19960417 Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 3.2.30

The following is a class given by His Holiness Jayapatākā Swami on April 17th, 1996 in Sweden. The class begins with a reading from the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, 3rd Canto, Chapter 2, Verse 30.

Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 3.2.30

prayuktān bhoja-rājena
māyinah kāma-rūpinah
līlayā vyanudat tāms tān
bālah krīdanakān iva

Translation (by His Divine Grace Abhay Charan Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda): The great wizards who were able to assume any form were engaged by the King of Bhoja, Kaṁsa, to kill Kṛṣṇa, but in the course of His pastimes the Lord killed them as easily as a child breaks dolls.

Purport: The atheist Kaṁsa wanted to kill Kṛṣṇa just after His birth. He failed to do so, but later on he got information that Kṛṣṇa was living in Vṛndāvana at the house of Nanda Mahārāja. He therefore engaged many wizards who could perform wonderful acts and assume any form they liked. All of them appeared before the child-Lord in various forms, like Agha, Baka, Pūtanā, Śakaṭa, Tṛṇāvarta and Dhenuka (Gardabha), and they tried to kill the Lord at every opportunity. But one after another, all of them were killed by the Lord as if He were only playing with dolls. Children play with toy lions, elephants, boars and many similar dolls, which are broken by the children in the course of their playing with them. Before the almighty Lord, any powerful living being is just like a toy lion in the hands of a playing child. No one can excel God in any capacity, and therefore no one can be equal to or greater than Him, nor can anyone attain the stage of equality with God by any kind of endeavor. Jñāna, yoga and bhakti are three recognized processes of spiritual realization. The perfection of such processes can lead one to the desired goal of life in spiritual value, but that does not mean that one can attain a perfection equal to the Lord's by such endeavors. The Lord is the Lord at every stage. When He was playing just like a child on the lap of His mother Yaśodāmayī or just like a cowherd boy with His transcendental friends, He continued to remain God, without the slightest diminution of His six opulences. Thus He is always unrivaled.

Thus ends the Bhaktivedanta Swami translation and purport to the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 3rd Canto, 2nd Chapter, 30^th Verse.

Oṁ Tat Sat!

Jayapatākā Swami: This chapter is entitled, “Remembrance of Lord Kṛṣṇa.” Here Kaṁsa, he must have thought and his wizards also thought that the killing Kṛṣṇa was going to be child play. Just like for some grown person to kill a child isn’t difficult. Of course it is a heinous crime, despised by people all over the world, when a small child is mercilessly killed. When we see the modern-day atrocities which are going on often in the different parts of the world; the thing which makes the most discussed to see a small child be tortured or maimed or killed. Because the child is innocent, has no chance to defend. So here Kaṁsa is giving the order. There’s this little child in Gokula, but He is my enemy. So we should go and murder that child, assassinate it. You can do anyway you want. So you have Pūtanā. Well, just to be sure you get that child, Pūtanā, you just kill all the babies that are under one year old age. Just kill anyone. So that way you will be sure you get Kṛṣṇa.

So the different demons they went with this idea to kill Kṛṣṇa, and they were very confident of themselves, of their own power, because they had this mystical power. One can get mystical power in a number of ways. One can get the mystical power through process of yoga, then that is… you know the white power. One gets aṣṭa-siddhi by the yogic process. Sometimes one can also get mystic powers by performing different types of penances, austerities and worshipping different demigoddesses or gods, or by doing some kind of magical tantric… black tantric of worship of these… different powerful devas or devīs. So somehow or another these wizards had been able to accrue these black mystical powers. They are able to transform their shape and to do some different wonderful things. So they have become very self-confident. “Because we have these powers, there is nothing that anybody can do to us. We can easily defeat a child. If he is the enemy of our dear friend Kaṁsa, what better gift could we give him than to just slaughter this child.”

