Japa Retreat—Srila Prabhupada’s Faith in the Holy Name

Giriraj Swami: I am going to begin the discussion of Srila Prabhupada’s faith in the holy name from before he came to America because it is almost a defining characteristic of Srila Prabhupada from the beginning, and it is really the basis of the Hare Krishna movement.

Srila Prabhupada had a godbrother named Oudh Bihari Lal Kapoor, Professor O.B.L. Kapoor, who was initiated by Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura as Adi Kesava dasa. And Srila Prabhupada in his householder life was a chemist or pharmacist. So, one day in Mathura, Srila Prabhupada met professor Kapoor, and the learned professor asked him, “You are a chemist, you know so many formulas. Do you know the formula for love of God?” And Srila Prabhupada said, “Yes, I do.” “Well, what is it?” And Srila Prabhupada replied, “tṛṇād api sunīcena taror api sahiṣṇunā amāninā mānadena kīrtanīyaḥ sadā hariḥ,” to always chant the holy name of Hari. Later, when Srila Prabhupada took sannyasa at the temple in Mathura, there was a break in the ceremony, and during the break, Akiñcana Krishnadasa Babaji Maharaja led a kirtan, and Srila Prabhupada told us that Babaji Maharaja was a paramahamsa, liberated soul, and he was certainly always absorbed in tasting the holy names. So, after the interlude during which he led kirtan, the priest who was officiating over the ceremony motioned to Babaji Maharaja, “Enough kirtan, I will do the yajña and the mantras.” So, while the priest was reciting the mantras, Babaji Maharaja was chanting japa. So, the priest motioned to Babaji Maharaja, “No japa, we are reciting the mantras.” And Prabhupada was sitting for the yajña, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and then he motioned to Babaji Maharaja, “Keep chanting Hare Krishna, keep chanting Hare Krishna.” [laughter]

And later, when Babaji Maharaja related that story to some devotees from whom I heard this story, he said, “At that moment, I knew that he would be the leader of the world Hare Krishna movement.” [applause] Then, some years later, after Srila Prabhupada went to America and then England, Germany, Japan, and eventually came back to India, Babaji Maharaja met another disciple of Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura whom Srila Bhaktisiddhanta had sent to the West to preach, and Babaji Maharaja asked him, “You went to the West, and Swami Maharaja went to the West?” Because Srila Bhaktisiddhanta was also called Srila Prabhupada, so they would call our Srila Prabhupada ‘Swami Maharaja.’ “You went to the West, and Swami Maharaja went to the West?” “Yes.” “And you preached the message of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and he preached the message of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu?” “Yes.” “And he was exceedingly successful, and you could not do anything. What is the reason?” And then, Babaji Maharaja gave the answer, “Because he had full faith in the holy name.” And it was really on the basis of his faith in the holy name that he spread the Hare Krishna movement, because he had faith that if people just chanted the Hare Krishna maha-mantra, everything else would follow.

He describes this principle. Everything that Srila Prabhupada did is substantiated by shastra, but he explained the principle on the basis of a verse from Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, “Somehow or other, engage the mind in Krishna.” Rupa Gosvami also enunciates the same principle. So, Prabhupada had faith that if somehow or other, if they engaged the mind in Krishna, the holy name of Krishna, everything else would follow. Means ceto-darpaṇa-mārjanam, the heart would be purified, and the devotees would be able to follow the regulative principles and learn the science of Krishna consciousness and preach. And when Srila Prabhupada arrived in America. . . Of course, I am not telling every detail of every step, but basically, the saṅkīrtana movement really began when he sat under the tree at Tompkins Square Park and chanted the holy name. It really sparked the Hare Krishna explosion. And if you read the description in Śrīla Prabhupāda-līlāmṛta, it is just wonderful. And the description includes accounts of different people who were there at the time, even people who are not devotees. And later, Srila Prabhupada said, “You can go anywhere in the world and do what I did and begin Krishna consciousness. You just go to some public place, sit down, chant Hare Krishna. And immediately, people will think, ‘Who is this crazy person? What is this nonsense?’ And they will gather around. And then, when they gather around, you teach them about the holy name of Krishna and the philosophy of the Bhagavad-gītā, and you begin Krishna consciousness.”

