The Monk’s Podcast 64 with Krishna Abhishek Prabhu – How Bhaktivinoda Thakura’s political positioning maximized his outreach

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Experiences. Welcome back to the Monks podcast. It’s auspicious day of our Bhaktivinoda Thakur today.
So I thought that we could discuss something about him and especially about how he has positioned himself in a way that his outreach becomes effective. So we could discuss about his, how he positioned himself politically with respect to the ruling government at that time, intellectually with respect to the ethos and culturally with respect to the existing culture and religious establishment. And especially what we can learn, what we have done as a movement and what we can do individually while positioning ourselves.
Also, we can draw some lessons from that. Is that okay? Yeah, that’s totally fine. Thank you for having me on your podcast.
I’d like to, sorry, please complete. You’re saying something. I said, I just said that I thank you for having me on your podcast.
Yeah, several devotees appreciated our previous discussion and especially the specific examples of Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s broad-mindedness were something which many had not heard of. I think there’s a lot we could discuss about Bhaktivinoda Thakur in the next, also. So I believe you also wanted to share something about some developments.
Would you like to do it? Just for the Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s place, like to do it now or? Yeah, sure. Sure, I can say it now. Yeah.
I can say it now. So for the last 12 years, I have been regularly in touch with my friends at Birnavar in West Bengal, India, which is Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s birthplace. And they had invited me on several locations to become their trustee.
And this year I accepted it. And they passed a resolution inviting me to start a research center there. And that is something I’m going to dedicate myself to for at least the next four or five years till it flourishes.
That’s my hope. And I wanted to share on this special location, the interactions between Shrila Prabhupada and Prabhupada Lalita Prasad Thakur, who was a brother of… By they, are you referring to the… They who are the trustees of the place, are they the descendants of Lalita Prasad Thakur? Descendants, they are mostly followers of Lalita Prasad Thakur who has maintained that place. But there are also other places like Bhakti Bhavan and his several places that where people know each other and they kind of either directly or indirectly connected with the bloodlines of Bhaktivinoda Thakur.
But also more importantly, actually, the spiritual lines of Bhaktivinoda Thakur. And there were several. Bhaktivinoda Thakur was a great kind of outreach acharya for Gaudiya Vaishnavism.
That’s true. And he started several places where he was… His Namahanta centers and other things were flourishing during his time. And some of his properties in Mayapur was inherited by Bhakti Siddhanta Saraswati Thakur.
And some of his estates in Puri, like Chhuti Mangalpur, went to other people. And Lalita Prasad Thakur was at Birnagar, his birthplace. That was a part of his family estate from his mother’s side, from the Mustafi side.
And in 1972, Prashila Prabhupada from ISKCON went there to meet Lalita Prasad Thakur. And they discussed together to have a research center. Who are they? Called Prashila Prabhupada and Prabhupada Lalita Prasad Thakur.
Okay. Saraswati Thakur’s brother. And Prashila Prabhupada, ISKCON’s Prabhupada Lalita Prasad Thakur was also titled as Prabhupada? Our Prabhupada used to call him Prabhupada.
Oh, okay. So he’s there in the database. Okay, so Prabhupada was not a very rare title, is it? Like Bhakti Siddhanta Saraswati Thakur was called? No, Prabhupada, no, it is not.
Anybody who is the leader of a certain group of Vaishnavas are called Prabhupada by that group of Vaishnavas. Okay. So Bhaktivinoda Thakur was called Prabhupada by his followers and Saraswati Thakur was called Prabhupada by his followers.
And Bhaktivedanta Swami was called Prabhupada by his followers. So anybody who is in a senior position and in the position of a leadership of a community is usually called Prabhupada by the community. It’s like the title professor, right? Professor is a rare title, so to say, in society, but it’s not a rare title in universities.
Similarly, within Vaishnava communities, Rupa Goswami is Prabhupada, Sanatana Goswami is Prabhupada, and Gopal Bhatta Goswami is Prabhupada, Krishna Chakravorty Thakur is Prabhupada. There are communities. So would Gaurav Rishidas Babaji also be called as Prabhupada or generally Babajis are not called Prabhupada? Saraswati Thakur would call him Prabhupada, I’m sure.
Okay. It’s Vaishnava culture. Okay.
Interesting. Okay, good. So you’re talking about the research center, their discussion about that.
Yes, and Srila Prabhupada, when he went to Russia, wrote handwritten letters to Lalita Prasad Thakur addressing him as Prabhupada and addressing his Tata. Tata means Taoji, like a Jatha Moshai in Bangla, or a father’s elder brother. So because Saraswati Thakur and Lalita Prasad Thakur were brothers and they were both very deep devotees, Prabhupada respected him a lot.
And Bhaktivinoda Thakur wrote his autobiography as a 200 page letter addressed to Lalita Prasad Thakur. And it is his particular followers who has had authority over his estates and Tawakrishna Maharaj knew about some family connections I’ve had with Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s family. And he was very interested and he had asked me to pursue the study of Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s works in his personal letters to me.
And so in a way, the news that I shared today is a culmination of almost 20 years of just being there and being there for them and serving Vaishnavas without any need to create projects that might hurt individuals. So it was done in a very, it was done maintaining Vaishnava etiquette and just as the people in Birnabur, sorry, Bangnapura had welcomed Bhaktivinoda Thakur as a part of their family by giving him the title Bhaktivinoda and making him one of the leaders of their community. I have been given that honor and I’m very grateful to the individuals who did it.
Some of my family members are a part of that Lalita Prasad Thakur’s line. My cousin sister, Dana Manjari and my aunt, Bakula Manjari, they’re all part of that dhara, so to say, that tradition. And it’s small, but I think to be able to have access to Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s birthplace and the ability to help transform that as an academic research center would be something not only Bhaktivinoda Thakur wanted, but also other acharyas like Srila Prabhupada and Prabhupada Lalita Prasad Thakur and their followers wanted, somehow it didn’t happen over many years, but finally they came about and said, yes, we want to do a research center and all the trustees unanimously agreed.
So that’s the good news I wanted to share. Wonderful, congratulations, big step forward. Thank you, thank you.
So you’re able to integrate your academic expertise with your traditional devotional lineage or devotional connections. And I think this will be a significant step forward in spreading the legacy of, perpetuating and spreading the legacy of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. All the very best.
Yes, yes, but more importantly, the vision of Srimad Bhagavatam is very, very broad. In fact, when I speak with people, they say that this is a radical book. And Bhaktivinoda Thakur in that sense was a very progressive person.
And, you know, we’re talking about politics of Bhaktivinoda Thakur. And we want to do that research center because my friends and I, who are now associated with it, deeply believe that the message that Bhaktivinoda Thakur tried so desperately to get to Western shores is meant to benefit the entire ecosystem of our planet. It’s not about one country, not one segment of people.
And I hope that one day that this research center becomes as important as the Frankfurt School, for example, that came up with critical theory that was meant to engage scholarship for human emancipation, right? And that was Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s mood, motive and mission as well. And in this regard, some people asked me that he was friends with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the author of the novel Anandamat and the song Vande Mataram. Okay, just a minute before we end.
So where are we going right now? Are you talking about the politics of Bhaktivinoda Thakur? Okay, so the research center, you’re leading that discussion from there to the… Yeah, I think we discussed four points today, his politics, his intellectual contributions, his cultural location and his religious disposition. Yeah. That’s so I’m kind of addressing each point one by one.
So we are discussing the political positioning, the politics. Yes. Okay.
The politics of Bhaktivinoda Thakur. So let me, I will phrase where I’m coming from. Sure, please.
You could take it forward from there. So the Indian history, as studied in the academic books or in the school books also, at least in India, it is seen as a history of independence and struggle for independence. And I don’t think in my history books, I even read the term Bengal Renaissance, Bengal Renaissance as it is called in academic texts.
We did talk about how Bengal was the seat of many of the prominent leaders who pioneered Indian independence and they rejuvenated… that eventually led to the Indian independence. So that is one way of looking at it. But so after that, when I started studying Bhaktivinoda Thakur, of course, the well-known incident is Bhaktivinoda Thakur told Prabhupada that let’s wait for, you know, don’t get involved in the independence struggle, focus on sharing Krishna consciousness.
Now, it seems that this is not just Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s specific introduction to Bhaktivinoda Thakur, but overall even Bhaktivinoda Thakur did not seem to sympathize much or at least didn’t identify with the independence struggle so much. So he was employed in the British government. And there is this famous metaphor which seems to have infuriated some of his or at least agitated some of his other Indian contemporaries where he said that we are like the older brother and they are like the younger brother.
So let the younger brother manage the estate and let the older brother focus on spiritual matters. If both of them have inherited property from their father. So it seems that overall, he was not so much, at least not passionate about bringing about change in the government.
And especially after the 1857 mutiny where it seemed that the British crushed it quite brutally and there was a lot of oppression. But even in his autobiography and in his writings about it, he is quite conspicuously silent about that. He hardly ever speaks anything negative about the British Empire.
And we consider that there were, that I think near Britain, in Bangladesh itself, there was a flourishing handloom industry and it seems that the British completely destroyed it. They went and cut off the thumbs of thousands and thousands of people who had been in the handloom industry. So there was a certain economic toll, apart from a cultural toll, which happened and which agitated Indians quite a bit.
But Bhaktivedanta Thakur kept himself at a distance from it. So, at least initially, the independent struggle was seen as also a spiritual struggle because they felt that when India becomes independent, then we can rejuvenate our culture, we can rejuvenate our spirituality. With political control of somebody else, we can’t do it as much as we want to.