The demons become very proud of their powers, and if they get mystic powers, well it really goes to their head. Rāvaṇa had become the king of the Rākṣasas. He became so powerful because of his worship of Śiva and his different austerities that he became invincible to the devas, and the devas became controlled by him. In fact his son was… defeated Indra and became known as Indrajit, the one who could defeat Indra… who defeated Indra. Apparently, all the devas had been put on the step of Rāvāṇa, so that when he would walk up to his throne, on the steps of his throne were the different devas that were captured and tied down. So he would just step on their bodies to go upto his throne. He was very proud of his having defeated all these devas, and because of the superior mystic powers of Rāvaṇa they couldn’t move. Apparently one day Nārada Muni suggested that, “You are letting this devas off very light because you are stepping on their back. Everyone knows it’s easy to tolerate being stepped on the back, but if you would have turned them around and stepped on their stomach, then it would be much more difficult for them to tolerate, much more injurious to them. Hahahaha!” (laughter)

Rāvaṇa thought, “Oh! Very great idea, ok turn them over, now let’s step on their belly.”

And of course Nārada’s idea was because you see all of the planets were looking down their influence was directed away. But now when they were all looking up, they could look at Ravāṇa, and they could cast all their malefic glances on him to further hasten his defeat in the hands of Śrī Rāma.

So Rāvaṇa, when he asked for a blessing, he said he didn’t want to be defeated by any other Rākṣasa or any of the devas. He never asked for any blessing to be not be defeated by human being or by an animal, because the human beings and animal are such puny, weak, insignificant creatures, he didn’t even consider them to be a threat. So he didn’t ask for a blessing to be protected from them. So he had a benediction, he couldn’t be killed by a Rākṣasa or a deva or by any form of by a higher entity. So the Supreme Lord, He appeared as a human being… in the form of a human, as Rāma. So he could deal directly with… he was accompanied by the monkeys, and the bears and other animals. So here was the army led by humans and animals which Rāvaṇa didn’t have any specific benediction to be protected from. But if the Lord appears as a human being or as anything, that is unlimitedly powerful.

So here Kṛṣṇa of course… he has come as the Supreme Personality of Godhead but he is playing like a small child. In the previous verse it is mentioned, just like a lion cub is playing, even though lions are such ferocious, powerful entities… animals, the king of the jungle, but their cubs roll around and play and they may be… they hit out in the air and they frolic and sometimes two lion clubs will roll on one another and play with one another in mock battles and the lions watch the antics of their cubs and find it very amusing. So it is said that Kṛṣṇa, although he is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, but he was playing in Vṛndāvana like a lion cub. So many different kinds of childhood pastimes.

Just to add spice… here Kamsa sending one after another different wizards, these different demons to kill Kṛṣṇa. So in the midst of Kṛṣṇa loving pastimes with his associates, you know in comes the different demons - Pralambāsura coming as a cowherd boy in disguise and actually entering into the pastimes and wrestling and playing. We can understand that there must have been so many cowherd boys that if one…. extra one entered in it, it wasn’t immediately noticed. Of course Kṛṣṇa could understand that this boy was a bit different, and engineered it so that Balarāma was being carried by the Pralambāsura. When Pralambāsura thought, “Well let me get… I really wanted to get Kṛṣṇa but let me get rid of this Balarāma first because then it will be easier to get rid of Kṛṣṇa.” So like this each of these demons they came in…. in a very deceptive way they tried to finish off Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma… and Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma being absorbed in their childhood pastimes, when they realized, “Oh, here is another demon.”, then just like a baby who breaks the toys, he breaks the head of these demons… head or legs or whatever… throws them in the trees.

Now Prabhupāda is giving us a new insight here, you see… just like these demons, they have little power, and they thought that because of this power, they had become equal or greater than God. Of course, being demons, they didn’t… no belief in God itself, but they were considering themselves invincible. When a demon thinks that they have unlimited power and they are invincible then they think that they can control others and do whatever they want. When a devotee… even they have unlimited potency from the Lord, they simply want to use whatever power they have to serve the Lord, and to do good to others, to uplift the people.

