Amarendra das Remembers Srila Prabhupada

Prabhupada Memories

Interview 01

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Amarendra: Obviously the first time someone meets Prabhupada it’s the seminal event, the watershed event of their life. We hear, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” People have these historical events they associate with. For every devotee whoever got the opportunity to meet Prabhupada, this was the seminal event in their lives. That’s the highlight of their entire existence when they meet Prabhupada for the first time. When Prabhupada came to Gainesville, it was actually a very meaningful visit in the sense that Prabhupada wasn’t there for any managerial purpose. Gainesville was not a big important temple. If I had said to anybody at the time, “I am from Gainesville, Florida”, they would look at me like I was crazy. “Where are you from? Where is that?” No one had heard of Gainesville. It wasn’t even on the ISKCON map so to speak. For Prabhupada to come to this place in the middle of nowhere was actually a very amazing event. When Prabhupada gave his introductory lecture, he said quite appropriately, “I am very happy to be here in this very remote place; thousands and thousands of miles away from the birth place of Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in Mayapur.” Actually every place in America is somewhat remote from Mayapur. In L.A. for example, you can get on a plane and be in Calcutta in twenty-two hours or so, three hours more by car, and finally you’re in Mayapur. On this trip Prabhupada had come from New York but he had to fly to Atlanta to change planes to go to Jacksonville and then drove two hours to get to Gainesville. By the time he got to Gainesville, he said, “I’m very happy to be in this very remote place and I am so happy to see all these boys and girls who are chanting and dancing in the middle of nowhere.” A reporter was there, who was quite friendly with the devotees, and she asked Prabhupada one significant question, “Why are there only young people in your movement? Why aren’t there any old people?” He gave a very good analogy. He said, “At the university, what do you see there? You see only young people. You don’t see any old people. Why is that? Because when you are young, that is the time for your spirituality. That is the best period of your life for taking to this process. It is too late for the old fools.” Everybody laughed and nobody was offended but it got the point across quite effectively. After his arrival he came out to the University of Florida Plaza of the Americas and gave a very philosophical lecture on Sankya yoga from the sixth chapter of the Bhagavad-gita to seven hundred students. This was the same place where anti-war demonstrations were held and it reminded me of Tompkins Square Park where Prabhupada started the movement in New York. Everyone was sitting down on the grass and as he was speaking, I was thinking, “How are they going to understand this? I can barely understand this! This is so intellectual and philosophical that how are these students going to understand this?” Afterwards, all the students came up and were saying, “That was the best lecture I have ever heard in my life. That was great! That was wonderful. I enjoyed it so much!” Prabhupada knew exactly where he was and who his audience was at all times. He was cognizant of the message he wanted to present to the audience and for this group of students he chose the sixth chapter of the Bhagavad-gita. It made a big impression on them. Years later, people who were there still remembered that lecture and it was a watershed moment in their lives. They’ll take that memory with them forever, whether they’ll become a devotee or not. When the whole city found out that Prabhupada was coming, they were actually very excited. The next day the local newspaper ran a story on the front page with a picture of Prabhupada on the Plaza: “Hare Krishna Leader Comes to Gainesville.” There was one professor at the University, Mark Damon, who ran the PBS TV station, and as soon as he heard that Prabhupada was coming, he started calling me every day to get an interview with Prabhupada. He would call and say, “Please bring Bhaktivedanta to my show. I would be so happy. I would be so grateful!” Finally Prabhupada agreed to do it and the professor was quite ecstatic. That evening, after we got back from the Plaza, Prabhupada rested a little bit and had darshan with some Indians and other guests. At about 8 p.m. that evening, we went to the TV station for the interview. The interview was later published by the BBT entitled “Transcendental Broadcast”. The thing I remember most about the interview was the professor kept trying to get Prabhupada to say something provocative or controversial. He had known the philosophy quite well and he had read some books to brush up before the interview. He knew about Lord Chaitanya and about how Prabhupada was instructed by Bhaktisiddhanta to come to the west. But he said he still wanted the program to be ratings friendly so to speak, by trying to get Prabhupada to say, “The Christian religion is no good and everyone should become Hare Krishnas.” But Prabhupada would not take the bait. Prabhupada said, “No, no, we are simply saying chant the name of God. You’ve got your name of God. You can chant that. That’s okay. We’re not saying you must chant our name of God. Just chant the name of God. That is our process.” Prabhupada kept giving him these non-sectarian answers that kept cutting the professor to pieces. Because Prabhupada was doing it so smoothly, the professor didn’t even know it. He couldn’t even understand it. It’s like getting cut with a razor blade; it’s so sharp you don’t even realize it until all the blood is pouring out. We were all behind the cameras watching and Prabhupada was beautiful. He had the TV lights on him, which allowed us to see the whites in his eyes and his golden skin. His saffron clothing was also highlighted. At one point in the debate, Prabhupada said, “Christ said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ So why are you killing? He did not say ‘Thou shalt not kill only human beings’”. He would make these kind of points and then glance at the devotees with a little twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face