19920103 Arrival Address

(Disclaimer: The following is a machine-generated transcript and may contain errors or inaccuracies. It will be reviewed and verified against the original audio soon.)

The following is an Arrival Address given by His Holiness Jayapatākā Swami Mahārāja on January 3, 1992 – in Mathurādeśa.

Thank you for your reception. Accepting on behalf of the Brahma, Madhya Madhua, Gauḍīya, Vaishnav Sampradāya, spiritual masters, the previous acharyas. Yes, I am one of their representatives. So out of respect for their greatness, accept your worship and respect and pray that previous acharyas may all give you their blessings. Which topic did I need to speak on at this point? A little philosophical talk or something? What’s been happening since I was here last? It was here in August, I believe, end of July. So in the months following that, there was some rathiaktra in Malaysia, which I went to. There’s a city called Tilag inten that doesn’t have a temple. It has a number of devotees, doctors and estate managers and other well situated people, plus some regular people. But they organize every year a rath yātrā. It’s like a namhat. They meet every Sunday together.

So they get about 7000 people to come for the rathyatra. In fact, it’s one of the biggest rathyatras in the year, bigger than many of the rathiatras organized by the established temples, because this is the main function and they organize it quite well. All the temples come also. So there’s about ten rathyatras like that in Malaysia. And there was another Mathiatran IPO, which is the third largest city in Malaysia in the month of August. Then for a couple of days, I went down to Melbourne, Australia, came back up and went to. Back to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, in Melbourne, one of the devotees who was connected before with Bangalore has organized congregational programs for the Melbourne temple. And they have a lot of professional people, primarily from the indian community, who are participating in their program.

They have their own class on a Wednesday or Thursday, forget which day, believe Wednesday. Then on Saturday, they do some book distribution or some preaching. And from the temple. And Sunday they help to organize the Sunday feast. From the temple they do the main cooking and everything for the Sunday feast. So they have about 30, 40, I don’t know, they have quite a few, maybe more than 50 now, people actively involved in this program. So Vijay Gopīkesh is coordinating that, and he’s moved up to a highly respected program now in the temple. So I went there to encourage those devotees, a lot of them taking shelter of me, and came right back to Kualampur, where we had an initiation ceremony in the evening. And the next day there was a Namhat conference in a place near Penang island called Bukit Mertajam.

About 250 Namhat preachers came from all over northern Malaysia. And we had a program, seminar, discussion on Namhat. And then there was a groundwork laid for having a padi atra festival in the month of December. So then I got an information that there was a special program in Bangladesh organized. They wanted me to be the chief guest. So I flew from Singapore to Bangladesh to Malaysia, from Malaysia to Singapore to Bangladesh, and in Chittagong, in a place called Jamshid hall, which is supposed to be where indian independence, or some historical aspect of indian independence was, freedom movement was enacted there. So that hall was big capacity, about 20, 30,000 people without chairs, just sitting in. It’s a big stage and a big festival area. So there are members of parliament from the hindu community, the Nepal ambassador, indian high commissioner.

They all spoke on the occasion of Janmas to me, and I was the chief guest. I spoke. I was only one to speak about Kṛṣṇa consciousness. Everything else a little bit political, but that’s what you expect from politicians. So everyone was appreciating that someone wrote something about Kṛṣṇa and Jamasj there. I am actually politically concerned in that country because the Hindus are a minority, only 20%, and a lot of difficulties they have faced in the past year. So they feel very encouraged, though, that Kṛṣṇa consciousness has given them a kind of an identity. We do programs throughout the year in all the different districts of Bangladesh. They’re very good devotees of Lord Chitandi, in the sense that they’re very dedicated to Lord Chitandi.

So anyway, from Chittagong, I went to Dhaka, where our temple had been attacked last year, so we had to reconstruct it, and we put the deities in the. In the new temple room. We had a fire, ya gya, and some ceremonies, initiation ceremony. And then about eleven, about 07:00, I flew back to Calcutta. It was Jamastami day, and drove out to Māyāpur, reached there 1130 at night in time for the abhishek, for Rana Manu. One day we covered two, three different cities. Sometimes they have the very tight programs. So in Māyāpur, there was also thousands of visitors for the Janmastermi festival, and the next day for Prabhupāda, Vyāsa Pūjā. They prepared over 500 preparations for prabhats. We asked pūjā peace, and different devotees made their offerings on that occasion. So in the meantime, after that, toward northeast India, or laid the foundation for.