Therefore you see, the difference between the demoniac kings in history like Hiraṇyakaśipu or Rāvaṇa or Kaṁsa. When they took over, they dismantled the institutions of welfare for the Lord and they began to demonize the people to different degrees. On the other hand, we have great Kings like Ambarīṣa who was so powerful that even a great mystic yogī like Durvāsā was powerless before him. In fact, he was almost killed because of an offense to him. But in spite of his vast empire, he simply did everything in a very humble way as a service to the Lord. Duryodhana, we can see how he was dealing. Yudhiṣṭhira, he got the potency, the power, he was performing different yajñas… aśvamedha-yajña or Rājasūya sacrifice and this way he was engaging people in Kṛṣṇa conscious activities. He offered Kṛṣṇa the first remnant of the sacrifice. Nārada was there, and others were there, but they offered Kṛṣṇa as the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

So the devotees, even they get power, they use it for Kṛṣṇa, which is something we have to be careful of because the materialistic tendency is the misuse power. Like the common saying is absolute power means absolute corruption… things like that. That’s true if one has a demoniac mentality, but not if one is in a proper Kṛṣṇa conscious mentality. It wasn’t that everyone who had absolute power became corrupted in Kṛṣṇa consciousness. Those who had the supreme power, they utilized in a proper way. So, the point is, having the proper consciousness. If one has a devotee consciousness, then the power is not a problem. If one has a demoniac consciousness, then the power becomes problematic both for the demon as well as for others. But generally people, when they get a little bit of power, then it goes to their head. Prabhupāda was… I remember when we together with him in 1968 in Montreal, around that time was the year of the Montreal World Fare. I don’t know French hardly… a few words only. Tenet is home or something. It was man and his world you see… English translation and they were very proud. Prabhupāda, he said, “What is this? ‘Man and his world’? It’s God’s world, it’s not man’s world.” He will also pick out how very easily this egoistic consciousness of man. Man and his world, that consciousness is what is destroyed the ecology today. We think it’s our world. Human beings think this is our world and if we want to we can mess around with it, but we get shown that if it was our world then we could adjust things when we mess it up, but we pollute the atmosphere, we create the acid rain, we create the various problems. Whenever I go to Chili, they always tell us … in Buenos Aires in South America how the ozone… and also Australia, the ozone hole… the big hole in the ozone layer down there… which they had to put sun glasses on the cows, otherwise they will go blind. (laughter) Here in the north I don’t think that you have that ozone hole but somehow it comes up in the South and people get skin cancer very easily in the Southern Hemisphere because of the thin layer, or the non-existent layer of ozone because ‘man and his world’ is destroying God’s planet by their imbalances.

So the true consciousness that is needed to be established is God’s world. It’s man’s and God’s world, and how we should treat God’s world according to his law. It’s Kṛṣṇa world. So this theme I could see that Prabhupāda, he kept bringing up these points. One time it was winter and before winter I think Prabhupāda left, but what happened was that in the newspaper, the Montreal city government had published picture of their new snow blower that they had procured which was going to deal with the snow because just like Sweden and Canada, it gets quite cold and there is a lot of snow. So here was a machine that could automatically… I am sure now there is many such machines, it was ’68. But this was the first invention that could take the snow and blow it off the road. (*sfx*) And it is a very common machine now but that time it was a very new machine, and so the head line was, “Man Conquers Nature.” (laughter), and then Prabhupāda, “How ridiculous. They can’t stop it from snowing, they can’t know make it warmer. all they can do is they can blow the snow three, four meters off to the side, and because they could blow the snow a few meters off then they… man has conquered nature. So what are these people, what do they think? How ridiculous! As soon as they discovered the D.N.A molecule was essential, building block life, they immediately thought, “Next thing we are going to do is we are going to create life. Then head line started coming in the ’65, “God is Dead. (laughter) Science is God.”  Of course they can never create the life and now if some people are thinking that maybe science is creating so much death, that  people because of little bit of a whiplash, kind of a reaction, now people have become very much allergic to over-science, and the situation in Europe now with the mad cow situation, where science has again outdone themselves in the demoniac creativity by feeding cows with animal, non-vegetarian, flesh by-products of garbage from the slaughter houses and that created this disease which in the cows, where their brain becomes like a sponge. And now they find the human beings who eat that beef, some of them have gotten this disease and the scientists are gonna say, “Well, no it’s just an accident. It could never be from this purpose.”, but now in Italy there are finding that, “Well, there is no other good explanation that could be that this is the cause.” So now their solution is that, “Kill all the cows.” Right? The slaughterhouses are not set up to kill that many cows at one time, so they thought, “Well, let’s take them in the ocean and dump them in the sea.”