So what was his vision at that? What is your understanding of his vision in positioning himself the way he did? The article that you’re referring to is called British Rajjo O Bhoishno Brindo. It was published in the first volume, first issue of the Sajjana Toshni magazine. And in that article, he says that, by destiny’s arrangement, the British and the Indians are now on same land and the whole idea that we are elders taking your spiritual things and you are youngsters taking your estate is a simplistic way to put it.
I think there’s a lot going on at that time. First of all, you’re right. We all know that he was a deputy magistrate and employed with the British government.
But more than that, what happened is that particular year, a bill was passed called the Ilbert Bill and that allowed Indian judges to preside in courts. And there was ILBERT, if I have this right. But anybody can Google it up and there’s a ton of information online.
Now, the major point of contention at that era in history is that whether brown-skinned people… Sorry to interrupt you. Which year are we talking about roughly? 1885. The major issue at that particular moment in history was racism, surprisingly.
And the proposition that people of brown color do not have the moral fiber to be able to judge criminals of white skin. So if an Indian judge or a deputy magistrate gets somebody in his court who has been accused of a crime and this person happens to be white, then Indians don’t have a right to judge them. That was the problem.
And that article is written at the cusp of that political upheaval in India. And in that article, he not only addresses that political concern, but a much wider issue at stake. That is whether European systems of politics will actually work in India.
And that is where history and politics kind of emerge for Bhaktivinod Thakur. And in 1869 or 1870, in his Krishna Samhita, 15 years earlier, he discussed Indian history from a Vaishnav perspective in the Upokramanika, the introduction to Krishna Samhita. Okay, just to interrupt.
And he does the very… Yes, please. So did Bhaktivinod Thakur ever judge the British or he was not authorized to do that? I mean, you know, I’m pretty sure he would have British criminals in his court. There weren’t too many.
The population, the British population wasn’t that high, but there were people who would come in as soldiers and would get involved in petty crime and would be taken to a magistrate for judgment according to British law. And Bhaktivinod Thakur was a magistrate. Now, I haven’t looked into all of his judgments.
Yeah, no, but you said that whether Indians had the moral caliber to judge British, that was a question. Brown skin could judge… Yeah, that was the point of contention. The British, white British, a segment of the British white people said no.
And then the government said, well, what’s the problem? If they are educated, why can’t we have Indians be a part of running that country? The government in essence was more non-racist than the general cultural mood of the people. The government went back and forth. Government, the thing is, in a democratic system, whatever the popular sentiment is, is eventually going to find its way to power.
There was no democracy there at that time. I mean, Britain had democracy. And India was a British colony.
Now, they did say that Indians are not mature enough to decide how to govern themselves. But that’s another question for another time. That’s fine.
About 1885. And so, John Stuart Mill, who was a British historian, wrote a British history of India or something like that, where he says, India is a very interesting part of British history. And… India is a very? Interesting part of British history.
Okay. And Bhaktivinoda Thakur takes that and turns it around and says, well, actually, England is an interesting part of Indian history. And he, in his Krishna Samhita, he gave a breakdown of the various how, you know, some of it is based on the Bhagavad, some of it is based on Oriental scholarship.
He tries to find a little ground. But more than that, I think what he’s trying to say there, in that article, is his response to the German philosopher Hegel, who came up with theories of… Yeah, like a progressive vision. Yes.
So Hegel had a theory of something called Weltgeist. Weltgeist is the world coast or the world spirit. Yeah.
That you could say that, you know, there is some connection between that and say, for example, the oversoul of the Boston Transcendentalists, who are also very popular in Calcutta and Bhaktivinoda Thakur was also in their books. But Hegel had this idea that civilizations grow like human beings and then they die out. And for him, the ancient civilizations like Egypt, India or China, that still continue their old traditions, were stuck in infancy because they continued their old traditions.
Whereas a civilization, a European civilization in particular, actually made progress. Right. And when he saw Napoleon, he said, I see the world spirit on a horseback.
Right. Hegel was German, Napoleon was French. But still he appreciated… Yeah.
Yes. But this person was influencing the politics of his time so much that Hegel said, I see history on a horseback or I see the Weltgeist on a horseback. Now, the telos… We are sort of overlapping intellectual and political, isn’t it right now? Because we can’t have that… Yes.
I’m going to talk about Bhadraloks when we discuss intellectual stuff, but I’m just talking about the politics of the situation. Now, Hegel was very clear in his theories where he said no state, no history. So unless you have a political state, you cannot write history.
And if you did not have a political state, it’s called prehistorical. And that’s one way of saying that, well, these people are not civilized enough to be writing their own history. And they also, by the time the British people came, they were also studying all of the Puranas and making fun of them because they came with the lenses of biblical miracles, right? Walking on water and talking about miracles.
We have too many. Biblical miracles are nothing compared to the descriptions of various kinds. I’ve got somebody drinking up a whole ocean or a river of water and then getting it out, flying mountains, talking monkeys.
You don’t get that in the Bible. So there was this question of civilizational difference because starting with 1757, at the Battle of Pulasi, 1757, around that time, 1757, I’m correct. The Battle of Pulasi, that’s when the Mughal government began to weaken.
The Bengals were already under the Sultans for a long time. And by 1857, 100 years later, with Mangal Pandey and what the British called Sepoy Mutiny and we call the First War of Independence, the rebellion, so to say. You know, the fate of the British Empire in India was sealed.
But along with came the question of moral authority. Do you have the moral right to be here? And in the United States, for example, they drew pictures of a woman walking westward and they said that this is, you know, what destiny is it called? It’s like, I forget the exact term, but it’s God ordained. That God wanted us to be here in America and therefore we can take all this land now and turn everybody to Christians.
The thing is, Native Americans did not have exposure to foreign diseases for a long time. And that’s why beyond the genocide that happened in the Americas, a lot of them also died by disease. Indians, on the other hand, have had foreigners coming for a long time.
Sub-Asian people, who we kind of colloquially call Desis today. And Pakistanis are called Desis and Bangladeshis are called Desis and Indians are called Desis and Nepali people are called Desis and Sri Lankans are called Desis. Now the term Hindu before the colonial period was like the term Desi.
Because Hinduism referred to a culture, whereas Vaishnavism would refer to a religion or even a spiritual practice. And this is something even scholars today, like Gavin Flood, who is the academic director at Oxford in some of his studies and a faculty of theology, still say that, let me just finish the sentence, still say that Hinduism is, you know, Hinduism as a religion gets reified during these times in the 18th, 19th centuries. So Bhaktivinoda Thakur is at the cusp of the formation of Hinduism, where Hindus themselves are divided.
There are progressive Hindus, like the Brahmos, and there are conservative Hindus, like the Smarthas of Bengal. And in terms of the politics of what’s happening, what Bhaktivinoda Thakur does is he tries to fit in to the middle of these conversations going on. And says that, you know, it’s not about us versus them.
We are on the same planet and we’ve got to share these resources. And in that particular article, he’s very clear that if anybody is unethical and if they are cruel, then we should not take it down, you know, like lame ducks. And so the politics of Bhaktivinoda Thakur is not appeasement of the British, but picking a bigger battle than what his colleagues like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee already picked up during his time.
Okay. So if you give the overall picture to, the British felt that they had the moral authority because they consider themselves to be a superior race. And… Yes, civilization will be superior.
Civilization is superior. And Bhaktivinoda Thakur, the bigger battle he wanted to focus on was reifying the Vaishnava identity and presenting it to the world. And so was he not that when he said, if there is immorality, if the government is not good.
So was the British plunder of India not evident at that time so much? Or… It wasn’t. The nationalist movement that we know, I mean, I think we should be very careful about collapsing history. Right? So 1857, Bhaktivinoda Thakur is with Kashi Prasad Ghosh when the rebellion happens.
He is a writer for the newspaper called the Hindu Intelligence Year. I haven’t been able to procure those newspapers. I’ve seen two articles written by him.
One about women’s education and why women should be educated and be a part of mainstream public life in society. Right? And he was a regular columnist and I haven’t seen that stuff. But so I am not in a position to comment on his particular take on the 1857 rebellion.
But I do know that… By Bhaktivinoda Thakur? Yes. Okay. But he was a coterie of… He was a part of a coterie of people who were invested in progressive thought in various different ways.
Out of all of that, by 1905, when Bengal was divided based on religion, that’s when the national movement reached its height. So in the time where Bhaktivinoda Thakur is writing this stuff, the national movement isn’t as mature as it was at the time of 1905. By this time, he’s already retired and he’s gotten into his bhajan and he’s disinterested in worldly politics.
But he encourages his children to look at what’s going on and write about them and speak about them. And so it’s not that he’s totally divorced. He retired in 1895 or 1896, I think.
1896, okay. So it’s not that he’s disinterested in politics. It’s just that he feels, I understand, through his writings, he has said enough where other people can take up and do the things that he was doing.
Okay, right. And in terms of… I just want to make one minor point about reifying the Vaishnava identity. I would think that the project was quite different.
It’s not about reifying the Vaishnava identity, but on earning a universal Vaishnavism within what was the Vaishnava identity at that time. Okay. And so there were already many, many Vaishnavas, but he’s picking up the universalist elements so that he can talk to people, like-minded people from other cultures and what Bhaktivinoda Thakur was doing, I think is anticipating intercultural communication that people from various different cultures who are barely able to engage with each other focus on how they can translate cultural concepts from one culture to another.
And he says that in our Hindu culture or in our culture, Vaishnava culture, we look at various alambanas, the objects that create uddhipana, the exciting feelings in rasa, such as, you know, Gopu, Gopi, Vrindavan, Tamil tree, Tulsi tree, and so on and so forth. He says future Saradrahis will be able to understand Krishna Bhakti very deeply and be able to culturally translate these things so that other people can understand what Mahavirbhu’s gift is. And Mahavirbhu’s gift is to explain to the world what is rasa.
