19890925 Caitanya-caritamrita Antya-līlā 19.65-77 & Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 6.1.47

Caitanya Caritamrita Antya Lila 19 65-77 & Srimad Bhagavatam 6 1 47 We Should Break The Fangs Of Maya 

Type Of Talk:

Morning Class

Book:

Caitanya Caritamrita (CC)

Date:

Monday, September 25, 1989

Collection:

Enlightenment 5

Audio player:

19890925 CAITANYA CARITAMRITA ANTYA LILA 19.65 – 77 AND SRIMAD BHAGAVATAM 6.1.47, WE SHOULD BREAK THE FANGS OF MAYA, NEW TALAVAN

Text 65: Translation: In this state of madness, Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu’s mind was unsteady. Whatever He said or did was all symptomatic of madness.

Text 66: Translation: Svarüpa Dämodara was very anxious, but then he had an idea. The following day, he and the other devotees considered it together.

Text 67: Translation: After consulting with one another, they entreated Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu to allow Çaìkara Paëòita to lie down in the same room with Him.

Text 68: Translation: Thus Çaìkara Paëòita lay at the feet of Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu, and the Lord placed His legs upon Çaìkara’s body.

Text 69: Translation: Çaìkara became celebrated by the name Prabhu-pädopädhäna [“the pillow of Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu”]. He was like Vidura, as Çukadeva Gosvämé previously described him.

Sri Caitanya Mahaprabu pillow ki jai!

Text 70: Translation: “When submissive Vidura, the resting place of the legs of Lord Kåñëa, had thus spoken to Maitreya, Maitreya began speaking, his hair standing on end due to the transcendental pleasure of discussing topics concerning Lord Kåñëa.”

Text 71: Translation: Çaìkara massaged the legs of Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu, but while massaging he would fall asleep and thus lie down.

Text 72: Translation: He would lie asleep without a covering on his body, and Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu would get up and wrap him with His own quilt.

Text 73: Translation: Çaìkara Paëòita would always fall asleep, but he would quickly awaken, sit up and again begin massaging the legs of Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu. In this way he would stay awake the entire night.

Text 74: Translation: Out of fear of Çaìkara, Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu could neither leave His room nor rub His lotuslike face against the walls.

Text 75: Translation: This pastime of Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu’s has been described very nicely by Raghunätha däsa Gosvämé in his book known as Gauräìga-stava-kalpavåkña.

Text 76: Translation: “Because of separation from His many friends in Våndävana, who were like His own life, Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu spoke like a madman. His intelligence was transformed. Day and night He rubbed His moonlike face against the walls, and blood flowed from the injuries. May that Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu rise in my heart and make me mad with love.”

Text 77: Translation: In this way Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu stayed immersed day and night in an ocean of ecstatic love for Kåñëa. Sometimes He was submerged, and sometimes He floated.

Jaya jaya Sri Caitanya Jaya Nityananda, Jaya Advaita Candra Jaya Gaura Bhakta Vrinda.

Mukha karoti vaachaalam panghum langhayate girim Yat kripa tam aham vande sri gurum deena taarinam Paramananda Madhavam Sri Caitanya Ishwaram

Srimad Bhagavatam: 6.1.47: Translation: Just as springtime in the present indicates the nature of springtimes in the past and future, so this life of happiness, distress or a mixture of both gives evidence concerning the religious and irreligious activities of one's past and future lives.