This is what we are facing. People wonder, “Why are there problems in the world? Why are we you know suffering diseases and things?” If people could just understand the law of karma, that for everything we do there is a reaction and that includes what we do to animals, what we do to nature. The biggest problem of the modern world that Prabhupāda said was that it is a Godless society. They don’t accept the supreme power of the Lord and therefore they just do whatever they feel like. Right? The government is trying, “Quickly we have to do something, our economy is going to be affected. Let’s get rid of those cows, troublesome.” They created the problem by having created these cows, by their whole… and now their solution is, kill the cows. What did the cow do? So in this way, we get a world which is just totally insane and the only hope of sanity is that people have to be brought up to the knowledge of these Kṛṣṇa Conscious principles, the Bhāgavad-gītā… what is nature? What is life? I mean before they can even begin to understand about Kṛṣṇa, they need to understand what is the basic law that governs this universe. Of course, if they can understand Kṛṣṇa, even they don’t understand all these… some people they just love Kṛṣṇa, you see… that’s what the Vrajavāsīs… they didn’t know all the laws of nature…. everything so… but they knew that they loved Kṛṣṇa and they respected the Vedas and they followed and that used to be what is happening in the centuries. At least people respect certain natural laws. But because of being over proud by little bit of scientific progress, they think now we can control everything and we can do whatever we want and of course we don’t know what’s going to happen with all the genetic playing-around the people that are doing. Occasionally we see in aeroplanes they come up with different, I don’t know but some kinds of movies about what happens with weird monsters on the screen, I don’t know the whole thing but they creates some monsters because of this genetic changing or this or that. Could be. Who knows what is going to happen.

So these wizards in Kṛṣṇa time, they wanted to kill Kṛṣṇa directly and it is still going on. I mean, basically killing Kṛṣṇa or killing His order, killing the natural law that He has created. Even killing the cows which are dear to Him. The whole thing is demoniac and Prabhupāda came to put an end to demoniac consciousness by introducing Kṛṣṇa consciousness. By putting an end to the material consciousness. They have to replace it with God consciousness. Actually everybody, most everybody is really trying to become God. I mean if you just look at the objective, they really just want to be free from any kind of restriction as much as possible. So when a person gets into spiritual life and then they get mystic power, then they think, “You know, I am as good as God. I can do anything.” Or someone gets … the Māyāvādīs, they merge into the light, “Now I have become God.” This is the biggest thing, become God. And that you have what’s that one, so called sādhu in India who was claiming to be God and then… the 'bhagavāna' Rajneesh and then after claiming to be God, he got disease and problems, so many different problems were happening and then so he decided, actually I am not God, but there is no God. (laughter) Right? It’s like if you can’t be God, then there is no God. So then, you just forget about it. There is no God, I can do whatever I want anyway. So, no God, and Be God, these are the two sides of the Māyāvādī and the Śūnyavādī coin. Either you want to be God, that means that if you are God then you can do whatever you want because you are God, there is no one higher than you. Or if you can’t be God, then at least there shouldn’t be any God. Then he can still do what he wants because there is nobody higher, because everybody is equally non-god. 

But the actual reality that there is God, there is a Supreme Being, there is a higher order, there are laws that govern the universe and we are bound by those laws, and if we have a choice. You are cooperating with Him and then we can enjoy His support and His love, or if we go against His laws and He has His material energy and she just makes life complicated for us because we are going against the natural laws and we are creating our own problems. So then we get people, they think, “Why is there so much suffering in the world. It’s all Gods fault. Right? It’s not anybody else’s.” We are all trying to become God, we break every law he has given us whether we know them or not but we are breaking them. Ignorance of the law is no excuse - it’s the common legal phrase. So people try to blame God, when you go on preaching…. Why there is so much suffering? So many people are praying to God, still there is so much suffering in the world. So many people are not praying, and so many people are may be praying and breaking the laws. So there is a need, yajña vai viṣṇuḥ… yajñārthāt karmaṇo anyatra karma loka bandhana (Bg. 3.9). If we engage ourselves in activities offered as a sacrifice to Kṛṣṇa, we are not tied up by these entanglements. But if we don’t engage in Kṛṣṇa conscious activities, then we simply get entangled in the complexities of karma, and what basically people are facing today is… they are getting entangled up in the karmas.

