My most beloved Çréla Prabhupäda,
Please accept my most humble obeisances at the dust of your divine lotus feet on this most auspicious occasion of your 120th Vyäsa-püjä celebration! It is just remarkable that it coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of ISKCON. All glories to Your Divine Grace!
Väsudeva Ghoña, an eternal associate of Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu, wrote, yadi gaura nä hoito, tabe ki hoito: “If Lord Gaura had not appeared, what would have happened?” Similarly, this evokes in my mind a significant thought: “If you had not appeared, Çréla Prabhupäda, what would have happened?”
Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu appeared, performed His pastimes, and established saìkértana as the dharma for this Age of Kali. He also predicted that the holy name would reach every town and village on the surface of the globe. However, even after more than four hundred years had passed after Mahäprabhu’s appearance, the holy name had not been sperad worldwide. There was some chanting taking place in certain parts of Orissa and Bengal, and at Rädhä-kuëòa and a few other places. Apart from these sporadic endeavors, the holy name was truly not going anywhere. There was even a thought that Caitanya Mahäprabhu’s prediction might not be fulfilled. Two questions were frequently asked: Who would make this happen? How would this happen?
Then one hundred and twenty years ago, in Calcutta, a phenomenal occurrence took place. The Lord made your appearance possible. In 1922 Çréla Bhaktisiddhänta Sarasvaté Öhäkura instructed you to propagate Kåñëa consciousness in the Western world. After a lifetime of preparation, you went to New York in 1965, and exactly fifty years ago you became the founder-äcärya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). You tirelessly circled the globe fourteen times, spreading the holy name and propagating Kåñëa consciousness. It was you, Çréla Prabhupäda, who made Caitanya Mahäprabhu’s prediction come true.
Saìkértanaika-pitarau: Lord Gauräìga and Lord Nityänanda are the founding fathers of the saìkértana movement, but it was you who formalized that movement. Lord Caitanya made you nimitta-mätram, His instrument in founding the Hare Kåñëa movement fifty years ago. You perfectly executed the will of the Lord. This year marks the Golden Jubilee celebration of ISKCON. It is not a conventional victory celebration but the supreme victory—paraà vijayate çré-kåñëa-saìkértanam.
I believe that this victory is not commonplace. I recall how it all began: here you were, seventy years old, friendless, and practically penniless, with only your guru’s instruction in your heart. How was it possible that a person with this standing could achieve the victory, opulence, and extraordinary power that are exhibited by ISKCON today? This brings to mind the final verse in the Bhagavad-gétä, where Saïjaya declares:
yatra yogeçvaraù kåñëo yatra pärtho dhanur-dharaù
tatra çrér vijayo bhütir dhruvä nétir matir mama
“Wherever there is Kåñëa, the master of all mystics, and wherever there is Arjuna, the supreme archer, there will also certainly be opulence, victory, extraordinary power, and morality. That is my opinion.”
I want to extract çréù (opulence), vijayaù (victory), bhütiù (exceptional power), and nétiù (morality), and delve deeper to illustrate how you are the epitome of these concepts.
Çréù is translated as “opulence.” Çréla Prabhupäda, forty years ago you wrote, “[T]he Kåñëa consciousness movement actually started with only forty rupees, but now it has more than forty crores worth of property, and all this opulence has been achieved within eight or ten years” (Çrémad-Bhägavatam 8.5.47, purport). ISKCON’s assets have grown immensely since then and continue to expand. I also recall you saying that if an Indian person has a servant from the West, that is an indication of the Indian’s opulence and prestige. You had close to five thousand disciples from the West serving you. Your opulence knew no bounds.
Your vijayaù (victory) is self-evident. Fifty years ago you started with one temple in New York. You informed us that victory meant spreading Kåñëa consciousness. We would “conquer” the West by spreading Kåñëa consciousness. Caitanya Mahäprabhu spread the chanting of the holy names in India and left the task of spreading it all over the world to you, Çréla Prabhupäda—and ISKCON. Today we have no fewer than six hundred and fifty ISKCON temples, centers, schools, and colleges worldwide. We have distributed five hundred and sixteen million books. One hundred and fifty padayäträ teams, with an average of almost seventy devotees each, have walked a staggering two hundred and sixty-thousand kilometers, visiting fifty-two thousand towns and villages in one hundred and ten countries. More than six thousand festivals are celebrated annually in ISKCON worldwide, and more than one million prasädam meals are served daily as part of the Food for Life program. It is estimated that more than nine million people worship at ISKCON temples every year.