So, that was his technique. And he really had faith in the holy name. It didn’t matter what people’s moods were in the beginning because they are, like, ignorant, it is not really offensive, they are just ignorant. And once in India, there was some very unfavorable publicity about us related to something that happened in Japan, and it came in the newspapers quite a bit. So, one of the neighbors in Juhu came to Srila Prabhupada, she was very upset because she was identified as a supporter of Hare Krishna, a follower of Hare Krishna, and then the newspapers are saying all these bad things, and she didn’t know how to handle it because people were approaching her. So, she explained the situation to Srila Prabhupada, Srila Prabhupada said, “Very good, very good. They are reading and they are saying, ‘Hare Krishna is nonsense.’ They are chanting Hare Krishna.” [laughter] So, he really had a transcendental perspective.

On that subject, I will relate another incident about Srila Prabhupada’s faith in the holy name. We say faith, yes, it is faith, but it is faith based on knowledge and realization. Yes, this one began when I was in Madras and a movie came out. Well, we won’t get to that part yet. A song came out called “Hare Rama, Hare Krishna,” and it seemed to be quite a sensation because wherever we went, we would hear this song. And in India, at least then, people would play their radios very loudly. Srila Prabhupada commented, “They want to show off to the neighbors that they have a radio.” [laughter] So, wherever we went, we were hearing this song. It had sort of a nice tune and snappy beat. But it was getting to be a bit much, I just wanted to know what it was, because it is obviously, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.” So, I asked, I went to some friend’s house, an Indian person for lunch, and I said, “This song, we keep hearing this song, what does it mean?” So he said, “Well, it means with every breath that I take, chant Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.” I said, “Wow, that is our goal, that is our goal. We can’t live, we can’t take a breath without chanting Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.” That was great.

So, from Madras we went to Calcutta, and in Calcutta, people were talking about the song and the movie. The movie had opened up or was about to open up in Calcutta. And it turns out that the meaning of the words was a little different. [laughter] The meaning was, really, “With every puff that I take, Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.” And that puff was of ganja, marijuana. So, we inquired a little more, and it turned out that the movie depicted hippies who came to India, and they were smoking ganja and having illicit sex and doing all sorts of nonsense and chanting Hare Krishna, Hare Rama. The idea was that the sacred Hare Krishna maha-mantra was being debased, degraded, misused. But anyway, I didn’t know that at the time. So, when I got to Calcutta, I saw that the movie is playing, ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Rama,’ and I thought, It is perfect, we can do hari-nāma in front of the movie theater. They are already interested, so we can distribute BTGs and books and invite them to the temple, like we used to do in front of [Unintelligible 00:16:19].” So, we went to the theater, and it was okay. So then, it was like that, the one audience came out and we approached them, and there is a little interval then, the next audience went in, and then there wasn’t anyone else. So, I thought, Let me go in and take a look.

So I went in. It was so impressive. First of all, I hadn’t been in a movie theater for some years, but what made it impressive was Prabhupada. I sat there, and it began with waves coming in from the ocean, and this narrator in a very deep, resonant voice says, “For many centuries, India’s spiritual culture was confined within the shores of India, but in 1965, one man. . .” And then, you see this huge picture of Srila Prabhupada on the screen. “This one man crossed the ocean.” And then, it has a map, it shows a map of India and then an arrow, and then it showed the London Ratha-yatra. This huge screen and sound and Prabhupada and Lord Jagannatha and the devotees, it was just so ecstatic. And then, the scene switched to India, and there are these youth, sort of scantily clad boys and girls smoking ganja and partying and chanting Hare Krishna. And then it came out, then the whole theme came out, and that is when I left.

Then, later devotees approached Srila Prabhupada, and Srila Prabhupada said, “Actually, the government is afraid of this movement, and they are actually behind the film because they want to turn people away from Krishna consciousness, or keep them from being attracted.” Then he said, “Actually, it will work in our favor, because eventually, people will get tired of the ‘Dum Maro Dum’ and they will only remember the ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.” So, that sounded nice, but this is what we experienced. From Calcutta I went to Bombay, and there are a lot of street urchins. They come up to you, they are either begging or sometimes they will sell magazines or little knickknacks. So, whenever our vehicle would stop, all the street urchins would come up and taunt us. They would make a motion like this, ‘dum maro dum, dum maro dum.’ It was like a play, really, wherever we went, I think it was the highlight of their existence to see two real Hare Krishna devotees, and they could go up and ‘dum maro dum, dum maro dum.’ [laughter] It was really like a play.