because he knew he was defeating this guy. It was not that Prabhupada was trying to win a debate with the professor, but he knew that the devotees were really relishing this discussion or debate. Then the professor invited all the devotees to come in front of the cameras and chant. It was a very auspicious program. I asked Prabhupada one time, “How can we make people Krishna conscious?” I was expecting some elaborate answer or formula and Prabhupada said, “Simply request that they chant Hare Krishna and then your business is finished.” And he repeated it. Devotees sometimes say, “Well I was sitting in the audience and Prabhupada said something and it was as if he was only talking to me.” Well, Prabhupada was talking to me but I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t listening because I have many defects, but the worst of them is attachment to the fruit. I am very passionate and very attached to the fruits of my labor even though it’s dovetailed in Krishna consciousness. In Gainesville I was preaching to students and I desperately wanted them to become devotees. I was almost willing them with my mind, “You must become a devotee.” I wanted to take away their free will and make them a devotee. Later on when I was a lawyer, winning and losing cases, I was so attached to winning; winning for Krishna, but still winning nonetheless. Because I was not listening to Prabhupada that night, I didn’t hear, “Then your business is finished”, which is right out of the Bhagavadgita: you have to perform your prescribed duty but you have no right to the fruits of your endeavors. That is up to Krishna and that belongs to Krishna. He was talking to me because he knew that I have these attachments. Prabhupada made a comparison to a lion when he talked about how people choose to stay in the material world and subject themselves to all of this suffering; birth, death, old age and disease. Prabhupada said, “Why would you do that? Why would people choose this? It’s like a lion. You don’t go up to a lion and say, ‘Oh, Mr. Lion, please open your mouth I wish to enter.’” It’s like we’re asking maya to open her jaws and let us enter this miserable condition of life. Prabhupada was in Gainesville only for a short period of time and when we took him back to Jacksonville we had a kirtan in the airport. People started to gather around creating a sizeable crowd wanting to know what was going on. This was Jacksonville, Florida, a place where every time we did harinam, we would get arrested because of all the conservative Christian views. We were just heathen to them, these “Eastern idol worshipers” and so forth. I was sitting right at Prabhupada’s feet thinking, “I must be really special getting to sit right there at Prabhupada’s lotus feet.” But Hridayananda and Ananga Manjari, who was his wife at the time, saw the crowd and they went out and started distributing books. Prabhupada saw them do this and the entire time they were in the terminal he did not take his eyes off of them while they were handing out books. At that point I could see that if I wanted to please Prabhupada and to get his attention, it wasn’t to sing and chant but to distribute his books. Prabhupada had a darshan with a reporter from the New York Times. The New York Times had always taken a keen interest in New Vrindavan for some reason. When I got to the darshan the reporter was speaking with Prabhupada and Prabhupada said to him, “Yes, I have seen your paper. It is so thick. But what do they do with it when they are finished? They throw it in the garbage.” At that time, the big Macmillan-gitas had just come out and Prabhupada had one on his coffee table in front of him. He put his hand on the Gita and said, “But this Bhagavad-gita, this they will keep forever.” He said this with such love that you could tell how important it was to Prabhupada every time a new book was published. Later on in the darshan with the New York Times reporter that went on for hours, a devotee asked Prabhupada, “What does it mean to love the spiritual master?” I equated that definition of love to the love that I saw with the first devotees who had met Prabhupada on 2nd Avenue like Brahmananda, Gargamuni, and Rupanuga. In my opinion those devotees actually considered Prabhupada their father. They had love for Prabhupada the way we would love our biological parents. I knew these devotees very well and had spent a lot of time with them throughout the years and was impressed with how much affection and how much emotional attachment they had to Prabhupada. I never had that kind of love to Prabhupada. I wish I did and someday maybe I will, but I don’t. So I was expecting that kind of an answer, but Prabhupada said, “You have made a vow to the spiritual master to take initiation and you have taken fire sacrifice. Now you keep your vow. Don’t break your promise. That is love.” That blew everybody in the room away. Everybody was stunned to hear that. I thought to myself, “What have I gotten myself into? Oh boy, I’m finished.” I was a political radical before I joined Prabhupada’s movement, but I more or less put that all aside when I became a devotee. But then when Srila Prabhupada was traveling, a letter from Shyamasundar detailing Prabhupada’s activities arrived and it also mentioned Prabhupada’s comment, “We should enter politics.” When I saw that, I immediately thought, “Oh, politics. I can do that?” I was astonished and couldn’t believe it. I immediately started working on a political preaching program. According to the election laws, to get on the ballot for elective position, all you had to do was get a certain number of signatures on a petition and turn it into the registrar. Once you were on the ballot they had to invite you to every engagement and give you equal time under the fairness doctrine. I wrote Prabhupada and told him about this and I got two letters in 1972 where Prabhupada gave me the approval to do that. He told me, “I like this very much.” Those letters are in the archives and they weren’t just for me. Prabhupada was saying that this is a very good opportunity to preach widely and distribute our books. Prabhupada saw that as an opportunity, not so much that we were going to get elected, but to preach and distribute books. He did say in the first letter I received, “Our platform is very simple. People