Just a minute. So it wasn’t about reifying Vaishnava identity. Just want to make that point.
Yeah, I agree. I got that point. So now when you’re talking about a bigger, fighting a bigger battle, so when I was talking about the politics, I was trying to understand his positioning.
Was it a matter of, you could say a spiritual or a transcendental principle or was it more a matter of practical strategy? So when we talk about at one level, he was working with the government. And as you said also that the independence movement also had not become very active. I think it was, I think it was 1905, I think there was a Rowlatt Act or something like that.
Or after the First World War, it became really strong where they felt betrayed that we were not benefited. That is First World War is 1916. You know, by that time, other people are active, not him.
Yeah, 1905 something happened. 1905 the Bengal partition happened. Yeah, right.
So Bengal partition, not the Indian partition. Right, of course. Yeah.
So at one level, the movement itself had not evolved that much. So when he’s choosing to position himself, say not criticize the British too much, then the idea is that, is it that that is not so relevant for us right now? Like you said, establish better cultural connectivity. So was it more a matter of that we, that Krishna consciousness or transcendental that we don’t have to get involved with politics or that is also one area of involvement, but that’s not what is most important for us.
That’s not what is relevant for us. Because the point is that Bhaktivinoda Thakur doesn’t seem to be too transcendental or otherworldly to me in the way he engages with intellectuals of his times. So that’s why I’m trying to understand how engaged, because he was significantly engaged and then to be to be aloof from the political movement of the world, movement of the times, even if it was nascent.
So what was the rationale for that as far as you understand it? Yeah, the, you know, one can, if I were to use his commentaries to answer that question, you know, the extent of one’s ego can go, you know, kind of expand all the way to a nation state and so on and so forth, right? And so those whose egos are our identity, not ego, identity is a better word. Identity is hinged to the body, psychologically speaking, are people who have bodily suffering. Now bodily suffering will continue because pain is inevitable, but suffering is an option, right? And in that sense, the less we kind of psychologically tune ourselves, realizing that we’re not just this body, then it’s easier to deal with bodily suffering.
Similarly, when somebody in our family is suffering or somebody scratches our car or something happens to our city, we still get affected. And that’s because our identity is, we identify with a community. Now scholars say that a nation is an imagined community and Bhaktivinoda Thakur, and this is quite recent, but Bhaktivinoda Thakur as a member of the British government, I think was sharp enough to understand that these borders that these people are creating are artificial.
And the Srimad Bhagavatam talks about a situation in the 10th canto, first chapter, verse 17, when the world is divided up by, as Thakur would put it, by narrow domestic walls. And people, unscrupulous people, dressed up or pretending to be kind of caring rulers would take advantage of innocent people. Right? And so he saw, I think, that the British were in India for trade, but they were also exploiting the labor and the resources of the country.
But instead of trying to address the symptoms of the disease that many of his other colleagues like Banki Chandra was doing, he addressed what he thought was intellectually the root cause of the disease. And the root cause of the disease is to realize or to not realize that Mother Earth is most important. And Father Dharma, when protected, nourishes Mother Earth.
This is in Bhagavat. So his vision was planetary. His vision was not located in India.
While others who were engaged in the national movement were thinking only about their motherland, Bhaktivinoda Thakur, after reading the Bhagavatam and reading Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s life, realized that what is at stake is the future of the planet. And this is not the first time this is happening. Right? At least that’s what the Bhagavata says.
And so instead of fighting with the British, he addressed the very ideology that brought the British to India to exploit Indians. And he used the Srimad Bhagavatam. When you said this is not the first time this is happening, what are you referring to? Invaders coming to India and taking over? I’m referring to both.
I’m referring to both the incidents mentioned or the stories mentioned or the legends mentioned in the Srimad Bhagavatam as well as the history of India after that. Right? So what was at stake? So when, say for example, we are fighting for our nation and at that time, the population was less than 300,000,000. Sorry, 1.4 billion.
It was about 300 million. 300 million. 330 something like that.
I don’t remember the census details. from those years. So if Bhaktivinoda Thakur was here and listening to our conversation, he would tell us, I think, that why are you only concerned about just this segment of the world’s population, why not everybody, including animals and plants? Because the British are here and they are doing things, right? But if they leave and we do the same things, what’s the point of a nationalist movement? The root cause of this is exploitation and suffering.
And that comes from a lack of spiritual education. So let’s start there. And this spiritual education needs to reach every corner of the world.
And that is why he was writing letters to Emerson and Monier Williams and everybody, these top intellectuals, because he knew that ideas have a life of their own and they trickle down and enter mainstream society. And if the leaders and thinkers of society accept what we are saying, then they realize that Krishna Bhakti is not a religion, but rather a science. It is the science of rasa, so to say, right? And Krishna is Akhila Rasamrita Murthy.
And once we understand that, then Krishna is no longer a Hindu God, by the way. And Bhaktivinoda Thakur also makes it very clear that Hinduism is my culture, Vaishnavism is my religion. He means that distinction.
Interesting. So just to contextualize what you are saying that in a sense, there is a consistency between say what Bhaktivinoda Thakur told Prabhupada about the urgency of sharing Krishna consciousness as compared with the struggle for political independence. So it is more or less the same strand of thought that goes back to Bhaktivinoda Thakur also.
It starts with him. And that’s why he’s called the pioneer of the worldwide Krishna consciousness movement. Or as I put it, the worldwide Bhakti movement or global Bhakti movement.
That’s true. Now, the pioneer of the Bhakti movement, Prabhupada also calls him that. At the same time, the idea of how to engage with the world.
So is political aloofness in general a characteristic of Gaudiya Vaishnavism? Because we also see that, say, Rupa and Sanatana Goswami were in influential positions in Nawab Hussain Shah’s ministry. But Chaitanya Mahaprabhu told him to renounce the world and then they went to Vrindavan. And Pratap Rudra, he was also a king.
And then he mostly used his royal resources for helping Lord Chaitanya. But it was not that Lord Chaitanya made him into a very prominent associate. He was an important person.
But Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was significantly reluctant to even meet him. Initially. But eventually also, was he routinely meeting him? Yes, on and off.
But you finish your question. I want to address the point about being politically aloof. So how much of like political engagement is it? In some ways, Gaudiya Vaishnavism grew on a certain infrastructure.
Like you said, Hinduism is my dharma, Hinduism is my culture and Vaishnavism is my religion. Is that, you said that’s not inherently a characteristic of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. But then how do you… Not in my understanding.
So then how do you contextualize or explain these examples? Gaudiya Vaishnavas have always been at the forefront of progressive political movements since the time of Lord Chaitanya. And if you think about it this way, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was a professor of logic and grammar, a well-known one in Navadvip. And it was at his time when the people had captured a lot of places in Bengal and were the kind of lawmakers and the justice system, the jury judge and executioner, as we call it.
And he had run into the government. In fact, the Sankirtan movement was a political movement. Otherwise, why would he go to the Sankirtan? And Gaudiya Vaishnavism has always spread with royal patronage.
How are we defining political movement? I would say it was a cultural movement. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu never… Political movement would mean that he would want to take a political seat of power. He didn’t try to change the government.
He didn’t really… They got a change in the governmental policy that was that, okay, he will not… Chand Kasi will not stop the Kirtan. That is policy, isn’t it? I mean, policy is politics. But the purpose of politics is to change policy.
Okay. I was thinking of political change in terms of occupying political positions. No, one doesn’t need to occupy political positions.
And also, just to finish the older train of thoughts, even Rupan Sanatana Goswami, Mahaprabhu put them in Vrindavan very, very strategically, because they had experience with the political establishment of the Turkish. I have heard about that. Yeah.
You know, I mean, to have the ex-finance minister and the chief minister, or prime minister, whatever you want to call it in English terms, stay closest to the seat of power, Dalit and Vrindavan are next to each other. To have them at the seat of power to deal with the government was the whole purpose of having them there, to maintain Radha-Kunda, Shyama-Kunda that Mahaprabhu… I mean, Mahaprabhu just jumped into a rice paddy and said, this is Radha-Kunda. So, it’s on the bhava of Mahaprabhu that we accept Radha-Kunda to be a sacred kirtan, right? And it was not till the generation of Jiva Goswami, where the Turkish had left and the Mughals had come in, that the farmans were composed to make sure that these particular individuals in Vrindavan, the Goswamis, were the main authorities when it came to maintaining the infrastructure of Vrindavan, right? And money was flowing in and pilgrims were flowing in, and Mahaprabhu never left, or none of the Goswamis ever left like a formal institution, but the temples were institutions, so to say, right? But the very fact that these temples are made of sandstone, that red-colored sandstone, speaks volumes about, say, political involvement with the government.
Temples that are made with a particular kind of stone and that are a particular color are temples that have been authorized by the government. Really? Okay. Yeah.
And, you know, the Vrindavan temples, like Madan Mohan temple, before Aurangazeb, it was much bigger. In their generation, having something like that means that we are with the government. It’s just the architecture of the temples itself, right? And if you look at Kusum Sarovar, which is much later, even that has Mughal architecture.
I mean, a lot of Vrindavan has Mughal architecture, right? And it was only certain Mughal kings who, you know, who felt politically threatened, so to say, by temples that were rising to power. And those are the temples they targeted and they looted and destroyed or whatever. But it wasn’t necessarily about temple desecration all the time, right? Because there were thousands of temples and not everything was desecrated.