The Yamadutas are making their presentation, their logic and reason for why Ajamila should be given to them so they can take them to Yamaraj for being punished because he has acted in a sinful way. So it is to be understood that in the future he would act in a similar way, so why should he be forgiven? The Yamadutas keep missing the point, you know ignoring the point or not realizing that the point about chanting the name of Vishnu at the time one leaves the body – Narayana antaha smriti. Anyone who chants the name of Narayana, at the end remembers Narayana at the end, remembers Krishna, while leaving the body, they are guaranteed to go back home back to Godhead. So the Yamadutas they were not trained in this particular point probably. That is why the fact that Ajamila had remembered Narayana didn’t impress them very much, later they probably would get some suitable instruction from Yamaraj. While we take in general whatever they are saying apart from that oversight is certainly very profound in understanding the nature of the material world. In the material world some people, as explained in the previous verses, are very happy, some are mixed happy and distressed, and some are totally distressed. Living in the hospital for a couple of weeks I could see a lot of people who are in a distressed condition. Became good friends with all the neighbors in the hospital because we were in an area where we were supposed to walk a little bit, if I did not walk they said I would get ulcers from the feeding in the nose. So then we agreed. There was a young lady and her husband was waiting outside all the time, she is getting worse. So he would be sitting outside completely in distress and when we asked how things were going on he would say, ‘bad, bad, she is getting worse, she is getting worse’ and he was getting really frustrated. Meet someone else and he says I am getting out tomorrow, really happy, nobody wants to stay in the hospital, we didn’t see at least, maybe someone wanted to. I don’t know. We talked to one of the policemen, he was interested in reincarnation and especially after being in the hospital with you the police were on guard. He said I really don’t want to take birth again in this material world. Maybe outside the hospital everything is covered up but they were bringing people after motorcycle accident with plaster completely over their face with head broken in four places with cuts here and there. For some reason there wasn’t room enough in the nose and throat section so they put me up on the 9th floor in the plastic surgery and some other, I forget, things to do with the head but more like plastic surgery and skin. So I was on my own floor and could see people coming in after different accidents. So a lot of suffering. Naturally in a hospital there is lot of suffering. Seems like the nurses just get callous to the whole thing, maybe in the beginning they are compassionate. But on my floor there was none of that and they were pretty much used to seeing people smashed up every day. But people who were there were naturally affected and they would like to get out. So you see in a hospital there is a lot of suffering. But in the ordinary material world you think it is very nice, it is a place to enjoy, then one of the field trips for the schools should be to the hospital. One of the persons died and they pulled his bed out because they did not want to keep the same bed, so people were shaken up. Some people get better, some get worse. Some people just stay there for a long time. So hospitals are pretty hellish places. They keep it nice and clean. But like the hospital in Krishna Nagar, it is not even clean. Point is that this whole material world, sometimes we get a better situation and sometimes we get into a hellish situation. If we are here in the material world, we are to expect that we are going to be rotating between these different states. Maybe when we are young things look really nice, then when we get old then it is different. Maybe when you are healthy you enjoy but when you are sick you just think how can I get healthy? So Krishna consciousness is meant for people to be more intelligent, more conscious, to be more pragmatic. Sometimes people criticize that well Krishna devotees don’t use their free will or something. But actually devotees are being pragmatic about life seeing it from a broader spectrum. Life isn’t just happiness, material life is a mixture of happiness, distress and intense distress and people go through these different stages. Lord Caitanya said, kobe Swarga uttai, sometimes we go to heaven like a demigod and join all kinds of sense gratification. Koba narake doobai, sometimes we go to hellish situations where it is suffering, complete horrible suffering. Dhan da dhanaraja jana nadite chubai, just like a king puts a person on a dunking stone in the water of a river, sometimes we get a gasp of air, sometimes we are drowning. Material nature tries to present very happy situation to get us in the mood of enjoying, but then once we are hooked on enjoying, all of a sudden things change and sometimes we are put in anxiety and sometime we are put in distress. So the devotees they know this is the nature of material life – sometimes somebody looks happy, just like I was driving on a highway in India going to a sankirtan program and I was following behind a truck, about hundred feet away from my car, my rented car and then all of a sudden, you know India roads are very narrow, there are just two lanes but no line in the middle. Except for the one between Delhi and Vrndavan, I remember it is a little wider. Just like you know, a two lane national highway. We see a lorry, a truck, coming from the other direction approaching the truck that was in front of us. All of a sudden from behind that truck there came a little pickup truck, all decorated with banners, loud speakers and kids hanging all over it, teenaged kids. They were going out for some kind of a picnic outing. In India they do this in the month of December, it is called Poush picnic. So they had the loud speakers blaring cinema songs and things and they were really enjoying you know. So this pulls right out and I said there is not enough room to pass the lorry and get back by the other lorry that was coming. Seemed like very close as the two lorries were quickly approaching. Somehow this driver he zipped right over and then tried to get in between the two lorries. It looked so close to me! I just started chanting Hare Krishna and sure enough there wasn’t enough room. He was trying to get in between the two lorries, pow! One lorry hit the pickup and rubbed across the lorry in front of us and it just started heading straight towards my car. Then I was really worried, first I was worried for them, then for us, for the devotees in the car. Because of their craziness we were in danger. Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare. We didn’t know what to do because the driver, he didn’t know what to do because they were coming up straight towards us, if we go out in the middle of the road then the other lorry is coming, if we go on the side into a ditch which is not a nice place to go! Ha! Ha! All of a sudden the other truck from behind them somehow got thru and smashed the side of one lorry and somehow the other lorry from behind boom! Just hit it. And it hit it at such an angle that it got pushed right in front of us and missed us like three inches, just went off into the ditch. Then the other lorry, the truck coming smashed on the side of our car but just pushed us in the side and we didn’t really get any serious injuries. Then we went out and tried to help the kids that were hurt, gave a lift to the bus stop for the kids that were injured and the bus took them to a hospital. They were in such an enjoying mood music blaring and picnic with the loud speakers playing latest popular songs and next minute! They are taken off to the hospital totally shaken and injured. So material life is like that, padam padam yat vipadam – every step there is danger, you never know what is going to happen. But normally people are in such ignorance, they just think I have to get healthy back again and get back out right there and start enjoying. But a Krishna conscious person is wise, they know that what is this happiness in material life? One minute you think you are happy and next minute your senses are totally suffering like anything. Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu, He is so kind that He showed that there is another happiness which is the real happiness we can experience in loving Krishna. Of course, He became so mad in love for Krishna that we cannot even imagine how intense His love was for Krishna, His separation from the residents of Vrndavan! But even a drop of His love is enough to flood the consciousness of any devotee. He is so kind to give that mercy that we can experience the spiritual happiness. It is not dependent upon the situation of the senses. Material happiness is depending on the senses, now one week it is going to be raining and cold so then if anybody had an idea of taking a vacation in sunny Georgia, forget it! I was in Hawaii a couple of years ago, several, many years ago actually, and they had a preaching centre in some multi storeyed building, 26th floor or something, really high up there. And they mentioned that many people they save up for years to go to Hawaii for a vacation. It costs thousand dollars a person to save up a couple of thousand dollars, two or three thousand dollars, takes a family a long time. And it is a tropical place you know, sometimes in rains. It is not always sunny in Hawaii; it rains sometimes too. So if it just happens to rain during the vacation time people after saving up for two years or three years, their whole life their dream vacation to go to Hawaii, happens to rain for one week, it gets so frustrating. Jump out of the 26th floor – somebody jumped out. Got so frustrated that the vacation was a flop. They were dreaming of this that they were sitting in the sun and getting a nice sun burn in Hawaii but it was overcast and raining, it was too much, so jumped out of the 26th floor. People are thinking you know they have a perfect situation for their senses and that’s what is going to make them happy. But sometimes it is a nice situation for the senses and sometimes it is not. Why be dependent upon that kind of a situation? Maya is very powerful so it always is trying to get you to enjoy, try to have this nice situation, if I have this situation I will be happy. But through intelligence, Prabhupad said, somebody goes out in the rain gets wet, another person is thinking I am not going out without an umbrella, without a raincoat, why should I get wet? In that way we have to see that so many people are suffering, some people are happy, some people are little in anxiety and some people are really fully in distress. And it keeps changing like that. It is just like seasons. So why should I just go out into the same material situation and have to suffer the same kind of difficulty? Just like why should I go out in the rain and get wet? So this is called Krishna consciousness, this is called the buddhi yoga. The yoga of intelligence, we use your intelligence and see. Actually the devotees are the most intelligent because they see the material world for what it is. They are very practical about it. If somebody sometimes happens to get some nice happy situation, they know that now I may be happy, but in the future the material life can change and I can suffer some distress. So they don’t forget Krishna just because there is a little happy time. They keep remembering Krishna. Then if they get into some distress they know that this is also the previous karmas I performed. This distress in material life is there but in the future the situations change and things are a little better, I should keep my consciousness on Krishna. So the devotees they always keep their minds fixed on Krishna through their happiness and distress, through every situation. And then eventually with the mercy of Nitai Gaurachandra they can actually start to experience the real happiness of Krishna consciousness. That happiness is so profound and once somebody tastes that happiness then material happiness doesn’t have much more attraction, doesn’t have any attraction really. That is why it is said that for someone who is fully Krishna conscious the example is given that the attraction of maya is like a snake where you break the poison fangs. Normally a cobra snake is very dangerous, if it bites you are dead in five minutes. You just have enough time to say your prayers. Once in India of course there was some snake charmer who got bit by a cobra and he knew the cobra had poisonous fangs. Normally they break the poison fangs but somehow he didn’t do it. So he took a razor blade and he just cut his arm where he got bit and so much blood was coming out that he passed out as he lost blood. Because so much blood came out of him the poison also came out. They took him to the hospital in the city and gave him transfusion and everything so with that arm he was able to live. But normally if you get bitten by a cobra, if you are not able to just immediately get the poison out it goes right to the nerves and you are dead in a few minutes. One old Mohammadan labor contractor that was working for building the first building in Mayapur, the Long building, he told me that when he was a young man he was working with the British building an air strip near Mayapur in Debulia. At that time, he remembered there was one British officer and he picked up a cobra egg and just then it hatched right in his hand and there was this little baby, cute little baby. Squiggly little cobra, just a few inches long and he looked at it and said, how cute you know and held it right up to his face to look and the baby cobra bit him right on the lip, died almost instantly. So normally the snakes are very poisonous but if the snake charmer they know how to break the fangs and take out the poison. If you take out the poison then being bit by a cobra means just a little puncture on your skin like someone has jabbed you with a nail, it won’t kill you. So material life, if we actually have a taste for Krishna consciousness, it becomes like that. A poison fang is broken, can’t poison us any more. So that is the thing we should try to seriously develop, our taste for Krishna consciousness. We can only do that if we really absorb serving guru and Krishna, if we absorb in chanting Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare, if we absorb ourselves in that nectar. Sometimes we get a little special mercy and we taste some nectar like on Ekadashi or Janamashtami or some big feast day, some special service that we are doing, we feel some ecstasy. Sometimes when you are building Ratha Yatra carts and preparing for big festivals, so intense you have to work, so hard just to make the deadlines that somehow by being fully absorbed you start getting a little taste for Krishna’s service. When you are in sankirtan and put out the extra management, you have got to press your batteries to the max, put the accelerator up a little bit to get the book distribution out then sometimes one can get the taste of nectar. I found in building Mayapur there were some very heavy times Prabhupad had us working double shifts, he said you are Americans, you have to work double shifts, 24 hours shift he wanted but we couldn’t get any labor to work from midnight to sunrise. So double shift was as best as we could do, triple shift didn’t work. But we had only single devotees overseas so we were working the double shift, the labor was working their two shifts. So it was very intense. But somehow in a very intense moment where it almost seemed like, it was so intense that we weren’t even able to complete or do it, we somehow got the special mercy, causeless mercy, experienced the mercy of the previous acharyas. So Krishna reciprocates if we put ourselves up to Krishna, then He reciprocates more than we can expect. When the times are difficult then Krishna He comes and takes a test of the devotees and gives His mercy.

