Prabhupada life-story 06 – Taking sannyasa & starting Bhagavatam commentary

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you. Hare Krishna.
Hare Krishna. Welcome back to our discussion on Prabhupada’s life story. We are discussing about Sri Prabhupada coming to the position of wholeheartedly focusing on sharing the Bhakti wisdom with people.
He had tried to balance his business and his family along with his spiritual outreach. He had lived through the traumatic events of the Second World War, being at the place where Japan had attacked India, and the post-independence trauma of partition and communal violence. And through all these political and communal upheavals, Prabhupada’s conviction remained strong and became deeper that it is only spiritual wisdom and the spiritualization of human consciousness that was the indispensable foundation for any sustainable solutions.
And he was trying resolutely, tirelessly, to try to share that wisdom in every forum possible. Unfortunately, whatever forums he had tried, he had repeatedly been thwarted. He tried to run the Back to Godhead magazine, but people had not been interested.
He had tried to establish the League of Devotees in Jhansi, but a political clique had actually practically evicted him from the very place where he had wanted to make his international headquarters. He had tried to assist the leaders of the Gaudiyam at his Sanyasi God Brothers in their writing and editing endeavors, but they were caught up in their own internal issues and did not have an expansive vision for outreach the way Prabhupada had. He had tried to correspond with various political and social and spiritual leaders to try to inspire within them the spirit to support the teaching of the pure message of the Bhagavad Gita, but he got no support.
He tried after the post-independence India, India was still enamored with the West or enamored with the hope that freedom will bring a new dawn and yes, freedom had brought political freedom, but unfortunately, it had not brought, it had actually brought the great trauma of partition and uprooting of people and communal violence and those scars ran deep and they took a long time to recover. So, on one side, this made Srila Prabhupada even more spiritually convinced that only the spiritual solution was there that would really work, but for many people in general, they just felt that all the spiritual can wait, all that can be later. Right now, we have to work on urgent political measures to deal with issues and in this way, Prabhupada found that his audience was not that receptive.
So, he had been living like a vanaprastha, a retired person for many years. He had one time lived in Delhi when he had been working with his godbrothers and his godbrothers had told him that because of some conflict over some minor issue, they said that they would not like to work with him. So, he at one time was practically left without a home.
Now, he had to live and different days at the house of different patrons, different supporters and he was changing houses so much because he did not have a fixed house and he couldn’t stay as a guest in one patron’s house for a very long time. So, the result was that things moved on and the result, unfortunately, was that he had to move from place to place and he did not even have a clear forwarding address. for correspondence and yet he was trying to contact as many people as possible.
Even after Gandhiji passed away, there was a memorial fund created to preserve and propagate the teachings and contributions of Gandhiji and Prabhupada wrote to them highlighting the spiritual aspect of Gandhiji, the spiritual foundation of his life and contributions and said that those need to be preserved. But unfortunately, he did not get any response. He tried to write to many Indian influential leaders, but none of them, apart from giving some nominal words of appreciation or patronizing words of support, none of them actually offered any tangible help.
So, Prabhupada lived in Delhi and he was trying to share Krishna’s message there but then he found that writing back to Godhead, publishing it or even planning about his books and living in Delhi, it was just too complicated. It was just also becoming unaffordable for him because he did not have much resources. So, he decided to shift to Vrindavan.
He visited Vrindavan several times, but in the 1950s, he decided to go there as a resident and this was, he wanted to immerse himself in the holy dhama of Vrindavan, not so much to retire from the world, but as to energize himself so that he could spiritually rejuvenate the world. So, unlike most people who go to Vrindavan with a vow that they will just live in Vrindavan and leave the world from Vrindavan with the hope that leaving the body in that sacred board would grant them liberation. Prabhupada’s mission was very different.
For him, Vrindavan was not the place for retirement, it was the place for rejuvenation, for preparation and he went there and he stayed initially at different temples and eventually stayed at the Radha Damodar temple and even now today in the Radha Damodar temple, there is the room where Prabhupada would stay and from there he would see the samadhis of Rupa Goswami, Jiva Goswami and he would pray to them, meditate on their contributions, meditate on their sacrifices, meditate on their enormous legacy and seek strength from them so that he could carry on their legacy in the present generation, in his contemporary generation to the modern world which needed the message of spirituality so urgently. While Sri Prabhupada was in Vrindavan, at that time, he was still writing. He was still trying to either write his back to God magazines or write his books and he had tried on various occasions, but he was not getting any significant breakthroughs.
He had grand plans for writing books, but everything required funds and he did not have funds. Over the years, Prabhupada’s visits to his family in Kolkata had become more and more infrequent. His children had grown up and he expected them, especially sons, to take care of the family responsibilities.