But the ones that were, the question is, is it government authorized, right? Today, you know, a secular government can go and demolish a Shiva temple if somebody builds it in the middle of a highway, right? Now, it wouldn’t necessarily become a fight between secularism and religion. We don’t even present that debate in such a way. And we must understand that politics does not necessarily mean sitting in power, but actually knowing the people who are in power so that the policies that is beneficial for everybody becomes mainstream or becomes a part of the, in his time, the royal order.
In our time, you know, we have Niti Aayog and so on and so forth. Okay, right. Now, you know, I think this temples is a big subject and we could discuss it separately also.
I appreciate that not all temples were vandalized or plundered because of religious reasons. But clearly, there are many temples where the temples were replaced by mosques. And there are temples where the DTs were made into, put into the tiles that made the footsteps of the mosques.
Under the stairs, yeah. That is true. So that’s also there.
So, I appreciate that Bhaktirodh Thakur, sorry, that Rupa Goswami, Sanatana Goswami, they were engaged over there. And we could say Chaitanya Mahaprabhu considered that their being in Vrindavan could be a more important contribution than their being in official position in Bengal, which is fine. Your basic point is that it is not that we are politically aloof, but then we strategically choose how to be politically engaged.
So, is there any example of say the way Bhaktirodh Thakur positioned himself that helped him to say either change government policy or shape government policy or that helped him to maximize his spiritual outreach? Yes. You know, first of all, when a deputy magistrate goes on the streets to dance in during his weekends or holidays, you know, it creates a certain furor. And he was very well aware of that.
And he used his position. I think he did the most subtle thing one could do. He resigned from his government position, dressed up like a beggar and went from door to door begging for the Yoga Peeth temple that he was constructing in Mayapur.
For a person who is honorable. Yeah, I remember reading. For a British deputy magistrate to become a Vaishnav beggar is a huge statement, I think.
Yes, of course. I remember reading the newspaper at that time. Was it the main… And by the way, I think the personal is political.
I think the personal is political and the political personal. And that’s what Bhaktirodh Thakur was doing. Okay.
Okay. Yes. Now, this is… I think the Amrit Bazaar Patrika also reported about his going, as you said, on the streets and asking for some contribution for the temple.
So that was quite radical and significant. Now, before that, how rare was his position? Say when he became the district magistrate. Any idea how many Indians were there in the position of district magistrate at that time? Not many.
Not many. And the ones who were were extremely influential. So not many means like a few dozen or a few hundred? I don’t know the exact number.
I don’t know. I cannot tell you the exact number. I have to look it up.
I cannot give a number off my head. I’m not sure. But, you know, getting into that position was very difficult.
And only he mentioned in his autobiography how many times he failed. And he just kept at it. And then it happened.
So the one thing is… At that point of time, it was also a question of… Sorry, go ahead. At that time, it was a position of? It was also a question of trust. Who could the British officers in India trust among Indians? Hmm.
Right. And Bhaktivinod Thakur was known as somebody who had a lot of integrity. And in his autobiography, he says that, you know, I tried selling sugar at the big market in Calcutta.
It didn’t work because I saw businessmen don’t have integrity there. And so that was a good quality that the authorities had noticed. And on all the letters that he presents in his autobiography, which, by the way, Mandala Publishing is printing, and another scholar, Shantanu Dey, and I finished working on it together.
And we’re just working on the footnotes and stuff. So maybe, I don’t know, maybe next year or year after. What his letters? The biography of Bhaktivinod Thakur.
He presents the letters he had received from various British officers. Your video has gone. Oh, is it? It’s come back now.
It’s come back. Usually it is that my internet is the problem. But the first time it seems your internet is the problem because mine is very, very clear and straight.
No, I had a phone. Somebody is suddenly trying to call me in the middle of it. That’s why I think the video went out for a second.
Oh, okay, fine. Sorry, can you remind me what you’re talking about? We were talking about Bhaktivinod Thakur using his position to influence his time politically, in shaping policies or optimizing his outreach, the way he positioned himself. So one example you gave was of his just being in his post.
So I was talking about two distinct things. So one is after he resigned, that itself is sensational. And while he was in that position also, just being in his position and then talking about Krishna Bhakti, that would also have its influence.
Yes, and Jason Fuller wrote a good dissertation on that. On how Bhaktivinod Thakur influenced? How Bhaktivinod Thakur’s social position impacted his preaching work, or preaching work isn’t the right term. You know, his activities, his organizational activities in Bihar, Bengal and Orissa.
Okay, that’s fascinating. So overall, were there any, say, overt or manifest influences? Because he was in that position, so he could travel more freely, or he could encourage people and people took him seriously. So that part, he couldn’t travel freely, he was stuck to wherever he was posted.
And sometimes he would plead again and again, please send me to Krishnanagar, please send me to Krishnanagar. Because that’s also where I think his spiritual life or his existential life and his career intersected. Intersected means pulled into connection.
No, came together, came together and met. Because initially he was thinking, I’ve done enough government service, I’ve earned enough, let me go to Bengal and retire. And then he had a dream that there is so much to be done in Mahatma’s area.
You know, you focus on Bengal, do in Bengal what the Goswamis did in Bengal. So what the Goswamis did in Bengal for Krishna, you do in Bengal for Mahatma Gopinath. And that is when he decided not to go.
And that was when he had this mystic vision about Balaldighi. And it was also a time, and if I may kind of slide into the point about culture. Yeah, please.
There was also a time where various segments of Bengali and Indian culture were suddenly taking interest in Lord Chaitanya, right? And there were the Vaishnavas who had maintained the traditions for hundreds of years in their family. And the good thing was tradition was thus maintained. But the not so good thing was these people thought of their job as their hereditary birthright.
And Bhaktivinoda Thakur did not fight against that. That was not a battle he picked. But Saraswati Thakur picked it on his behalf.
The Krishna Bhakti is not something that can be limited to a small group of people who claim, you know, authority over it. But it is an exact science. And I don’t mean it in the sense of an empirical science or a positivist science, which is mostly mechanistic, but rather a subjective science of emotions that was replicable anywhere on planet Earth.
And that is the characteristic of what I mean by science. It is, you know, you have a hypothesis and then you do an experiment, you come up with the results. And when you can repeat the experiments at many places and the results are still the same, then you can say that it was a scientific experiment.
So there is some scholarship. Some scholars have written about subjective science. And subjective science is, I would call it the theory of Rasa, is a subjective science from ancient and early modern India.
And in the cultural landscape of Bhaktivinoda Thakur, people had limited it within certain circles, thinking that these are not for everybody. And in some cases they were right. But in many cases, Bhaktivinoda Thakur disagreed.
And therefore, he made it a more egalitarian thing, saying that egalitarianism is in keeping with the mood of Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. So there were several people. One were the Bhadralokas of Bengal, the Babus, so to say, who could speak English.
So when you said egalitarianism is in keeping with Lord Chaitanya’s spirit of outreach. Let me turn on the word spirit even more. Yeah, of course, definitely.
So that was very important. So now when we talk about the culture at that time, so in one sense, there was the traditional, like the Smartha Brahmanas, you also mentioned they were conservative at that time, but they were not really the shapers of the cultural renaissance that was happening. So from what I know, well, they were.
They were. They were always a major cultural force from the time of Ram Mohan. And whether it was, you know, widow remarriage act, no matter what, like whatever the Brahmas did, the Smarthas were opposite.
And so Bhaktivinoda Thakur had to deal with the Brahmas in his early life, the Christians in his early life. Then the Bhadralokas in Bengal, right, who are Western educated skeptics, so to say. And then the Smarthas.
And then the various groups of people who claimed Vaishnava identity, but had no clue about what they were doing. And, you know, and these were the Otiparis and Karta Bhaja groups like that. And Bhaktivinoda Thakur also respected them.
Like he had, he writes in his autobiography that he was cured by a Karta Bhaja Vaishnava guru when he was very young. Karta Bhaja is what a lot of English translators called deviant sects. One of the deviant sects.
But deviant from Vaishnava, deviant from Hinduism or deviant from what? Deviant from Goswami literature. OK, so he was, but they were vaidyas, they were medical, they cured him. They cured him when he was very young and they gave him a mantra.
That was his first initiation, so to say. And he respected them. And then it was when in Puri, he met his first shiksha guru, so to say, who had initially protested saying, why are you gathering without being an authorized Vaishnava? Because some people would gather at the Mukti Mandap right outside the main entrance of Jahannad’s gate.
And they were discussing mostly kind of Smartha philosophy. And Bhaktivinoda Thakur used to meet up with his group of people on the other side, on the, where is that? That’s the northern, near the northern gate where Mahaprabhu’s footprints are there. And then the Vaishnavas took exception and said, you know, why are you doing this? And that’s when he realized that he has to be initiated to be a part of community.
This is the initiation. This is in Jahannad Puri. I forget the name of the Babaji right now.
And then much later, he took initiation from Bipin Bihari Goswami. And in their tradition, in the tradition that Bhaktivinoda Thakur received, there are about 15 Gayathris. And Saraswati Thakur didn’t accept the whole thing.
Saraswati Thakur only accepted the segment of the Gayathris that were related to the renunciates of the tradition. And what Saraswati Thakur tried doing, and this was on the instructions of Bhaktivinoda Thakur, was to create a monastic order within Gaudiya Vaishnavism, which was not there at that point. That is a very interesting subject.
We can also maybe have a separate discussion in the future about how Bhaktivinoda Thakur carried on the legacy of Bhaktivinoda Thakur. That’s a very important aspect. Many people carried on the legacy, but he was the one who carried on the legacy in terms of monastics.
Okay, that’s true. So just to elaborate on this point, when he felt the need for us to be a part of the community, you see, at one level, we are analyzing these as consciously thought strategic decisions. Now, in the way within the tradition, we see our teachers, say, for example, if you read Prabhupada’s Leelamrit, it is, we talk about what Prabhupada did, and we don’t say, okay, he just dealt with the situation this way, dealt with the situation that way.