We see in Caitanya Mahaprabhu’s mercy we read today, He was just feeling intense separation of the Brijawasis, so much so that at night He would grind His teeth and rub His face against the rocks and He would be completely forgetful of His body and He would completely become mad. But the devotees, their duty was to protect Lord Caitanya’s body, they couldn’t let Lord Caitanya harm His body. It was too painful for them. So they had a meeting and they discussed how to protect Lord Caitanya’s body because He wasn’t worried about His body, He was just worried about His devotional service, He was feeling separation, so He was in the madness of separation.

One time Prabupad was walking down the stairway in Calcutta and I remember that – stairway is very funny in Calcutta, it has never really improved much. They put marble on the temple floor, they fixed everything else up but even to this day that stairway in Calcutta leading to the outside store is still crummy, wooden stairway. So much traffic, somehow they have never figured out how to improve it. It is kind of like a clumsy stairway that you can easily slip on. Some of the devotees saw that Prabhupad almost slipped and said, Prabhupad watch out or be careful, something like that. Then Prabhupad said that it is not my duty to watch out, my duty is simply to serve Krishna! You are my disciples; you have to watch out for my body that nothing happens to my body. He said, I am concerned with this that I have to serve Krishna. So in that way Caitanya Mahaprabhu, He wasn’t concerned about His body, He was just concerned about serving Krishna. At a certain intensity of devotional service one might become even careless about their body. But the devotees, they were concerned. So then they made this plan, we are going to have Shankar Pandya stay with Caitanya Mahaprabhu and he will see that He doesn’t rub His face on the wall, doesn’t grind His teeth. So it worked, the plan worked! So in material life people they think that this body is theirs and if they want they can misuse it. If they want to have an abortion that is their free will, if they want to stuff drugs into their veins that is their right, whatever they want to do, they want to smoke cigarettes and die of cancer that is their free right. But actually it is not their body, everything belongs to Krishna and Krishna has given their body for them to use, because they are misusing it, it is sinful and therefore they have to suffer. If they use the body properly then in the material sense they can enjoy if they really use it properly in Krishna’s service, then they can leave this material body and get a spiritual body and go back to Godhead.