He wanted to devote himself to Krishna’s service. While Prabhupada had been reading scripture, over the years, at one time in the 10th canto, he had come across a passage where it is said that ईस्याह मनु ग्रणामि हरिष्येत धनम् च नहीं। तो धनम् दिज़त्यस्य स्वजान दुख्य दुखिता। That Krishna says that those on whom I bestow special mercy, I take away everything from them. When they have no material resources left, then their material relatives also abandon them and thus, when without any material possessions and without any material relations, when people are just left with nothing, then they turn to Me and they turn to Me making Me their everything.
So, this deprivation which forces one into intense spiritual connection and which gives deep devotional absorption, this is actually Krishna’s special mercy. And when Prabhupada had read this, he had felt that this verse spoke to him. It spoke to his situation.
He felt that whatever he had been trying in his material life, none of it had really worked. He had worked so hard for his business, but time after time, he had faced reversals in his business. He had worked so hard to take care of his family, but his family had not supported him in his spiritual endeavors.
They had shown no spiritual interest for their own spiritual growth. In fact, at one time in the 1940s, Prabhupada had actually worked tirelessly to write a commentary in the Bhagavad Gita. And writing a book itself is very difficult, but after writing it, to get published requires money for publishing the books.
And Prabhupada was desperately looking for some money, for some sponsor. And finally, he got an influential person, a sponsor from southern part of India, who felt inspired to contribute for the publishing. And Prabhupada was so grateful to Krishna for having made this arrangement.
But when he came home to look for his manuscript, he couldn’t find the manuscript anywhere. It was, it was a horrible tragedy. Sometimes we just write one page on our computer and suddenly if the computer program crashes or the computer crashes and we lose that one page, we feel so irritated.
I have to write this whole one page again. If we write or lose a file or lose a mail, even then we feel irritated. Now what to speak of somebody has written a manuscript which contains scores and scores and hundreds of pages.
If that is just lost, Prabhupada asked his family members, where is it? Where is it? He couldn’t find it anywhere. None of them, they claimed that they didn’t know anything about it. He suspected that some of them might have just thought that this manuscript was just like a waste heap of papers and they had sold it in like garbage to get some money to buy some tea.
Prabhupada means profoundly distressed to see this apathy, not just the apathy, almost bordering on antipathy towards his spiritual endeavors. So he talked with his wife and he told her, you have to decide, do you want me or do you want tea? Now she thought that he was just joking and she just picked up a cup of tea and started drinking that. He says, obviously I want tea and Prabhupada saw that and he walked out of the house.
He told other family members he was not going to come back, that he was leaving. They thought that he was always leaving, that he would stay for a few days and he would leave again, but this leaving was different. A wave of absolute conviction had come over Prabhupada.
He felt that he had been called for a much much bigger mission. He through the wisdom of the world’s biggest problems, why should he spend his time in tackling intractable petty family issues for people who are not at all spiritually interested, nor were they sympathetic to his spiritual interests. He in the time honored mood of renunciation decided to renounce the world.
The Vedic system was that a person lives as a grahastha, lives as a brahmachari for 25 years, then 25 years as a grahastha, then takes vanaprastha and then eventually takes sannyas. So Prabhupada had for all practical purposes been living like a vanaprastha for many years now, but still he would try to earn some money and give it to his family members and he would keep visiting his family, but now he decided that he would focus exclusively on Krishna Bhakti. He had already shifted to Vrindavan, was staying in Vrindavan.
When he went home, when he went to Vrindavan this time, he had no intention of coming back and as he was living there, his spiritual master who had departed almost two decades ago, now came in his dream and he told him, you must take sannyas. Sannyas, which is the highest renounced order in the Vedic system is meant for disconnection from the, is meant to formalize the disconnection from the world so as to totalize one’s absorption in the Lord. So the idea is that one devotes oneself completely to the service of the Lord.
So for practical purposes, Prabhupada is already devoted to the service of the Lord, but the world still saw him just as an ordinary person. Yeah, devoted to God, but still as an ordinary person. Now the renounced order by the formal, formalization of one’s devotion to the Lord brings with it certain respect, brings with it certain power, and brings with it the inner bliss, the spiritual devotional blessings of the Lord, especially for those who have devoted themselves to the Lord.
So the, those who take sannyas in the Bhakti Marga, they carry a danda, a stick, which has three parts joined together. So three parts indicate, kāye na vāca and manasa, with the body, with the mind, and with the words, one devotes oneself to the service of the Lord. So Prabhupada got this dream once, and he was a little disturbed.