But we don’t really see this kind of analysis that, okay, that Prabhupada, okay, these were the sociocultural forces at that time, and Prabhupada was responding to them, and Prabhupada was taking a particular position. So this question has two parts. First is that, is this approach of analyzing the sociocultural or sociopolitical factors to understand how a Vaishnava is approached? Is this a part of the Vaishnava tradition itself? Because I see academic scholars do it.
But we don’t see this in the hagiographies of Prabhupada, generally speaking. Now, to some extent, It may not be, I mean, there are, Yogeshwar Prabhu’s book, for example, Swami in a Strange Land, does that. And there are other older books.
I think Bhaktivikas Narayan’s book also, Bhaktisanth Vaibhav does that to some extent. Yeah. But other books, they don’t do it in the same language and the same modes that we do today.
The genre has changed. But even books like, Chaitanya Charitamrita has Bhatkhans going around and, Mahabharata says, don’t bother my friends. I just have epilepsy.
Remember, during one of his travels, he met these soldiers, Turkish soldiers. Okay, so you’re saying, How are you related? The very presence of the incidents that are happening in relation to these people shows that there are all these other characters. I think that the books that we have need to be meditated on rather than just read.
That’s true. In those times, they didn’t have videos. Otherwise, you know, 500 years from now, they’re going to have videos of people like us talking to each other.
And they’re going to have some other technology, which we don’t even have an idea about. Right? But we are leaving behind our digital footprint and we are trying our best to leave a message for our future generations that is going to help them, you know, literally save the planet. If you look at the Srimad Bhagavatam, it starts with the planet is in distress and it ends with Bhumi Gita.
And if you look at the Mahabharata, Krishna says very, very clearly that my first commitment is for the well-being of Dharma and this planet. Right? And so even politically speaking, to go back to the first point, I’ll just make a very small two minute spiel here. The politics of the Bhagavat, if you really talk about it, is basically ethical politics.
It’s not about winning elections or being in a position of power. It’s the politics of practicing satya, socha, tapa and daya. Right? That means no matter what, we don’t want to compromise with our integrity.
We want to be clean in our dealings and in our hygiene and all of that. We need to practice restraint and put in effort, that’s tapa. But most importantly, to be kind and compassionate, to be non-violent is daya.
The practice of satya, socha, tapa, daya is the politics of Shri Krishna himself. And if you look at the Bhagavatam, you will see that even when the Yadu dynasty is, you know, his own children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are killing each other, his response to that is, these people have become unethical. Why would they try to cheat a saintly person? Right? And so to be aware of the ethics of bhakti is paramount.
And Bhaktivinoda Thakur used to say all the time, aage manushya tapar bhooshna bhaal. You first become a human being, then you can think of becoming a Vaishnava. And becoming a human being means following these four ethical values.
Can you repeat that? aage vaishnav, aage manushya aage manushyav aage, first become a human being manushyav first grow up aage manushyav taare taare, taare vaishnava pehle chahiye insaan banao, baadme vaishnav banao gaye Yeah, I think something similar to first become conscious, then become Krishna conscious. Yeah, something like that we can develop humane qualities, then we can develop spiritual qualities. Yeah.
And what Prabhupada translated as the four regulatory principles are these four principles of dharma. Yeah. Right.
And in our tradition, there are vidhis and nishedhas. And I think we spoke about it before. This is a good point.
Positive principles. No, that’s fine. I think this is, you know, and the politics that, yeah, this one, it’s a, it’s a good point that the politics of ethics, I think a major difference.
If we go toward the past, the times of the Bhagavatam is that main central characters, there are Kshatriyas. And in that sense, they get directly involved in the ruling of the kingdom. So whereas, in the recent times, the main characters who are, who are spreading dharma or who about whom we hear, they are most brahmanas, sanyasis, the kings are there.
If you see the center, if you look at the whole bhakti literature or right from the time of Shankaracharya onwards, central religious figures are either renunciates or Brahminical teachers or a combination of both. But if you look back at the time of the epics, the renunciates are significant religious figures, but the epics are written about the central figures in them are kings. So in that sense, there is a greater intersection of say politics and spirituality centered, as you said, on ethics.
In the epics, it is in the recent Indian tradition. So it also depends on the societal role which a particular person is playing, how much they get involved. So when I asked that question about, about analyzing a particular Acharya’s actions in terms of their social contexts.
So the question I was, I was asking this is in today’s, today’s world, there is an increasing trend, at least in India, that I see in the Indian community, devotee community. Also some devotees feel that we as a movement are too transcendental. That means, that means, you know, that maybe there are Christians who are aggressively converting, or there are leftist scholars who are aggressively misrepresenting, or just there is, there is increasing materialism because of westernization.
Now we could go into the specifics of each of these factors. But the idea is that for people to come up to the level of practicing Krishna Bhakti, as is presented in ISKCON, the number of people who are going to come up to that is, is not going to be very high. And that’s why we need to network with other organizations or other groups to protect Dharma.
Now, Dharma can, as you said, it can mean the four, the four principal values of Dharma, at least, for example, protect cows, protect deities, protect something like that. It can also mean countering conversion. It can also mean protecting national integrity.
But at least to some extent, there is, India is the land of Dharma. So the idea is that how much, so although our acharyas have taken positions which are significantly, we could say transcendental, focusing on transcendental, but the way you analyze it, that it was, it is not transcendental because the political is insignificant. But rather they took a position, they were choosing a battle by which they could influence the temporal in the most effective way.
That is correct. So, if devotees today feel inspired to engage, say with national, with those who are nationalist activists, those who are say, wanting to anti-conversion activists, or those who want to protect or counter misrepresentations of Dharma in the culture, say our sacred icons are sometimes misrepresented or maligned. So those, these are not directly devotional activities.
So, but those who want to do this, how much would this kind of, this kind of activism be in continuation of our tradition, or would it be something which is divergent from what has been done in our tradition? First address your point about kings becoming exemplars. We also have to see the various patronage systems, as well as ground root, like grassroots level composition of literature. And we have both courtly literature, as well as proletariat literature within Vaishnavism, among Vaishnavists.
And what was, and in terms of political involvement, you know, I mean, the idea is very simple. It is better to do one’s own Dharma imperfectly than to do somebody else’s Dharma perfectly. Right.
And political engagement, you know, in my understanding, will create more problems if they are not done from the platform where one has developed the right insight and the required amount of compassion. And do you know about the Cobra Effect? This is one of the ideas that keeps floating around. It first appeared, I think, in the Freakonomics blog.
Are you aware of that, the Cobra Effect? I can tell you briefly. So it is said, and nobody knows if it’s historically true or not, that during the British period, Delhi had an infestation of cobras. And the government came up with a plan saying that if you bring dead cobras, we will give you some money.
And the number of cobras that began pouring in were way more than what they had estimated. And then they started investigating and figured out that the farmers outside of Delhi now had cobra breeding farms and people would go and buy cobras and sell them to the government, just to make some money. And the government figured it out and said, all right, we’re going to stop.
No more money for cobra. And the farmers thought, OK, it’s not profitable anymore. So they let the cobras go.
And before you knew it, there were way more cobras around Delhi than they had started with. Now, I’m saying that to point to the teachings of Prahlad in the seventh canto of the Srimad Bhagavatam, where he says that when you try to create solutions in this world, often it ends up creating bigger problems. And to engage in politics without… Sorry? And so to engage in politics without first thinking through, without the training, is going to create more problems.
And I had a conversation with Gurudapur sometime back, 2016. And he says, when you have somebody in charge of a university, a president of a university, how much experience does that person need? How many times is that person vetted? Right? Why is it that somebody who wants to win a popularity contest gets to do that and take charge of our lives without the qualifications? Right. And it’s a good point.
It’s a good point. The critique of populism. Now we go into the discussions about how politics are engaged in today’s world.
And then maybe democracy is the best among all bad bargains. It’s not about democracy. It’s about, because democracy is not a monolithic thing.
There are various forms of democracy. American democracy looks very different from British democracy, which is very different from Indian democracy. There are many democracies, right? But my point is very simple, that if we engage in any form of politics without cultivating the insight and the compassion to be able to deal with problems that impact people’s lives and create suffering, then we will not have empathy and we will create solutions that will create bigger problems.
And so Prabhupada started the Srimad Bhagavatam with the preface, we must understand the present need of human society. We are no longer bound by small walls anymore, right? We have made rapid progress in the areas of education, economy and so on and so forth, but we have a pinprick somewhere, right? And Srimad Bhagavatam is going to address that pinprick. That’s Prabhupada’s politics.
I agree with you about this point. That is definitely true that if we get a position of influence, and if we are both, you know, there has to be some spiritual caliber, and also there has to be material competence. If either of them is lacking, there can be a lot of problems that can result from it.
So no doubt about that. That’s right. That’s true.
At the same time, do we so that this but this fact applies in every area of life. If somebody becomes a doctor, absolutely, they’re not competent or compassionate. Absolutely.
There is no need. And that answers your question. So there is no need to say, to put politics in a category different from everything else.
To engage with the world, exactly, you need competence. And we need you could say compassion, both are you going to call it character which can include compassion. So that means unless we have both, if we not just character and compassion, but also insight, insight, intelligence, you can have a, you can have a very strong character, you can have a lot of compassion, that’s what is the competence.
But if you don’t have competence and insight, then you’re still going to create a disaster. Agree, no doubt about it. So it’s not that in a sense, as a movement, we are struggling to manage our own movement.