We’re gonna. We’re gonna. We planned. What we’re doing right now is I went to that time because in the months of November, December and January, right now, we’re doing 90 days of nonstop festivals through Assam, Bengal and Arissa. And they’re going to be entering in Teresa about the 6 January. I am supposed to join them on the 8th and 9th. It started off in Guwahati with the governor, or Mister Miśra, who inaugurated the 90 day festival and celebrating the 25th anniversary of silver Jubilee of ISKCON. It was very interesting because, as you might know, the newspapers that in Assam there’s a group called ULFA, which has basically declared war against India, and India reciprocated with them, declared war against them. So when the governor came to our program, there was about 150 black cats.

Theyre not the little four legged ones, two legged ones with machine guns. And they had two bodyguards on me with sten guns from the airport. It was a little bit tense, but by Kṛṣṇa’s mercy, nothing happened. While in fact the governor, after giving his formal speech, he looked around and said, everybody was quite attentive devotees. And he went another half hour, just extempo, explaining how he had taken Dhiksha from a Vaishnava guru. And he really appreciated the hare Kṛṣṇa movement. And everybody should plug into the powerhouse and get the strength by spiritual practices. He said, I am only speaking this way because you’re all a spirit, a religious audience. Otherwise, if I spoke like this normally in a political audience, everyone get up and leave. So he was actually very favorable.

He went, bowed down before the deities and offered worship to the Rukmiṇī Kṛṣṇa deity, according to the Assamese, although there’s. According to the Assamese, they say that Rukmiṇī comes from Assam. And so we had Rukmiṇī Kṛṣṇa dean instead of Rādhākṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇa personally went to Guwahati. Its ancient name was Divya Pragjoteshpur. It’s the ancient temple of Kamakshya there. And it was the place of Narakasura. So Kṛṣṇa went there and had a battle with Narakasura, defeating him. And he also delivered the princesses who were captured by Banasur, and that he accepted as his 16,000 queens. So the devotees that came there from Māyāpur, in different parts of India, in different parts of the world, they visited some of these holy places. Lotus footprint of Christianity. Kṛṣṇa is there, Brahmaputra river, Viswam Viswar, Vishishta, Muni’s Bhajan place, or meditation place, like the many sacred places are there.

Then I went from there, preaching back to Māyāpur, went to south India for a meeting to Vrindavan. Then again, I came back to Assam near the end of the last days. Of the program in Assam, and the chief minister of Assam, Mister Hiteshwar Saikya, he came, and he claims to be a descendant from the thai people who had conquered over that part of India, Assam, several centuries ago. But he also said he is a vaishnava. He bowed down before our deities in Sulcar. We have a temple there. So he spoke about the need for integrating people and races, and he said Kṛṣṇa consciousness was doing that through its spiritual teaching. So he was appreciated. So I go one place and there’s some preliminary thing, and then later on it develops into another program. But it wouldn’t be fair to end the discussion about Sulcar.

I know probably very few of you may even have heard of Sulcia tucked away on the other side of India, opposite side of Bangladesh, near Chippura and Manipur. We heard of those places. Silchar used to be part of the ancient Bengal, hundreds of years ago, and part of the Kachar district was part of the Silhouette area, which is where Lord Caitanya’s parents appeared in Dhaka, Duckin, Sylhet. So at the partition, some ended india and some went to Bangladesh. So the people there speak Bengali in Sochari, and they’re basically also devoted to Lord Caitanya. So they organized a prashad distribution, which I think was apart from maybe one time I was bigger in Māyāpur. It was one of the biggest prashad distributions I ever seen.

And it was not the normal kind of feeling where, you know, you have people sit down in the road and just all the beggars come. But they put tables and chairs closed off a road, and for 1 km they had table and chairs, and at one time 510 thousand people with, I don’t know, I mean, this beyond counting 1 km, you can figure out how many thousands of people would sit down every 15 minutes, a new batch and members of the legislative assembly were coming and taking prasadam public, rich and poor, everyone. And they gave khichri, which is like punggol, little liquidity with chutney, a vegetable and sweet rice porphyry preparation, to 50,000 people, tables and chairs like that. Otherwise in the street, respectable people won’t sit in the street. So they put.