So that’s what we are trying to do, educate people that the whole world belongs to Krishna and they should use it in that consciousness. Now the modern scientists are concerned that because of man using the material nature in such an aggressive manner they have created so many problems to the ozone layer, to the stratosphere, to the ecology balance, to nature that now the whole world is in danger that there could be another, just like they say in the past there were this massive extinction of life on earth according to the fossil records, Srila Prabhupad says like the end of the Kali yuga. We are in Kali yuga now and they are saying like well it is so heavy right now that the whole world could easily have all the life extinguished because there is so much irresponsible exploitation of nature’s natural features that it creates an imbalance in nature which can cause life to find it very hard to live here. So how to make people feel responsible? Now if we just apply Prabhupad’s formula, the Bhagavad Gita formula that Krishna is the proprietor of the whole world, that God is the proprietor, and then therefore accordingly no one has the right to take from nature to the extent that it causes other lives to suffer. Because every living creature here has the right to live because they are given that right by God. It is not that human beings own the earth. So if we had that type of consciousness then it will be very easy to apply that to laws, to other things like ecological balance. But now they are just like pleading to people, please do something! But who is listening? Well everyone thinks what do I get, the purpose of life is to make as money as you can while you are alive and the way to do that is exploit nature to the maximum, so on and so forth. So they keep coming, the world problems, the individual problems, they can be solved by Krishna consciousness. Unfortunately, there is a communication gap, so we have to bridge that by preaching. And today to preach we have to actually believe it, realize it. So that means that we have to thoroughly understand this philosophy and then practice it. And to really be able to preach we should break the fangs of maya and actually realize that happiness of Krishna consciousness. So then whenever we say we sound convincing to people because they can see that the devotee is really happy. These are some points that come to mind thinking about the snake, there is another snake that we know, Anantasesha, He is very kind to the devotees! He is very merciful! Always serving Krishna! When Lord Caitanya was a baby, Anantasesha came and Lord Caitanya grabbed Him and He coiled up in a big circle and Lord Caitanya as a one-year-old baby just crawling, laid down on Anantasesha and Anantasesha spread His hood over the baby Caitanya. Mother Sachi was inside the kitchen cooking some milk or something to baby Nimai. She did not know it was Anantasesha, she just came out and saw this huge white cobra with baby Nimai lying on it and the cobra’s hood right over Nimai! She started screaming and fainting and falling on the ground, cobra! Cobra! The neighbors come running and they see they scream. All the devotees they are completely mad in love for protecting Nimai. So Anantasesha, He felt a little compassion for the devotees who were in so much anxiety, and the screaming really disturbed Nimai as He was enjoying the nice cool body of Anantasesha and the shade of His head. He didn’t like it that He was dumped on the ground, so He started crawling after Anantasesha and grabbed Him again and asking where are You going? Mother Sachi and others they just see the snake crawling off and she ran and grabbed Nimai and sighed, Krishna has saved our baby! So Anantasesha is actually kind to the devotees. But at the same time He is always serving Krishna. So you know that Anantasesha is the expansion from Nityananda Prabhu from Sankarshan. Sankarshan comes from Balaram who is not different from Nityananda Prabhu. Nityananda Prabhu is very merciful to the devotees, He gives His mercy very easily, so we pray to Nitai to give a drop of His mercy so that we can have love Caitanya Mahaprabhu. You know like he delivered Jagai and Madhai, if He just gives us little drop of that mercy then we could be immediately Krishna conscious.

