Why are Ambarish Maharaja and Dhruva Maharaja not counted amongst the 12 mahajans?
From Rahul Bhat
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Question from Rahul Bhatt Prabhu Why are Ambarish Maharaj and Dhruv Maharaj not counted among the twelve Mahajanas Answer because the list of the twelve Mahajanas is representative it is not exhaustive that way we will see that even the Gopis are not there in the twelve Mahajanas and they are the most exalted devotees as depicted in the same book Srimad Bhagavatam that describes these twelve Mahajanas so what does it mean? Are they not Mahajanas? They are but this particular list which is given by Srimad Bhagavatam by Yamaraj Bhai describing, instructing Yamadutas that is representative of the various exalted personalities who know dharma, live dharma and teach dharma but that doesn’t mean there are only twelve. There are many other people also who know dharma, live dharma and teach dharma when Manjula Prabhupada was talking about the twelve Mahajanas one devotee told him that Prabhupada you are the thirteenth Mahajana and Prabhupada promptly replied and you are the fourteenth what Prabhupada meant by that was that the tradition of people living according to dharma has to be living and continuing so it is the responsibility of all devotees to follow in the footsteps of the Mahajanas and to try to live also exemplary lives so if we try to go into the mentality of why this devotee is not included in this particular list then often we can go into offensive fault finding mode with respect to exalted Vaishnavas and even if that doesn’t happen our focus can become unnecessarily negative so our focus should be to learn what we can learn from the great devotees and we can learn a lot from the list of devotees that is given in the twelve Mahajanas and we can learn a lot from other devotees also so we should see the list of devotees as representative of the great souls of the great Mahajanas and take inspiration from all the great souls that were talked about in the Bhagavatam and who inspire us in the path of spirituality, transcendence and devotion