They didn’t have room in the temple, so they put the tables and chairs set and they gave everybody on banana leaves. This is quite a. Has some pictures. It’s a pretty amazing program. So I was there with bhakti, churu Maharaj. We wanted to get out of there no matter how we tried. That was the time when indian airlines had called a flash strike. We couldn’t get out, and then they cancelled the flight. So I was tucked away on the other side of India, and I had a Bangladesh visa, but I didn’t bring my passport, so otherwise I would have escaped to Bangladesh. So were stuck in Wakitur Maharaj. Both of we had programs we had to get to. So after doing an evening program there the next morning at 03:00 a.m. We drove over the Himalaya, we call it the Megalaya mountains.

Going through these tribal areas, 13 hours drive to get to Guwahati, a beautiful area, though rivers and jungles. Some places even had roads for constructing the road. It’s only 240 km, but it took 13 hours. So were averaging 16 km an hour because it wasn’t. You’re going this way, you’re going this way. The road is like that. In fact, when we finally, we thought we had crossed soon, and we started, we came there, built a new road. We’re going in a district, reach through the jungles that came up. And were going through a quarry where the army was taking rocks out to make the road. And they kind of had, up to that point, made the road, and they were going forward when there was suddenly a landslide. And everyone started screaming and a big boulder was rolling down.

I looked out the window, was coming right to our car, but the driver, when everyone screamed, it, just braked. And I said, hare Kṛṣṇa, you know, get going, you know. And the driver singing. And somehow I went forward, and that boulder, boom, boom, just went and missed car by about six inches right behind. So a little excitement everywhere. So that’s what happened. I assam in November, in the meantime, in September, October, actually, I had taken a tour of the west, gone to Poland and Italy, Switzerland, England, then went to America, South America, for a meeting in Ecuador, Peru. All the leaders of Latin America came together, because I have been preaching in Latin America since 1980, so I am still one of the G, B, C, s there.

So I went there for the meeting, and then three days, after three days meeting, came back to Miami, where the north american leaders were gathering together for a meeting. So actually there in North America, that organized a special foundation, which is called the ISKCON foundation, where the about 20 leading life members and congregational members, with five leaders of the temples in North America have formed this foundation with the idea of raising a lot of funds for paying back all the mortgages in the temples and for defending ISKCON and organizing things. So their goal was that Henry Ford’s grandson, ambush is the chairman and some different people, one mister Modi from Washington’s member and other member, some seraph or something from Los Angeles. Each of these persons have donated 5500 thousand dollars to $1 million or more to ISKCON.

They’re all very big donors, and so bringing them all together to organize fundraising and different central programs. So we had a budget to make a preliminary for their campaign. They needed to raise $800,000. So the first 1 hour of the meeting, amongst themselves, they raised about $260,000 of it, which is, well, $1 million is three crores of rupees. So 300,000 is almost a crore rupees in 1 hour. And they said that was only half of the one third of the one half of the people in the meeting had made their pledge. The other half are going to pledge in the next few days, I don’t know how much. They said that they felt they could easily collect 8 million in one year’s time.

They had a whole agenda to change public relations for ISKCON, have training camps to train all the temple presidents in North America, how to manage their temples financially, or, you know, the technical parts of it, business administration of the temples better. They gave out free books on public relations, and they have a whole agenda, quite detailed. So they’re trying to organize to keep up with the changing times in North America. And their program, of course, is also to expand the membership. They brought in some experts who said that everyone should be made a member, maybe not a life member, but some kind of a member, and they should be cultivated and they should be engaged in devotional service this way. That’s the way that big organizations maintain relation with people, the devotees.

After the professionals spoke, they gave different quotes from the vedas and from Prabhupdas teachings, how Prabhupāda wanted us to engage the life members and develop a very close relationship with them so that they can advance spiritually. So on to show how, for the professional state, what Prabhupāda said is very much parallel. But then we had a private meeting after all the big lecturers left and analyzed what was our progress in North America. And then everyone gave themselves a very low mark as far as really implementing the things. So like that they have a lot of goals. This year was a year that ISKCON has been asked to set goals for each temple and for each zone and for the whole world.

And next year, this year, in February, we will be meeting in Māyāpur and analyzing what our progress has been in the first 25 years of ISKCON, and then make five year goals for the hundredth anniversary of Shula Prabhupāda in 1996. So I had to go to all these different meetings, because this year I am the secretary of the world, ISKCON. A few years ago, I was trying to encourage people that we should cultivate people that are not living in temples, and that would be the real strength of spreading Kṛṣṇa consciousness, of people who are living in their homes, working outside. They would spread Kṛṣṇa consciousness. But I didn’t get a lot of response at first.