So what to speak of managing it? Because we are trying to manage it in the first place, there is nothing to manage. Prabhupada said very clearly that, you know, I don’t know how things are running, Mahaprabhu is doing it, I just simply sit, write these books and sing Hare Krishna. And so, and he’s told us very, very clearly, don’t create bureaucracy, don’t create unnecessary management, first create temple goers, then create temples.
And because out of our over enthusiasm, we have not listened to some of the instructions of our Acharya Vargas. Rupa Goswami said one should not take up too many projects because it’s destruction, it will destroy bhakti. And that’s a big subject, right? That’s another subject for another time.
But I’m saying that, you know, without insight, compassion, competence, and character, if we try to take anything up, we will end up creating bigger problems than the solutions we’re trying to solve, problems we’re trying to solve. Agreed, agreed. So the idea is that, see, politics is not like a one untouchable category.
So we are transient. No, why should it be? Yeah. So we, if a devotee is competent, a devotee can start a big company, start a company and become a CEO of a company.
If a devotee is competent, as you said, they might become the head of department of a particular university, or they might become the dean of a university. So, and if a devotee is competent, they might enter into politics also. So, but the point is that, so it’s not that political disengagement is a matter of spiritual principle in our tradition.
It is not. No, it isn’t. So we could say that it is more a matter of we have a spiritual purpose, and then we have to intelligently see how best we can pursue that spiritual purpose.
Absolutely. So Bakhtinath Thakur, Bakhtinath Sri Thakur, and Shri Prabhupada also. Now if you consider Shri Prabhupada, as he started a political party in God We Trust, but then I was talking to Balwant Prabhu, he said that initially Prabhupada was very enthusiastic, but when he came to know about the extent of financing required to actually run a political candidature, so then Prabhupada said that Prabhupada did not back so much.
And then Balwant Prabhu asked him, Prabhupada, are you not interested in this? Prabhupada said, I’m interested. Just don’t ask me for any money. So don’t ask me for any money.
I mean, Tulsi Gabbard is a Hindu. She practices, you know, Nam Jaap, Bhakti Yoga, and she ran for president. And she had quite some campaign funding.
So she may be one of the good examples that we have for the future. That is true. And then also, you know, if somebody’s going to enter into politics, they will have to choose their battles.
So, you know, you cannot just accept somebody who enters into politics to adhere to all the principles of Dharma to the same degree. So that is something which is like some devotees took a strong objection that she’s a part of the Democrats, where the Democrats often are quite pro-choice, and they support abortion. But that is a, we cannot simply take devotional values and expect a devotee to enter into politics with all those values intact exactly as they are.
Just because a professor knows calculus doesn’t mean that a three-year-old is suddenly going to start solving calculus problems. Everybody has their own benchmark of standards and education. And, you know, if somebody who’s only spent one or two years beginning their devotional lives, or their existential questioning, and they suddenly expect that they are going to become a Siddha Swaroop and, you know, transcendental something.
You are saying that Tulsi Gabbard is like a three-year-old student? Is that what you’re comparing? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, to expect certain standards from people who are not even there. Why should my standards be the standards for somebody else? Each one of us are a unique individual. And in traditional Gaudiya Vaishnava circles, even something as simple as how many rounds are you going to chant every day is a decision between a guru and a disciple.
Yeah, that’s, you know, and Prabhupada was saying that even if you cannot do anything else, at least minimum chance, 16 rounds, that means you can be engaged in any form of material activity, at least an hour and a half a day, you focus on this thing. If you’re serious about it, that’s true. So, okay.
So, so this is a important, this point of a political positioning. So a devotee Prabhupada, so Prabhupada for example, as giving the example in God we trust, Prabhupada felt that the financial resources we had would be more effectively used to create, create infrastructure, maybe write print books, build temples rather than to fund a political campaign. So it’s more of a, it’s more of a strategic decision than rather a matter of principle.
In principle, a devotee can engage in whatever profession they want to, and each profession will have its own challenges which they will have to negotiate. So, and devotees will have to individually decide how they can be most effective. And as a movement, the, our tradition has largely been, we could say a political in terms of not directly taking specific political positions.
So, no, we’ve always taken the political position based on an ethical platform. And, and when it came to some public Sankirtan, I mean, think about it, the very public Sankirtan itself is an act of civil disobedience as Prabhupada calls it, and that’s a political movement. Okay.
No, no. I think there’s a different, when I say a political position means it’s supporting a particular party or a particular ruler. Oh, oh, oh, oh, I see.
I see. No, we never done that. The other thing I want to bring to your notice is the distinction between politics and governance, or, you know, winning an election and running a government.
There are two very different things. Politics is the process of getting mandate of the people, at least in democracies. Political theories are basically how you’re going to distribute resources and, you know, try to benefit the maximum number of people.
And governance is the everyday process of doing that. Right. And that’s why I think it was Obama who said, you know, running a campaign is one thing, and running a government is something completely different.
Yeah, that’s true. Right. So when we come to politics, I think we have to be very clear that Vaishnavs never, as far as I know, never attempted to suddenly sit themselves, seat themselves in positions of power, except for certain circumstances, were never asked to do that.
For example, Nityananda Prabhu. Mahabubu asked him to go to Bengal and get married, even though he was a sanyasi, and about 13 years older. And Nityananda Prabhu went and became some sort of a jamindar.
Right. He held land, which is now called the North of Calcutta. And after going there, he used to wear a lot of gold.
And, you know, he was, any scholar would say that he was quite a flashy person, you know. And he practiced the politics of humility and tolerance. But then, you know, to have women leaders within his movement is also a significant political statement when women are not a part of public discourse.
Right. To have Vasudha and Jhanava engage with his followers, especially Jhanava Devi, travel freely, show her face in public. This was unthinkable in that time, because women had to be behind the purdah.
Their voices should not be heard in public. And if anybody gets to interact with them, they need to be allowed inside the houses, Andhar Mahal. And once you get into a house as Andhar Mahal, you are either very intimate with the husband or the wife, or somebody is here to plunder your country.
You know, in a socio-cultural situation like that, to have leaders, irrespective of who they were, to go out and do things and lead congregations is a huge political statement if you ask me. Each of our Acharyas did not engage in street fighting, did not engage in battles, did not engage in wars to become kings or princes, but they had the mandate of the people because they engaged with societies from an ethical platform. And if you look at the entire movement, Mahaprabhu encapsulates it in Samanda Vidya Prayoja.
Samanda in practice is the practice of Dharma. Okay. Okay.
Just one minute. This is a different point and we’ll come to that. So when you’re now, it’s like you’re expanding the conception of what we mean by political.
So as I said, political, we will not be directly taking positions of official power. But what you’re saying is that we were the devotees had positions of influence, social influence, even if they were not politically appointed or politically elected or whatever, politically captured in any way. And those positions came from came from their spiritual caliber, or it came from their ethical strength, whatever we want to use it.
And they use that to influence society. So in a sense, to change social policy, that’s what we are doing the example of Vithyanand Prabhu and Janavadevi. That is an example of, we could say reshaping the existing social structures in a way that is conducive for the spreading of Bhakti or the spreading of spiritual consciousness.
Bhakti itself is emancipatory in all its senses. And for example, the movements of Marutam Thakur, or even Chaitanya Mahaprabhu himself, is a political statement, even within a Hindu community. By establishing who is in charge.
Because Chamkasi did not come to attack Mahaprabhu’s kirtan at Srivasa’s place, Srivasangan, because neighbors complained. But it was particularly the Smartha Brahmanas who complained saying that this guy is destroying Hinduism. Singing and dancing is not a part of our culture.
And Chaitanya wouldn’t have any of it. Right? So it was a tripartite political battle, if you look at it that way. And he organized 100,000 people, at least according to the geographies or biographies.
And he comes in, and he makes a huge statement. He says, you know, if you are in my country, and the thing is, Yavana literally means a foreigner, Ionian, like Greek, but the Turkish were called Greek, for whatever reason. You know, they came from the same side, Northwest.
If you are here, then you have to live with us on our terms. That was the political essence of the dialogue between Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and Chamkasi. And Chamkasi had police that he had used to stop Kirtan.
But Chaitanya Mahaprabhu showed who was in control, that he had popular support. If that is not political, I don’t know what political is. I’m not saying he had to govern.
Politics is not governance. But politics is to show that you have clout in society, and you have some influence in the way culture runs, religion runs, and economy runs. Those are the three main strands of our daily life.
The food we eat, the clothes we wear, culture, religion and economics. Culture, religion and economics. Okay, so economics is clear enough.
How do you differentiate between culture and religion? Religion is a part of culture that has existentialist truth claims. So culture could also have it, but that is not the center in culture. See, first of all, we have to understand the word religion is an English word and religion does not mean dharma.
Dharma can have a very wide application. It can mean justice, it can mean duty. That’s perfectly true.
Dharma and religion are very different. So if I just put it this way, say culture, religion and economics, if I’m living in the world, say there is a reality beyond and how I approach and interact with that is religion. And well, not just that, there’s more to that.
Okay, but it’s a pretty broad framework, right? Then economics is, you know, how I function, I contribute to society and I get my needs from society. So just to kind of put it in context, religion is the act of meaning making. Okay.
Economics is the act of distributing resources. Okay. And culture is the normative standards on which society is going to run.
Beautifully put. So when we say religious culture, then what we would mean is those normative standards also contribute to meaning making. Exactly.
Okay. So within, you know, say Gaudiya Vaishnavas, people might wear saffron, white, blue, whatever. That’s cultural.
One can still be a Brahmachari. In any, I mean, St. Francis of Assisi, do you think he’s not a great saint? Bhaktivinoda Thakur writes an article called Krishnaridaya Vaishnav Dharma Daya called talking about John Newman, the theologian. Oh, John, you wrote about him? And he says that this person is a Vaishnava.
