​Should we preach about the material benefits of bhakti given in scripture?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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any other questions? ok so sometimes in our preaching also we make promises that you will just chant and you will get this benefit, that benefit well I have not seen Prabhupada ever emphasizing the scriptural promises in his classes even in his conversations or even in his purports if you see usually the falashruti that comes at the end of a chapter Prabhupada does not give any purport to it he just leaves it as it is most of the time if that was what Prabhupada’s emphasis was he could have given an elaborate purport to that so you know as I told you Prabhupada’s in general approach was not to get into technicalities in scripture Prabhupada was focusing on essential principles and he did not want us to go into you know arbitrarily interpreting scripture and saying this is like this, this is like this he wanted us to focus on the essential message of scripture and apply that message in our way so if somebody is excessively emphasizing scriptural promises then I would say that they have to be cautioned now in the scripture itself the promises come now it’s not that all the time the promises come we have to say no no this is not true it is not that we have to say that these are simply poetic exaggerations or this is not actually true, not like that but we have to explain the context actually without the context lot of scripture can be misunderstood the whole Bhagavad Gita itself there is a famous Indian political author he said independent India’s greatest mistake was that India did not follow the Bhagavad Gita independent India’s greatest mistake was that it did not follow the Bhagavad Gita if it had followed the Bhagavad Gita within three days of the creation of Pakistan India would have attacked and conquered Pakistan that would have been following Bhagavad Gita Krishna told Arjuna to fight, we should also have fought so now he is saying Bhagavad Gita had a fight we should also fight the fight in the Bhagavad Gita and the fights today are very different and that fight involves so much peacemaking effort before and so much discussion on Dharma all that was there so the point is that if you don’t explain context there are so many things in scripture that can be misunderstood so it is our responsibility to present scripture and present it in its proper context how it should be applied in today’s situations so we talk about scriptural promises but that should not be our highlight our highlight should be the standard process of bhakti which is to be followed and I would say that is what we normally do we encourage people to not just chant the holy name once, we encourage them to chant regularly we encourage them to chant diligently attentively so we too emphasize the standard process of bhakti does it address your question? we are trained