So, that went on for about maybe a year. And then, there was a slight shift. It used to be just ‘dum maro dum,’ but then, after, say, a year, it was sort of equal, ‘dum maro dum, Hare Krishna Hare Rama.’ And then, after another six months, the ‘dum maro dum,’ just dropped out, they lost interest in ‘dum maro dum.’ And whenever they would see us, ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Rama!’ That is exactly what Srila Prabhupada said. He had that faith. But he knew the science, he had realization, he knew the science that Hare Krishna is a transcendental sound vibration, it is ever fresh, and ‘dum maro dum,’ or any, whatever it is, is mundane, people get tired of it.

So, another incident. And again, it is just sort of highlights. This relates to Hare Krishna land. Srila Prabhupada named the project Hare Krishna land, and very early, some devotees somewhere made these postage stamps, they didn’t have any postage value, but it was a picture of Radha and Krishna, and it said “Hare Krishna.” Just like a decorative thing to put on an envelope. So, we asked Srila Prabhupada, he said, “Yes, these two words ‘Hare Krishna’ should be seen everywhere.” So, the project was called Hare Krishna land. And Srila Prabhupada had a very staunch devotee named Mr. P. L. Sethi. He lived to quite an old age, he just passed away in the last year, fearlessly, and that is a whole other topic, fearlessly. He just said, “Prabhupada is calling me,” totally fixed, totally fixed. So, anyway, he built a compound wall. Whenever we got land, Prabhupada instructed us to build a compound wall. And within the stones of the wall, he put little tablets with the maha-mantra on it. And he was a member of a kirtan group called the Radha Madhava Prema Śuddha Kirtan Mandal. It is like a really beautiful name, Radha Madhava Prema—love; Śuddha—nectar; saṅkīrtana Mandal, and they would meet, I think, they had a guru in Vrindavan or at least the guru was very much associated with Vrindavan, and they would meet every week. They were all householders, and every week, they would meet at one of the homes and do Akhand hari-nāma-saṅkīrtana from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. And then, from 6:00 to 8:00, they would sing Vraja songs.

So, Mr. Sethi had the idea, “Well, why not bring them to Hare Krishna land and do the kirtan there?” So, we arranged it in the small temple. And at the time, Srila Prabhupada was in Juhu, staying in his new quarters, but the building wasn’t really complete, the lift wasn’t working, but he was there and his health was not good, he was very weak. So, we were doing the kirtan with them, they were very enthusiastic, very enthusiastic and sang very nicely. And Mr. Sethi, he went upstairs, he climbed the stairs, the lift wasn’t working. Anyway, these devotees, householders, they were all thinking of Srila Prabhupada, and then at one stage, they just came out of the temple and stood under the balcony to his room. And, Prabhupada couldn’t come down, they couldn’t go up, but then, after a few minutes, Srila Prabhupada had emerged, Mr. Sethi was helping him to walk, he emerged on the balcony, he looked down at the devotees, they went wild in ecstasy and stood for a few moments or minutes and went back inside.

So, the next day, I went up to see Srila Prabhupada, and he said, “That was wonderful, that was wonderful. You should invite them all to live on Hare Krishna land, and tell them that we will give them lodging and boarding, and all they have to do is what they did on Sunday, just Akhand hari-nāma-saṅkīrtana from 6:00 a.m. to 6 p.m.” So, knowing these people, they had families, they had jobs, they had businesses, they had houses, I just didn’t think they would agree. I said, “Well, we can try, but I don’t know.” Then, Srila Prabhupada said, “Well, then our devotees, they should do Akhand hari-nāma-saṅkīrtana every day.” So, I thought about that. We were struggling to complete the temple and open it, and it was the whole theme of the last five years, to get the land and build the temple and open the complex. So I said, “Srila Prabhupada, we have so much service to do for the project. How will we do all the service if all the devotees do kirtan from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.?” So then, Srila Prabhupada said, “All right, then on Sunday. On Sunday, you do twelve-hour kirtan.” But then I was so relieved, I immediately agreed, “Oh, yes, yes, we can do that, we can do that.”

Afterwards, I related the incident to Tamal Krishna Goswami, and he said that Srila Prabhupada had done some transcendental bargaining. He said, “If Prabhupada had begun by asking you to do twelve hours continuous kirtan every Sunday, you might have thought, Oh, that is too much, you would have settled on four hours. But beginning with inviting the whole group, saying that we will accommodate them all and maintain them, and coming from there to all of our devotees do it every day for twelve hours, and then from there to, ‘we just do it one day a week for twelve hours,’ that was like nothing, that was nothing.’” And that turned out to be one of the best things we ever did in the history of Hare Krishna land because we really strictly followed that principle, that all the devotees would chant for twelve hours continuously. And it was a rule that everything else would be minimized, the only things that would be maintained would be the Sunday feast for the guests and prasāda for the devotees. But that too, only the minimum crew for the minimum amount of time, and the rest of the time everyone was in the kirtan. And it was really amazing, it was really amazing because all our problems were solved in that kirtan.