Oh, he’s clearly a Vaishnava. And there are Vaishnavas who wear mala and tilak, but they are Bharavahi Vaishnavas. They are externally Vaishnavas, but they’re not really Vaishnavas.
But there are Christians who are Vaishnavas. Right. That means Vaishnavism is the mode of meaning making in life.
Whereas culture is Hindu, and it could be European culture. It could be Arab culture. And this is why when Prabhupada goes to Tehran and he listens to the Azan in the morning, he says, oh, that is also God conscious.
When he goes to Dallas and he looks at the church and he says, don’t remove these benches because it is their cultural tradition to sit and pray to God in that way. Bhaktivinoda Thakur says that in the Chaitanya Shikshamrita and the Krishna Samhita and many articles that the test of any culture is whether you found out the meaning in life. And there are five ways of doing that.
Shakta, Surya, Shaiva, Ganapati and Vaishnava. Vaishnava meaning in life. And that’s a fascinating hierarchy.
We could discuss that also sometime. So what is this coming back to what you’re saying is that politics is the way of influencing these three areas of life, religion, culture and economics. They are like three corners of a triangle.
They are all interdependent. And how is politics related with that? Politics and religion have a lot to do with each other. No, but there are policies which affect society in all its walks.
So can we say politics is essentially the way of shaping policies that influence all of these? Primarily the distribution of resources. That’s what politics boils down to. Okay, that’s interesting.
And then when distribution, the question of distribution of resources is taken care of, what do you do with the extra time? And then all these cultural artifacts come into being. You create art, you create sculpture, you create recipes, you create dresses, music, drama, literature. That’s where culture comes in.
So in a sense, just to go back a little bit, when the Mughals were ruling India, in some ways, or even in the British were ruling India, once they stabilized, their primary purpose, it was economics. So in a sense, they left the religion and the culture to itself. At least the British, I think Bhaktivinoda Thakur writes how they initially had Jagannath temple worship was going on.
They would have their soldiers shoot guns when Lord Jagannath would come out. And at least initially they were a little deferential. But as long as all economics are taken care of, you do what you want with your religion and your culture.
But later on, they expanded and they tried to convert also. In fact, the East India Company was made around 1600. And 1813, the Charter Act was passed in British Parliament.
And during those periods, when the British came to India, they practically became patrons of rich Hindu people. In fact, one time I remember, I was going to Calcutta airport, it’s a short anecdote to receive Raghunath Swami. And they were making the new Calcutta airport at that time.
Your video went off by the way. And they were digging the ground where the foundation and somebody, I had to change some money and somebody came to me with a bag of coins that was buried under the ground 200 years back. And those were old East India Company coins.
And those coins were expensive if you wanted to buy it from a thing, but the laborers, they had no idea. And it was like just selling it away for 50 bucks. So I bought a whole bunch of coins.
And each of those coins have Sita, Rama and Lakshman and said East India Company. East India Company coins with Hindu iconography. And many Hindu temples were patronized by the British because it is a normal standard in Indian history for governments to patronize temples, mosques, gurudwaras and so on and so forth.
And Wendy Doniger writes an interesting incident about the Babri Masjid in her book. I don’t know where she got this from, but she referenced it. Around 1857, the British government decided that they want to put in a railing going to the Babri Masjid, right? Where Hindus and Muslims were both going.
Hindus were worshiping Rama and Muslims were doing their prayers, fried prayers and stuff. And I don’t know how much of it is like hearsay or how much of it, I haven’t looked into this. But apparently when they made the railing, they left a lot of space for Hindus and very little space for Muslims inside the mosque.
And that is the same year when the court cases between the Hindus and Muslims started about Ram Janmabhoomi and Babri Masjid, 1857. And so British policies in India were deliberately, and I’m not saying this is good scholarship, were deliberately made to divide and conquer the indigenous population. That’s true.
And it was Western definitions of religion that got imposed on indigenous cultures and therefore we have so much confusion. A great book to read in this regard is the Harvard professor Wilfred Kenton Smith’s book called Meaning and End of Religion. That the idea, the category of religion itself is a Christian category.
And even though they take away Christianity, that category still applies. In a sense, it’s like, I was talking with a friend a few days back saying, I want to learn a foreign language. I said, you’re already talking to me in a foreign language.
He says, what do you mean? He says, you’re talking to me in English. English is a foreign language. You might have mastered it, but doesn’t mean it’s not a foreign language.
Yeah. So just let me see the train of thought over here. So what you’re saying is that we were having this politics as primarily concerned with economics in a way that does not interfere with people’s religion or culture that was there initially even with the British East India Company.
That’s what you told from that anecdote. Well, they did influence. It’s not that they never influenced, but the policies did not want to.
The policy was, the British policy was missionaries should not come into our territories. And as you said, history, we can’t monolithize it. But at a particular time, they were more favorable.
They might have been less intrusive. Later, they became more intrusive. That’s also possible.
But the two incidents in that context, the Babri Majid incident and the Coins incident as two distinct examples of how the politics can shape the religion and culture and can be in harmony or can foster disharmony. Isn’t that? Yeah. And it boils down to individual motives at the end of the day, individual motives of people who are in power.
If their motive is to serve, then, you know, then politics at the end of the day, cannot make everybody happy. But at least, you know, everybody is taken care of. And Dharmic politics, so to say, just to conclude this discussion, is there in that verse, the cows are the most vulnerable species in any human social ecosystem.
If you go to any supermarket in America, look at the dairy aisle. That’s not buffalo milk. That’s not camel milk.
That’s not horse milk. That’s cow’s milk. Right.
And what has happened if you if you think of it as alienation of labor, because capitalism is alienation of labor, right? Labor from the laborer. That means if I work something on, you know, because, you know, two, three different points have come up before you go into capitalism. It just struck me cows are the most vulnerable animals.
That’s what I said. Now that you said that I never thought of it that way. See, among the various animals that we see, in a sense, cows don’t are not really very, very equipped with defensive resources, a bull at least has some resources, but a cow doesn’t have.
So in a sense, we could say that a culture that protects cows, it’s a it’s a culture, we could say that it represents its attitude towards the most vulnerable members of that. Exactly right. Exactly right.
There you go. But I never in all the discussions on cow care and cow protection that I have read, I never read it till now about the cows, especially vulnerability and how this the cows value we are talking about it, the cows cultural value, economical value. But the cows vulnerability is a very striking point.
Is this something? The thing is, within human societies, you know, when the domestication of animals is an important aspect of human civilization, to have dogs who can protect horses, you can ride cows, you know, I mean, what are cows good for? Around the world, you’ll see people drinking cow’s milk. And they are the most vulnerable creature in a human economy. Right? When chickens, for example, are not even standard food.
And nobody thinks of eating eggs, because, you know, I mean, who would do that? At the same time, the Brahmanas, the intellectuals of society are also the most precious and the vulnerable people because they don’t have defense mechanisms, you know, they are intellectuals, they work in ways where they’re not going to go out for war or work in the field. And there is a very interesting anecdote from the time of Kali Dasa, when the king was somebody came and says, Why are you paying this poet so much money? And he’s doing sitting sitting doing nothing. And the king said to run a kingdom, you need him.
And he said, Why? And he says, I’ll prove it to you. He says, Look at this little piece of wood in front lying in front of you. Describe it.
And this person says, Why? A dry piece of wood is in front. This Kali Dasa, what is it? And Kali Dasa says, A little, a tree that has lost his life is lying in the east. So if language has its own power, the Mimamsakas knew it.
And to come back to the idea of cows and Brahmanas, Brahmanas are not fake Brahmanas, not people who just wear a Brahmin thread. But Brahmanas are intellectuals, the thought leaders of society and cows, these are the two most vulnerable people. And Krishna is so important in Indian culture, because he of all people realized the value of these two categories of society and did everything to protect them.
Right? The other thing, sick people, old people, animals, children and women in vulnerable positions. This is there in our Dharmasastras. These are the five most vulnerable segments of human society.
And if we do not protect these five people, then we are not a civilized society. So you now, whichever systems of government we have, right? I was just reading the work of, I think, a French anthropologist who was looking, who digs up bones, human bones, and does research on Neanderthals and other early forms of species that were there. And somebody asked her, how would you define the beginning of human civilization? And she said, by discovering the first time there was a bandage on someone’s leg, because in the animal kingdom, when somebody gets injured, they are left behind as food for the others.
Somewhere, some person decided, I will risk my life and make sure that this person is doing okay, even if I don’t feel the pain and took the time to heal this person. That is civilization. That’s right.
So just to go back now, because you said this would be the, like a conclusive summarization of what are the words you used? Say spiritual politics or Vaishnav politics. This verse. So what do you say? The whole planet.
So, in a sense, the purpose of political administration is by taking care. So how we are taking care of the most vulnerable members of society, that is an indicator of how we will eventually take care of the whole society. That’s right.
The whole ecosystem. Full ecosystem. Yeah, not just society.
Jalakitaya Krishna. Govindaya namo namaha. Okay, that’s beautiful.
It’s amazing how verses can be expanded to, I don’t think anybody would have thought of seeing a political insight in this verse. That’s beautiful. You did.
No, you did that. Thank you. So, if we consider what Bhaktivinoda Thakur did, just to put it round now, that he focused on how best we could further the wisdom, the Vaishnav wisdom, spread the Vaishnav wisdom by which society could be benefited.
And then according, he positioned himself that, okay, instead of getting into the political independence struggle, he could focus on taking the existential roots of suffering. Exist. That’s a beautiful way of putting it.
And then how to address them by presenting the universal aspects of the universality of Vaishnavism itself. Yeah, Krishna Bhakti. Bhakti, Krishna Bhakti.