Nitai Gaur premanandi! Hari bol!

Any questions?

Question: Inaudible.

GM: In the tenth canto of the Bhagavatam it mentions that Devaki when she saw Krishna in Narayana form she was feeling fearful about Kamsa coming and attacking Him. Out of motherly affection. It says even pure devotees they feel fearful of maya. Although we see a cobra, even though the fangs are broken and they don’t have the poison we still wouldn’t like to be bitten by the cobra. Although in actuality the devotee is protected from the attraction of maya, they remain careful, cautious and Prabhupad explains in the purport that this is a protection of the devotee, that because a devotee gets a taste for Krishna consciousness they are not really attracted by material sense gratification, still they are careful, they are cautious. The only thing is that Bharata maharaj, he lost attraction, he wasn’t attracted to any kingdom, opulence or anything, he was careless that he gave so much attention to a deer at that time when he was on the home stretch, he should really have been concentrating on giving his affection to Krishna! He didn’t consult with his guru or anybody that it was safe to do that. He just acted out of an impulse so certainly even if a person is in a level of bhava or spontaneous love they have to govern their life with advice of sadhu, Shastra and guru, they have to be careful. At the same time, you can also use the example of Bharata, he was careless, he had to suffer some reaction but eventually he did get back to Krishna. He just got delayed. It wasn’t that as a deer he forgot Krishna or when he became Jada Bharata he was really determined not to get waylaid. So we don’t want to get bitten by the cobra whether it has got poison or not. I mean whether a dog has rabies or not, it is comforting to note he does not have rabies but we don’t want to get bitten by it. So we still care for the body. But attraction of maya, maya really approached Bharata from the point of enjoying but he was just a little naïve about getting attached to a deer until he realized it was a great danger. So we have to be very careful that maya can take us from the front door, from the back door, from the side door, through the window, through a hole in the roof, anywhere she gets a chance! False ego is also there. We may become protected from the direct assault, we have to be always careful about any kind of guerilla tactics. Doesn’t have to take a long time to get spontaneous taste for devotional service. But even if one does, one shouldn’t become puffed up and careless because by offenses or by carelessness – by offences you can lose it and by carelessness you can get delayed.

Question: Inaudible.

GM: Technically from one point one starts it at sunrise and ends at sunset. But for the devotees, they follow generally from brahma muhurta until sunrise. But it doesn’t mean like get up at 2 in the morning and take a big feast. That once you go to sleep at night it is considered that is the end of that day. So you are not supposed to take any more grains if you wake up till the next morning after. But if we happen to come home late from some preaching or something you had ended your day then you can take some grain the night before. Unless you are doing nirjala, then you are not supposed to take grains but it is restricted, there is a whole lot of rules if you are doing nirjala. I am just saying the general way we practice. So generally we don’t take any grains that would still make it sunrise to sunrise so two hours before brahma muhurta you don’t take anything. The technical midnight doesn’t have any bearing on Vedic time. The day begins at sunrise and it ends at sunrise the next day. The problem we get is like being here like in kind of more hellish places, you get further north like in Sweden in the winter the sun rises at 9 or 10 in the morning and sets at 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Just 3 or 4 hours of daylight. In the summer, I remember I arrived, my flight was late, I arrived at 11.30 at night in Stockholm and was driving to the temple and at midnight I saw this sunset. Then it rises about 1 am. Dips down, it never gets dark. So it is crazy when you are so far north and so far south, they just kind of follow like the Mayapur temple time, 6 o clock sunrise. Otherwise you cannot live like that where the cutoff point would be – just keep to 6 o clock, the actual time is taken from sunrise to sunset.