And whether you know… sometimes a naughty child doesn’t want to obey the parents, doesn’t want to do what they are supposed to do and they throw temper tantrums and they get spoiled. But eventually they have to grow up and be trained. They have to follow certain discipline, that they are not the Lord in the family. There are parents and there are other children. So if a child is properly trained and disciplined, they become a productive member of the society, otherwise they become what is known as the spoilt brat and they create havoc. So a society has you know produced a lot of people who are spoilt and what’s needed, even that all religions should at least unite on this platform. There is a Supreme Lord and we should follow his laws. There must be some common laws that we all agree on. Of course, then you get so many strange philosophies. You get some people say, “We believe in God and he has given us laws, but the flesh is weak and we cannot follow them, and his son died for our sins, so doesn’t really matter what we do anyway, we can do anything we want because anyway we have gotten paid for.” You get all kinds of distortions. But the bottom-line is that we should follow the laws of God. There really is no excuse not to, and to get the strength to do that we need to worship the Lord. So people may follow different methods of worship. We respect all the methods but in Kali-yuga, the most powerful method is chanting,

Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare
Hare Rāma, Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma, Hare Hare

and the proof is that by chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa, even a person with very demoniac habits or very materialistic nature, in a short time becomes transformed and naturally develops a taste and desire to serve Kṛṣṇa. Now that is really something amazing. And Prabhupāda mentioned how some parents had come to them. When they were with us they didn’t look so bright faced. What have you done to these young boys and girls that they look so bright faced? Mmhm! What did Prabhupāda do? He gave us Hare Kṛṣṇa mahā-mantra, the Bhagavad-gītā, the transcendental literatures. He gave us proper diet - kṛṣṇa-prasādam and proper activities of Kṛṣṇa consciousness. He gave us his mercy. So in a sense, these demons, they not only tried to kill Kṛṣṇa but they also tried to kill a lot of his friends. And some of them were just focused on Kṛṣṇa, but some were more…. they wanted to get Kṛṣṇa, was their objective but in doing so they didn’t mind killing many off his friends too. Like Aghāsura, he killed all the cowherd boys. Ate them so that he could eat Kṛṣṇa. Of course Kṛṣṇa saved his cowherd boys, brought them back from their unconscious state and killed the Aghāsura snake demon. But somehow in the world we face this demoniac attacks, demoniac problems. But if as devotees we remain surrendered to Kṛṣṇa, and continue to do our duty of spreading this saṅkīrtana movement, then Lord Caitanya said that no external power can stop us. We have to be very tactful and go about it with a proper strategic manner, but we should continue going on with the spreading Kṛṣṇa Consciousness, no matter what. Then Kṛṣṇa will help us to overcome the obstacles. But Prabhupāda did warn us not to lose our own service attitude. 

Now if we adopt a demoniac attitude, we begin to despise other devotees or to commit offences to Kṛṣṇa and his loved ones, that’s the big problem, because then it becomes not so clear that Kṛṣṇa should protect us or not because we are acting against Kṛṣṇa. So we have to continue acting for Kṛṣṇa at all costs and then Kṛṣṇa will certainly protect us, because he promises his devotees that they will never perish…. na me bhaktaḥ praṇaśyati (Bg. 9.31). So Lord Caitanya … Śrī Kṛṣṇa is easily defeating all these demons and wizards by His killing them, just like baby kills… breaks it’s toys.