But now, in the past ten years, since I started the campaign, now it’s the main focus that everyone understands that, which what I have been saying all along is the temples are training centers and places where devotees can get some association and inspiration as a base for full time preachers, but full time devotees who are in their home, but they may be part time preachers, they’re like unlimited how many of them there can be, and they get strength from the temples. So now this is what basically the whole goal is in North America, to have various kinds of members, those who can help financially, or those who can help with service, or who can help in any way, to engage them in devotional service for their own spiritual advancement. And so a lot of people are getting inspired. Things seem to really be improving.

Like india, naturally, people respect the sannyāsī as a sadhu, but in America, people don’t have that training. So the congregation also doesn’t know how to look at the Brahmanas or the sannyasis in the temple. So properly. But now that this is proper relationship established, things are improving much better and showing a lot of promise. Anyway, I am involved and I am a monitor for the congregational preaching in ISKCON. I am supposed to monitor ISKCON’s progress and report to the g, b, c what the progress is and what are the areas that need more attention. So in one sense, of course, this program here is like that, because everyone here naturally has their own occupations, but they gather together and do their prayers, and they help to involve other people.

So hopefully, the numbers will be involved in these programs go on increasing here and increasing in all other parts of the world nowadays, too. So anyway, how much detail do you want? So then, more recently, I just, I was going to come here directly from, I was invited to go to South Africa for the first time. I went there over Christmas, just after Christmas, and there they had a big festival in Durban. There’s about 800,000 Indians, people from indian origin living in Durban and over about a million in South Africa. So now they have abolished the apartheid laws segregating the different people. So at our festival there were people not only from the indian community, about 200,000 people came from the indian community. But tens of thousands people came from the white and black communities there.

It’s a very big festival program going from 11:00 a.m. To 11:00 p.m. Every day. Big panda and many booths. Question and answer Prashad distribution to everybody that came over 200,000 plates. One businessman, he purchased 200,000 plates and said, I want one serving. They go on each plate. I want all the plates distributed as soon as they could go. It was right on the beach front. But I couldn’t get the reservation from Mauritius to Dubai. I had thought that it was already made when I made all the arrangements because I went travel agent, there was a light member said that it would be possible. But he hadn’t actually made the reservation. So when went to go then there was no reservation available.

So that’s why I had to go back to Bombay and because this wasn’t a holiday on the first we thought this was a holiday. So I shifted over to go to Bahrain first and come here. It seems that in the future both Muscat and Bahrain want me to just come either to Bahrain or Muscat because everybody wants the whole weekend. Nobody wants to share time like that. When I went, I found that devotees are very enthusiastic. They just installed big deities in Poland and two different places. Deities were sent to India from India. Now in Russia there’s so much book distribution going on now it’s previous republics of Soviet Union that apparently in Russia alone, the russian language they’re distributing through public campaign. They have advertisements in all the buses, tramps, billboards everywhere. Bhagavad Gītā.

So by VPP people are sending away for Bhagavad Gītā and some days up to 2000 orders are coming in prepaid. Such a demand for Bhagavad Gītā and they’re not giving out the Bhagavad Gītā’s free. They’re printing there. But with the inflation, the cost that the Bagua gītā, thousand pages in Russian with the full color pictures and the big Bhagavad Gītā it cost almost one week’s salary for some of the people there. But still they’re getting 2000 a day. People will. So you can imagine that if you give a week’s salary to buy a book will you read that book, the whole family will read it. I mean, the whole. They’re gonna definitely. Each book is gonna be read by a lot of people. So they’re really fired up. They sent a challenge out to all the temples that.

So we’re gonna be number one this year. Now you can fight amongst yourselves. Who’s gonna be number two? I don’t know the final result because it just ended. The marathon of the December month is the main marathon. So, I mean, if I fax la, I could probably find out. But we won’t know the full picture until mid January when all the scores come. I think the deadlines about the 10 January descend in this course. I heard you were here having a big December marathon. Very good. How many books are pursued? That’s huge. Bombay actually had a particular plan. You are doing it on behalf of Bangalore Bombay. Who gets the score? Bombay or Muskrat? And Bombay will take it. They will take the credit. Should be mentioned. How are they doing? Hundred thousand at least. The individual scores have been put there.

These are list the top distributors for the month of December. So put the top 300 distributors. Well, here we didn’t have the full. You can give that individual name and give like some code name and you below that. Oh, the whole world is also every temple.