You shared with us the maxim that at its height the British Empire was “the empire on which the sun never sets.” After visiting England, you joked that in reality “The sun never rises in England.” In comparison, in the ISKCON Empire our sun is Kåñëa-sürya, and it truly never sets. Every fifteen minutes the reverberating sound of a conch shell announces the beginning of maìgala-ärati at an ISKCON temple somewhere on this planet. In that sense the warmth and light of our Kåñëa-sürya is omnipresent—constantly and consistently spreading everywhere and truly never setting.
ISKCON’s bhütih is Kåñëa’s extraordinary power. During the years when the Kåñëa consciousness movement was trying to make inroads into the former Soviet Union, it was reported in The Telegraph, a Calcutta newspaper, that Semyon Tsvigun, the deputy chief of the KGB under Andropov, had said that the three main threats to the Soviet Union were “pop music, Western culture, and Hare Kåñëa,” and that the KGB perceived the distribution of ISKCON literature as a threat since Lenin had also caused a revolution with the help of the printing press. How could anyone be surprised that a superpower such as the Soviet Union felt threatened by the Hare Kåñëas? If the power of the holy name makes the Age of Kali tremble, what can it not do to Russia? In 1976 a magician visited our Kåñëa-Balaräm Mandir and showed you and the devotees his repertoire of tricks. The magician made many objects appear and disappear. After a while you asked the magician: “What about the miseries of life? Can you make these disappear? Birth, death, disease, and old age?” The magician replied submissively, “No, that I cannot do.” At these words the magician sat down and you said, “But I can make these things disappear. That is the real magic.” Çréla Prabhupäda, this is proof of how you were extraordinarily empowered.
As for nétiù, morality, you gave your followers four regulative principles: no meat-eating, no illicit sex, no gambling, and no intoxication. There are no better or higher principles of nétiù than this.
In your purport to Çrémad-Bhägavatam 1.12.26, you state:
The symptoms of Kali are (1) wine, (2) women, (3) gambling, and (4) slaughterhouses. Wise rulers of all states should take lessons from Mahäräja Parékñit in how to maintain peace and morality by subduing the upstarts and quarrelsome people who indulge in wine, illicit connection with women, gambling, and meat-eating supplied by regularly maintained slaughterhouses. In this Age of Kali, regular license is issued for maintaining all of these different departments of quarrelsome people. So how can they expect peace and morality in the state?
You put your stamp on these substantial principles of morality. And in your purport to Bhagavad-gétä 18.78 you write:
The supreme instruction of morality is stated in the Ninth Chapter, in the thirty-fourth verse: man-manä bhava mad-bhaktaù. One must become a devotee of Kåñëa, and the essence of all religion is to surrender unto Kåñëa (sarva-dharmän parityajya mäm ekaà çaraëaà vraja). The instructions of Bhagavad-gétä constitute the supreme process of religion and of morality. All other processes may be purifying and may lead to this process, but the last instruction of the Gétä is the last word in all morality and religion: surrender unto Kåñëa.
In 1933 Çréla Bhaktisiddhänta Sarasvaté Öhäkura dispatched his first group of sannyäsés to the West. In England they were invited to the House of Lords. Upon meeting the British aristocrats, the sannyäsés were asked what it would take to become preachers like them. The sannyäsés responded that they should
just follow the four regulative principles. However, when they heard what these principles were, they said that it was impossible. Çréla Prabhupäda, you made it possible.
Wherever there is Çré Kåñëa Caitanya and Your Divine Grace, we will continue to see the attributes of opulence, victory, extraordinary power, and morality manifesting themselves in your ISKCON. You are eternally Caitanya Mahäprabhu’s man.
I remain,
Your humble servant,
Lokanäth Swami