Now, there is a prior story from when I joined the Boston temple in 1969. We hadn’t really started to do hari-nāma-saṅkīrtana in the streets, or book distribution, occasionally. But Srila Prabhupada was really encouraging it, but we hadn’t really taken it up in Boston, and we didn’t have money. The only real income we had was Satsvarupa’s paycheck as a welfare worker. And as we were making a few devotees and the artists came there, it was the base for the artists for the books, it wasn’t enough. So, we had a meeting, what to do, and Prabhupada said, if necessary, devotees can have jobs, contribute their earnings. And the devotees were very surrendered. I remember one devotee, he said he used to work in the post office before he joined, he could get a job in the post office. Another devotee said, “I know the grocer down the street, I could probably get a job in the grocery store.” And then, one devotee named Nanda Kumar raised his hand and he said, “Srila Prabhupada wrote a letter in which he said that if we just do saṅkīrtana, all of our problems will be solved materially and spiritually.” So, that is a whole other chapter, I can’t tell everything, but there are miraculous stories of devotees not having money or not being able to pay the rent or make the mortgage payments, and then at the last minute the money just comes.

It happened in Boston. It looked like we were going to lose the big house that we had got, and we had to make the payment on Tuesday. If we didn’t pay, we would lose it. And one middle-aged lady, and we hardly ever got middle-aged people coming, she came and she liked the devotional paintings on the wall and she said, “How much would it cost for me to buy some paintings?” So, we came up with a figure that would cover the mortgage payment, and she agreed. In San Francisco, they had a similar situation where they desperately needed money. And I don’t know how this happened, but Shyamasundara Prabhu told me they walked out the door, and they saw hundred-dollar notes being blown down the street. So, they just went and collected hundred-dollar bills, it was floating down the street.

But anyway, that phrase, “If you just do saṅkīrtana, all of your problems will be solved materially and spiritually,” that phrase came to mind in Juhu when we started to do that twelve-hour kirtan, because it was really true. I was the temple president and it is a big project, a lot of development going on, a lot of problems. And Monday, Tuesday, I would deal with some of the problems, but then, I knew that by the kirtan, all the problems would be solved. So, Thursday, Friday, I would say, “All right, well, give me some time to think about it.” I knew I was just going to wait for the kirtan, but I didn’t tell them that because I didn’t know what they would have thought, so I said, “Give me a little time, give me a little time, and I will speak to you again.” And it happened every time that after the twelve-hour kirtan, either the devotees got the insight how to deal with the problem, or they realized it wasn’t a problem at all, or somehow, the problem itself solved itself. It was just miraculous. And devotees have had such experiences not only in Prabhupada’s time, but even with their japa. Maybe sometime Mother Archana Siddhi can tell you how she stayed on at the New Vrindavan Japa Retreat on my request even though she had many things to do back home in North Carolina because she was receiving a house guest, and what happened. Do you want to? Would you like to make up for coming late by telling that story? [laughter]

Devotee: Yes, we had a big program scheduled for the day after I got back, if I would stay on for New Vrindavan for the second level, but because Maharaja is so expert in transcendental trickery, [Unintelligible 00:39:13]. So, I just thought, Well, I am just going to depend on Krishna. And when I got home, a neighbor of mine, good friend, she had come and she had cleaned the whole house, she had done the laundry, she had even sewn some things that were ripped and she made granola and bread. And I just couldn’t even believe that she had taken care of everything, and all we had to do was greet our guests the next day and have our program. So, I have had so many incredible experiences like that of just depending on Krishna, the holy name and miracles. Thank you. Maharaja, am I redeemed now? [laughter]

Giriraj Swami: You were already redeemed; it was just a joke. So, I guess we could end it there. And that neighbor, when you told it the other time, she’d never ever done anything like that before.

Devotee: She will probably never do it again. [laughter]

Giriraj Swami: Yes. Thank you very much, Hare Krishna.

Devotee: Hare Krishna. Thank you so much [Unintelligible 00:40:44]