He said that, I have my family, how can I take sannyas? But then Bhakti Sahas came in his dream again and told him, take sannyas. And then Prabhupada went to one of his godbrothers, Keshav Maharaj, who had a Martin Mathura, and he talked with him about this. And when he talked with him, Keshav Maharaj said that, yes, this is what you should be doing.
You must take sannyas. You have already given up your life to preaching, but no one can actually preach without taking sannyas. What he meant was that, in the pious culture of India, where many people were known to be pious, the position and the authority for speaking the message of God came when one was given especially to those people who had externally also accepted the renounced order.
He said that your preaching will have much more authority and potency if you are in the renounced order. And Prabhupada felt that the same spiritual master who had spoken to him this in a dream, not once, but twice, was now the same spiritual master, Bhakti Siddhanta Ithakur, was speaking the same message to him, the same instruction, the same call to him through his sannyasi godbrother. Prabhupada remembered how during their first and last interactions, Bhakti Siddhanta had given him the same consistent message that preach the message of Lord Chaitanya, preach the message of Lord Krishna.
So, Prabhupada felt that this was going to be his mission and this would be the renouncing the world and adopting the order of sannyas would enable him to formalize his commitment to his spiritual master’s mission. And thus, in 1959, Keshav Maharaj gave Shri Prabhupada sannyas. So, Abhay Babu, who had been known as an exemplary, tireless, learned devotee, went into the temple for the sannyas ceremony and came out as I C Bhaktivedanta Swami.
Actually, he was given the title of a Swami. Swami is the title associated with sannyasis and not only that they get the title, but beyond that, because he had been so learned in the Bhakti scriptures, Bhakti is devotion, Veda is spiritual knowledge, Vedanta is the end of knowledge. So, Bhaktivedanta was also the title given to him by some of his learned godbrothers.
So, he became I C Bhaktivedanta Swami and this was going to turn out to be a momentous event because with his total devotion to the service of the Lord, now all his energy which had been channeled in different directions would now be concentrated on outreach. And Prabhupada looked back at the example of previous sannyasis in his tradition and he saw that all of them had had worked tirelessly for writing books. So, he decided to write books also and the Bhagavad Gita had been commented by many in India and he felt that a book that had been neglected, relatively speaking, by most writers and a book which he felt could contain urgent spiritual wisdom for benefiting people in the world was the Srimad Bhagavatam.
And Srimad Bhagavatam has thousands and thousands of verses. Traditionally, it is considered to have 18,000 verses. It spans over 12 cantos, 335 chapters and translating it, commenting on it was an awesome task, was a just stupendous task.
But Prabhupada took it up with zeal, with determination. He decided to start writing and he would stay in Vrindavan in a small room and day and night just type, type. He would do his own spiritual sadhana, chant the holy names, go to temples and take darshan and then come back and sit, write, write, write.
And he kept writing, writing. And that time he had planned the Bhagavatam as multiple 50 volumes, practically speaking, of commentary. And he would translate, he would comment and then he would go to Delhi and get the books printed.
And when he got the first volume printed, then with that book, he went and started going to distribute it to others. He even went and gave a copy to the then Prime Minister of India, Lal Bahadur Shastri. And he gave a copy to, he wrote a correspondence with Radhakrishnan, who is himself considered a spiritual author and a spiritual scholar.
And Lal Bahadur Shastri, the Indian Prime Minister, Abhay Babu Om Bhaktivinand Swami, Prabhupada gave personally a copy. He appreciated the work of preserving India’s sacred bhakti traditions, a core literature and making it accessible in contemporary English language. And he recommended that this book should be made available in libraries all over the country.
And Prabhupada, for him, this was one of the strongest endorsements from the head of state of India, both a written endorsement as well as the photo of his meeting Lal Bahadur Shastri. And with this, Prabhupada started giving out his books, personally giving out his books and working with distributors to distribute his books. And he knew that if one book, in a multi-volume book, if a library took one book, it would take other books also.
So, in 1959, he had taken sannyas and he started working tirelessly to write his volumes. So, 1960, so the first Canto, he published at that time in three parts. And 1962, 63, 64, 65, he worked practically each year, he is working in publishing one-one volume.
And as he kept publishing the books, he felt more and more confident that these books would be his resources. They would be, they would give him the intellectual and spiritual power with which he could share the timeless message of the Bhakti tradition with the world. Prabhupada was not just writing books to become celebrated as a prolific author.
Prabhupada actually wanted to use the books as tools for transforming human consciousness. And he saw those books as his resources for launching his mission to the West. What all Prabhupada did to actually go to the West and how he embarked on that historic trip, that we will discuss in our future talks.
Thank you.