the ground, he said, he looks familiar. And he took, he saw him, he said, oh, this is Abhay Babu. He took him in his car and took him to a hospital.
The doctor told him that he is healthy, but he’s exhausted, he needs to rest. Abhay said that, I have no time to rest. I have to carry on my spiritual master’s mission.
And soon he resumed his activity of publishing and distributing books, distributing the magazine Back to Godhead. The idea of Back to Godhead was that we all are human beings who are turned away from God, and we need to turn back to God. And one day when he was distributing books like this, distributing the magazines like this, a cow rammed into him and knocked him down.
Again, he was dismayed, distrayed, distressed. Why did this happen? Cow is considered a sacred animal, and cow is very dear to Krishna. And Indians revere cows, especially those who are devout Indians.
And cows often just go along in the streets, and for a cow to just hit into him, again in the hills, hot streets of Delhi, he was taken aback. But no matter how many times he was taken aback, he would never turn back. He was determined to press on.
He kept trying to distribute the magazines, but then, although he was very eager to carry on the spiritual master’s mission, he was also very vigilant, very eager to learn how best to serve. So once when he was distributing a magazine, a postman spoke to him. He said, magazines people will read and they’ll throw away.
Why don’t you write books? People will preserve books. He said, yes. He felt it was the voice of God.
This was the voice of his spiritual master speaking to this person. And he took that mission. And he shifted his energy from the printing of magazines to the writing of books.
And eventually, the books that flowed from his pen would become his greatest spiritual legacy. Books that would flood the world in millions, even billions, would be translated into scores of languages and would transform the lives of millions all over the world. How Abhay continued the spiritual master’s mission, we will discuss in our future