Any other question?

Question: Inaudible.

GM: Krishna may overlook an offense out of His causeless mercy. If someone very innocently makes an offense but technically it is still an offense. So it is up to Krishna that He might overlook it.

Devotee: Inaudible.

GM: You know Jagannath traditions in Jagannath Puri are beyond our scope of commentation. Ramanujacharya, he went and started to complain and started to change things and then Jagannath threw him away from Jagannath Puri and tossed him to Kurmadesh. So the Jagannath Puri pandas like to say that. They may have overstepped but I am not in a position to make a comment, I don’t want to get thrown away so many miles away! There are books written, they have their own set of rules and regulations, they have their set of customs which are unique and I have heard from pandas that they don’t really follow those. Those customs are definitely different than the customs Ramanuja would follow in South India. So whether that following today that is authorized for Jagannath I don’t know. I don’t know who can emulate that. We know that there is the time when Jagannath is leaving the temple, He is worshipped by the sabars, they are a separate group of servitors that take Him. And there are different pastimes like Hera Panchami where the representatives of Lakshmi tie up servants of Jagannath and abuse them. There are many kinds of traditions about worshipping. I heard that the person that drives the horses of the chariot, he sits there with a whip and the whole time he is swearing at the horses, you lazy good for nothing whoosh… that is part of thing, they have one guy sitting with a whip and lashing the paper mace horses and swearing at them. As a charioteer would do you know, they tend to get heavy with the horses! So they have all kinds of little traditions you know and maybe they speculate and adding some, it is like an ocean. We have just now got the books and are trying to install some, we have 56 offerings at Jagannath temple in Mayapur and we are trying to do a worship of Jagannath so that He feels at home there. I didn’t come across anywhere where they kick Jagannath but it seems pretty far out. I never heard that before. There is a book though, a very big book about the different timings and they have an entirely different system of offerings all the time, many offerings, big opulent offerings and many different festivals with different dresses they change for Jagannath 24 veshas – Padma vesha, Ganesha vesha, different like elephant dress, lotus dress, we just have one or two in Mayapur. They have the lotus and the elephant and there are like 24 different ones you can get. So later when we get a chance to study we got just recently the book you can ask the pandas there, the best people to tell you. The pandas often criticize, they are not following they say, they are not supposed to do that. Actually there are rules and regulations, they are definitely different than Ramanuja’s style of worship in South India. It is much more a spontaneous kind of a worship but it is such a unique situation, Jagannath Puri, to a large degree they have taken advantage of Lord Jagannath’s mercy. Like Jagannath Puri is a holy dham, so it says even if you eat fish there it is the same as being vegetarian! So a lot of people eat fish. But then like Bhakti Siddhanta Saraswati Thakur, he said that the point is that a devotee is not a vegetarian, he is a prasadtarian. He should only want to eat prasadam. So actually we don’t eat vegetarian, we eat Krishna prasadam. So therefore devotees shouldn’t eat fish. Otherwise how will they get love of Godhead? They won’t get love of Godhead by eating non prasadam. So that is certain, unique things about Jagannath Puri but they stretch it to the maximum. So you find a lot of pujaris, whether they have love of God is highly questionable. Or you can say it is not a question at all. We have to follow our own guru parampara. We have our own tradition; we follow our guru parampara. Prabhupad said, if we built another Jagannath Puri temple, go in front of the existing one and chant Hare Krishna, Jagannath will walk over with His brother and sister to our temple. So now when I saw the Jagannath play by Tamal Krishna maharaj we really got inspired that we have to do it subsequently. We have to be reminded that we have to build exactly a duplicate Puri temple and go in front of the temple and chant, that will get the pandas worried! But whatever Prabhupad said is absolute! We have faith! Jagannath will come!

Time over! Hare Krishna!

Transcribed by: Jayaraseshwari dd 11 September 2016