And in a similar way Lord Caitanya, He killed the demoniac nature of the demons. We know that Lord Caitanya didn’t bring any weapons and He didn’t kill anybody as such, because in Kali-yuga of course you would have to kill practically everybody (laughter), but so many people. So that wasn’t His method. His method was rather to love everyone, and by His personal beauty, by His chanting, by His own spiritual arms, spiritual loving weapons, to kill the demoniac nature of the people, and that’s even more difficult really. I mean just kill the demon is one thing. I mean there is many governments when they… I just heard this horrible thing about one lady who was jogging, and somebody jumped on her and then she tried to defend herself, and she ran away and person got angry and created a big… that’s a daily kind of thing going on in the world, that is not unusual thing. So people were all upset because it was in a small town. Just recently you know somewhere in Scotland, some person nobody even knew about, very much kind of a recluse, he just suddenly decided he didn’t like all the children of the town. He went into the school, primary school, and shot 16 children. Shot so many children. 16 died. Killed the teacher and then killed himself. So people get very upset, very frightened by this kind of development. Then everybody thinks, “Well it’s happening there, it won’t happen to me”, but one by one different places in the world these strange things are happening. And the government sometimes… this person he killed himself but many times they don’t. The government arrests them and then puts him in life imprisonment or hangs them or something. But they can’t change them. They don’t really change. You hardly hear of somebody like that you believe has changed. There is always a danger that they are going to do something strange again.

But here Lord Caitanya, He changed people. Jagāi, Mādhai were like that. They were just like you know…. really violent, cruel people but He changed them. They became loving, caring, socially conscious, civic sense you know… Kṛṣṇa conscious. Serving the people, serving the devotees of the Lord, serving the Lord, chanting in ecstasy, crying. Complete change over. So Lord Caitanya, He had this ability to change people’s demoniac nature and just kill it off and they’d become wonderful people. So that is what we need today.

I mean people don’t see any hope right? You look at society and, in some places, worse than others. Of course Scandinavia, everyone says it’s better but there is problems. You know, used to not be any theft. Now there is theft. People used to not throw garbage in the street, now people throw. So changes are there. Maybe here it takes longer but why even let it happen. The point is that right from the bud all over the world if people actually have God consciousness, Kṛṣṇa Consciousness, then this nature will be naturally finished. And to get that Lord Caitanya gave a very practical process. You know people, “This is a new thing, this is not our religion.” That’s why Prabhupāda is saying, “It’s everyone’s religion, why be sectarian? There is one God, and Sanskrit is the mother language, and practically most of the languages in the world.. this is just the name of God, what is the problem with changing the name of God. Then if you want to worship, he said, “I don’t have any problem.” I was surprised. Prabhupāda told us, “We can have devotees in our temple who are practicing Muslims, they can do their namaz five times a day, we don’t mind. They just have to shave up and attend maṅgala-ārati and do all the other things. They can also do namaz. We don’t mind. (laughter) They can bow down… and that was for being of course a temple resident. But apart from that, people can chant Hare Kṛṣṇa even in their homes and this is the wonderful potency of Lord Caitanya, His movement. If actually someone does it, they can get over.

But there are so many obstacles. There is the mano-dharma, and there is the specific religions that people have adopted, and there is a false ego dharma, and then there is the national dharma, and there is your sports club dharma, and there is your hobbies dharma, and you know what kind of…. it just goes on. There is so many. We should just have you know a few dharmas but now there is so many dharmas that have come there. You know some people have their rotary and lions club dharma, or may be boys scout dharma and so many occupational duties. You know now they have the this county club and the golf dharma. You have to worship the holes in the ground (laughter), offering white balls and bowing down. (laughter) So somehow or another, you know we created… we are creating everyday new dharma. If one gets tired of one, then you know they create a new one. Sports has become the big dharma now. Like the Olympics are coming up, everyone is… and people say, “What you are doing to solve these problems?”, you know. And they don’t know what we are doing is ultimately “the solution”. And there maybe some other temporary… get people to stop using spray lotions for a few years, and then that might help them, but that’s not really going to solve the problem. So many stop gap solutions like that. Don’t really solve that problem.

It’s like that story that Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura gave about the young child who had a boil in the back. You know that story? The boil in the back story? So a nine year boy had a big boil on the back. One of these throbbing carbuncles. Huge… you have in this country boils sometimes? Not so much? You get occasionally, someone might have had. In India when you eat a lot of mangoes you get boils because it creates heat in the blood, and there is different things. So sometimes you get a boil. So this boy anyway, he had a boil in his back and he was calling to his mother that, “Mummy, Mummy, this boil is hurting me!”, and he didn’t know how this boil, sometimes when they really get big, they start to just like, it throbs with the heart beat. (*hear beat sounds*) Just throbbing and paining. I mean it is amazing how a little thing on the skin can create quite a big influence in the body. So to mother he said, “Mummy, mummy, help me, I am hurting, it’s hurting me! Can’t you do something?” They called the boy’s elder sister and said, “What can we do? Look at your brother, he is suffering from these boils.”, and she said, “Oh, I know the natural way to relieve”, and she went into the forest and got some nice little leafs and put the leaves around it and she put these cool leaves, then you blow on the boil. (*blowing sound*) “Ahhhhh…” (*sigh of relief*) And the throbbing had gone for a while. He was feeling some relief you know. “Ahhh….!” Then they went off.