Yes, beautiful. Krishna Consciousness. So, should I try to summarize? And then you have the concluding.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s about 3am here.
Yeah. Thank you for sparing so much time. No, this is Bhaktivinoda Thakur Seva and this is important.
Yeah. So, it is a very wide ranging discussion. Basically, we try to discuss about how Bhaktivinoda Thakur positioned himself politically to maximize the outreach.
We’ve also somewhat discussed about culture, religion and other aspects. But primarily, it was, we focus on the politics. And he started by, I mentioned that, you know, the younger brother, older brother example, that British are like the younger brother, we are like the older brother.
So, let the younger brother manage the state. You’ve explained that there’s a lot more going on. And we talked about how the British at that time received moral authority for, derived their own moral authority for ruling.
And say, when they went to America, they just, because they’re not used to diseases coming from elsewhere and apart from the genocides, it just the original culture got removed entirely. All of those went away. But in India, they’re used to invaders coming in many ways.
So, then here, it was at time, how initially the British had a little hands-off attitude, but the British rule became solidified from 1757 to 1857, after the battle, after the Sequoia mutiny. And then they… Between Battle of Palachi and the revolt. So, then at that time, the independence movement, so during Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s prime, the independence movement was more in a nascent stage.
In this very nascent stage. People are thinking, but not really acting on it. And so, Prabhupada, so Bhaktivinoda Thakur directed the thoughts in a way in which there could be, as you said, existential problems being addressed.
And within that, he discussed about Bhaktivinoda Thakur using his position as a prominent member of the Bhaktar Loka, as a deputy magistrate to bring respectability to Gaudiya Vaishnavism and its message. And also, when he retired, that itself also created a sensation. And through that also, when he started talking about, I am dedicating myself to build a temple, that also brought cultural value to what he was doing.
And then a major theme of our discussion was, is political disengagement a matter of principle? Not at all. That was, it was more of strategic political engagement to protect the values of dharma. And even in the Royal Ministry, when the Kshatriyas were ruling, at that time it was, the Kshatriyas, their purpose was ethical rule so that the values of dharma like truthfulness and cleanliness and mercy, these could be maintained.
And when we had more of renunciates or saintly teachers, they also were engaging. So, rather than taking politics as only meaning occupying a position or supporting a particular party, it can also mean shaping public policy in a way that is conducive for society and for spirituality. So, Ketan Mahaprabhu did that through his civil disobedience or non-cooperation movement, where he got the right to practice Kirtan, to freely Kirtan with Chand Khande’s presence.
And then he also had Rupesh Nath and Goswami go to Vrindavan so that they could strategically negotiate with the British rulers. And the fact that we had… Mughal rulers. And the fact that we had the sandstone temples indicates that they are like government authorized temples.
And it was the expertise of the… So, we have to remember when the Mughals Mughals came in, I think, there was a period between the Turkish and the Mughals where things were rough. And so, at that gasp… When Rupa Goswami was there, I think… It was by Rupa Goswami’s time that the Mughals were established. See, Babur came way before.
Then, anyway, we could go into this. But basically, they basically interacted so that they could build those temples over there and stabilize the… So, what Radhakund was basically a pond in which Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had established. But then that had to be established.
So, our Acharyas did that over there. And then we discussed about Bhakti Saans, Taako, Leda Prasad. They all carried on the legacy in different ways, which is a different subject.
But it’s not a matter of principle. And when we look at Shri Prabhupada and analyzing an Acharya’s actions strategically is also a part of our tradition. Different devotees may do it in different ways.
So, if you want to learn, you can look at it from a transcendental perspective, but you can also look at it from a pro-technical, sociological perspective to see how we can operate. And yes, let me complete this. As far as in today’s world, politics is not like one untouchable field.
But in any area we want to enter into, we need competence, we need insight from a material perspective, and we need the character and the compassion from a spiritual perspective. Only then we will be a part of the solution. Otherwise, we may well be a part of a bigger problem.
And then the Vaishnava ethics about politics or the Vaishnava ethos about politics could be conveyed to Namo Brahmanyadevaya verse, where the caliber of a society and how it is going to promote welfare in society can be seen by how it protects the members who contribute but are vulnerable. And the cows and the Brahmanas most vulnerable and they are also having, they are actually significantly contributing also. Significant and vulnerable.
It’s like wearing a helmet when you ride a bike, you know, why would you wear a helmet? Why not bracelets? You know, this is the most vulnerable part of the human body. Okay, beautiful. And then we also one point, interesting point was, it’s a politics, if you consider different areas of human society, there is religion deals with the finding meaning, culture refers to the norms in which society operates and economics is the provision, the generation and provision of resources.
So, politics traditionally meant focusing or it focuses primarily on the economic aspect. And if you consider authority to decide economic systems. Yeah, the authority to decide how economic resources will be generated, utilized, divided and what systems we will operate in.
So, the British, in some part of their history had a less involved strategy with respect to how the economics would affect the culture and the religion. Later on, they became more involved. They had a divide and rule.
So, our focus is when we are trying to practice bhakti and share bhakti, is that we want to take, not only get ourselves to practice bhakti, but create a ethos by which, take positions by which the bhakti message can reach a larger number of people. And we can create situations where that can reach can happen. And in that sense, a devotee can actively, responsibly, competently engage with society.
You’re saying some things? Yeah, no, I just had one concluding realization, if I may share. What is? That is, I read this in a book a long time back, that when the caterpillar turns into a butterfly, there is a time when it remains in the cocoon and various parts of his body begins disintegrate. But within the caterpillar’s body are these cells that usually remain asleep for the entire life of the caterpillar.
But as the transformation happens, these cells connect with each other. And the butterfly that eventually comes out of the cocoon happens because these cells connect with each other, starts combining and creating the new body. And I think that that is how Bhaktivinoda Thakur would have explained what he meant by Vaishnavism if he were speaking to us today.
He looked at the universal dimension of bhakti. He looked at what Krishna wanted, what Chaitanya Mahaprabhu wanted. He said that the Bhagavatam to us looked like a repository of bad ideas when you were in college.
But when I read it, it blew my mind. And he called Mahaprabhu his eastern savior and the mighty genius of Nadia. And this is after he has completed all his education, you know, and he’s kind of established himself.
And this happened because he feels that he can and future people can connect with others around the world irrespective of their cultures. So they can connect, you know, inter-culturally, but on the universalist principles that are taught by Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. And I was saying something a little few minutes back, we’re talking about Sambandha, Abhidheya and Prayojana.
And if you think about it, the teachings of Krishna can be encapsulated in three words. First is Dharma. The second is Yoga and the third is Rasa.
And these are the three universal things that kind of correspond with Sambandha, Abhidheya and Prayojana that Bhaktivinoda Thakur really wanted to be understood and accepted by leaders of society around the world irrespective of their cultures, right? So that is the genius, I would think he is the mighty genius of Kalkara. Because among his friends, colleagues, nobody were thinking like he was on a global level. I don’t know of many people who wrote to Emerson.
Emerson was looked up to whereas Bhaktivinoda treated Emerson as a colleague, right? So while his peers were hero-worshipping Emerson and Monier Williams and other people, Bhaktivinoda Thakur was saying, oh these are intelligent people, they need to understand Mahaprabhu’s mission, which is for the benefit of all forms of life on this planet, especially the most vulnerable. And to serve them, thinking of them as sparks of Shri Krishna and remembering the Hare Krishna mantra, Hare Krishna, you know, which is like a love song. And to say, Sarva Dharma means all the various dharmas that you have around the world.
If you look at the essence, you will see reciting the holy names with love and serving other living entities or living beings is the essence of all dharmas. So I just wanted to conclude on that note. That is a beautiful meditation about how Bhaktivinoda Thakur actually, so his singular focus was on revealing how Krishna Bhakti offered universal wisdom that could address the fundamental or the root problems of human society.
And so we connect with Krishna internally. Contribute to, connect with Krishna internally by chanting his holy names. And then we contribute to society externally by through Jiva Daya.
Not just chanting his holy names, gradually begin to realize who Krishna is. Beginning to realize Krishna is first with his name, then with his qualities. Nama, Rupa, Guna, Leela.
That’s true. So name is the entry point. But at some point when Nama, Rupa, Guna, Leela all come together, then you can witness Krishna within your heart.
And Krishna’s own teachings point to the fact that love is transcendental to time. And so Krishna loves each and every one of his devotees. When they worship him with all their hearts and their intelligence and how to worship it by practicing Dharma.
All his devotees practice Dharma. He wouldn’t, Krishna wouldn’t hang out with anybody when they did not practice Dharma. Example is Shishupala or the Kauravas.
Yoga, he himself practiced yoga according to the 11th Canto of the Bhagavata. But more important, it was the Rasa, the Prayojana. You know, what is the point of life? And Yogeshwaraprabhu and I were having a dialogue once on this.
And you know, he’s a very interesting character. He’s a humanist and he is an author. He writes popular literature and a Holocaust historian.
And his brother is Brian Green, the scientist from Columbia. He also comes regularly on this podcast. So we know him quite well.
So, you know, this Dharma, actually this categorization of Sambandha, Abhidheya, Prayojana, this is something which is very important. We could discuss this more in the future. But you can complete this point of Dharma and Rasa and what are the three things? Dharma, Yoga and Rasa.
Okay. So, Yoga is the way, Dharma is what are the foundational values that guide our life. Yoga is the process that we use to grow or evolve or to connect with the ultimate reality.
The process, Abhidheya. And Rasa is what we experience. Experience, the purpose.
The purpose. Okay, beautiful. So, thank you very much for your time, Prabhu.
Thank you for your time and take care, please.