But after a while the leaves dried up and the boil was still there, it was just giving a little temporary relief and then you know… (*hearbeat sound*)…. “Mummy! It’s hurting again.” So how long they can just keep blowing and blowing? (*blowing sound*) (laughter). So this was not at all solving the problem. And then the uncle came. The brother of the mother. And he had been travelling in Tibet, and Thailand, and you know China and various countries, and he had learned lot about Buddhism and different things. So he just returned and she said, “You have been all over the orient and everywhere, can you help your young nephew here, he is suffering a lot.”

“Oh yes, I have a solution. What’s the problem here?”

“Oh no… he is suffering this boil, this is giving so much suffering.”

“Uh huh. You are suffering, suffering in life. Yes, yes, I know the solution. You should simply kill this boy. (laughter) Relieve him from his pain. (laughter If you kill him, no more pain. Finished. Oṁ śānti! (laughter) All over.”

But the mother was not very interested in that solution. “That was not exactly what I was looking for. Thank you my brother, why don’t you go and have a cup of herbal tea?” (laughter)

So this is what they learned from this? So then the father came back, “Look at your son, he is suffering.”

And he said, “Oh really? Okay let me go and get a doctor.” He went out and found a doctor. The doctor came, (long story short) then and looked at the boil. “Ok I have a solution.” Opened up his black bag, took out his scalpel, with a little surgical knife. The boy when he saw the knife, “AHHHH! (*scream*) No, no, he is going to kill me with that knife!! Don’t let him kill me! I would rather die in another way but not by that knife of this doctor!” He is getting all hysterical.

“It’s alright, he is not going to kill you.”

“No, No, he is going to kill me.” The doctor just went, cut the boil and put the hot compressors and drew out the bad puss and blood, rotten black blood and everything, and then cleaned it up and bandaged it and then… “Ahhh… (*sigh of total relief*) They boy was a little sore there but it was no more bum bum (*heartbeat sound*), but it was feeling better. And then the father thanked that doctor and said, “You really did a wonderful job. I want to thank you and please forgive us. My son was chastising you and thinking you are going to harm him and how can we apologise?”

And he said, “Well this is a part of our job. People don’t understand, it’s alright. I am glad that now he is feeling better, thank you.” and he left. So this little story was given by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura. Of course, it is an analogy and everybody in the drama is actually representing a certain thing.

So the boy of course is a living entity who is suffering from the material pangs. Now who is the young sister? What is that young elder sister? What is that solution? It’s the material solution. Some temporary solution. Karma-kāṇḍa or material solution, but the real problem doesn’t go. And then we have the uncle, the impersonalistic or the Śūnyavādī, the different forms of the Māyāvāda and Śūnyavāda. Their idea is that you just either cease to exist or you become one with God and merge or annihilate. And then you have the doctor who came and gave the solution. Yes, the bhakti-yogi… bonafide spiritual master. Here he has come. Of course, here the preacher, he comes in and he was chastised. The mass of people, they are thinking, “What are these people doing? What are these Hare Kṛṣṇas doing?” and they give so much mis-idea. Once somebody is cured then, “Oh thank you very much!”, everyone is appreciative. So we face this initial resistance because of ignorance, but ultimately the devotees have the real cure. But everybody thinks that the other cures are the better cures. So Lord Caitanya’s causeless mercy is like that. Give love to everyone and if you can flood the world by Kṛṣṇa consciousness literature and engage everyone in helping to spread this Kṛṣṇa conscious movement by practicing and preaching themselves, very quickly we can see a massive change in the world.

Thank you very much!

Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare
Hare Rāma, Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma, Hare Hare.