should come together and have kirtan and then afterwards there should be wide-scale distribution of Krishna prasadam. That is our platform. Who will not be attracted?” He said, “Yes, I want you to endeavor for these political posts. You should expose these Nixons and replace them.” That was a quote from this letter that was prior to the Watergate scandal. He said, “Politician means ‘pick-pocket’; tell the people whatever they want to hear to get elected and then pick their pocket because they know that in two to four years they could be out of office. Therefore, they grab all the money they can in the meantime.” Prabhupada said, “The people are innocent, but these rascal leaders have misled them. I am very encouraged that you boys and girls can expose these Nixons and replace them.” He encouraged us to realize that we also have a grave responsibility as to the condition of the world. Prabhupada was exhibiting his Vaishnava sentiment like that of Prahlad Maharaj and Advaita Acharya; the suffering of the conditioned souls makes the pure devotee suffer. He suffers seeing them suffer due to their identification to the body. The political leaders keep people in the bodily concept of life with the assistance of the material scientists who give them facility for sense enjoyment. In the Bhagavatam, Prabhupada spares no quarter. He attacks the politicians viciously over and over again, especially in the First Canto with Pariksit Maharaj and the Fourth Canto with Prithu Maharaj. Therefore, Prabhupada liked this idea of getting in the middle of that whole process and sabotage it, so to speak, to change their agenda. Once we got on the ballot and were able to debate, all the other candidates for whatever the office was would be saying, “Oh yeah, I believe in God! I go to church. I do this, I do that…” They were all trying to justify their spiritual qualifications. We were thus successful in changing the discussion from all of these ridiculous and stupid mundane issues to something that was really important because as Prabhupada says over and over again, the only solution is God-conscious leadership. In 1972 before the New Vrindavan festival, I went down to Miami Beach for the 1972 Republican convention. With Mahavir, who was a good friend of mine, we put together a prasadam program for all the demonstrators who were camping out at Miami Beach at a place called Flamingo Park. Every day we would bring prasadam and feed all the protestors who were there to disrupt the Republican convention. We became very popular and one night we were having a street sankirtan in front of the convention center. It was getting dark and we were going through the crowd single file and we couldn’t really see where we were. There were eight or nine of us and all of a sudden T.V lights turned on out of the darkness. As we looked around, we saw on one side thousands of angry anti-war demonstrators getting ready to storm the convention center. On the other side, there were hundreds of police, national guardsmen and state police in their riot gear with shotguns. We were right smack dab in the middle between these two camps. When we realized our situation, the whole sankirtan party shot up three to four feet in the air and started chanting for our lives. We thought we were going to get caught right in the middle of this confrontation. As we started chanting, the crowds started to mellow out a little bit. Allan Ginsberg was there and he came up and started chanting with us. Then the leaders of the anti-war demonstration came up to us because they were furious. Outraged, they said, “You’re ruining it for us! You’ve got to stop this chanting! You’ve got to get out of here!” They were chanting their chants about not wanting the war and they had the crowd worked up through sound vibration. But when we started chanting, we neutralized the impact of their sound vibration by the maha-mantra. After a few minutes, more and more people started dancing and chanting with us. A detective from the Miami police department then came over to us and asked, “Could you please lead these people back to the park?” We headed back to the park and the whole crowd just followed us. Later that night, that same police detective came back to us, bought a book, gave a donation and told us, “You guys stopped a riot. There was a riot that was about to happen and you guys stopped it.” I told Prabhupada that story at another darshan and he said, “Oh, just see the power of the Holy Name.” One time at the Pittsburgh temple, a reporter asked, “Do you really think you can take over the world? Are you serious?” Prabhupada never missed a beat. He was never off message, not even for a heartbeat. With his eyes always on the goal of the message he said, “Yes, if only they would listen to me.” Again, hearing from the spiritual master, hearing from the pure devotee, if they would listen, which I was not doing when I got initiated, then we can take over the world. In Chicago Prabhupada said there would be a war with China. I had never heard that as he had said many times that India and Pakistan would be the spark that ignites World War III. I don’t know how he got on the subject of China, but he did say, “Yes, the Chinese, they are the lowest because they will eat anything. Therefore, they are the lowest.” I asked him, “Prabhupada, isn’t there anyway to avoid it?” Prabhupada just shook his head “no”. “They will eat anything.” He said that several times. At one point Srila Prabhupada was talking about an Indian boy named Guru Maharaj ji who would dress up like Krishna and pass himself off as God to his followers. Everyone knew what a fraud he was except his own followers. Prabhupada said, “He is claiming to be God? You kick on his face with boot and then we will see if he is God.” Everybody laughed but Prabhupada said, “No!” He was serious and not joking around. “You kick on his face with boot.” When he said it, he never smiled. Then I asked, “Well, they’re chanting ‘Hare Krishna’, Prabhupada. Won’t they get any benefit?” Prabhupada said, “Yes, they will get benefit, but it will take them a very long time because they are so offensive in the process by imitating Krishna’s pastimes and pretending to be Krishna and the gopis.” We got to see Prabhupada in a Nrsimhadeva mood when they wouldn’t give us the occupancy permit in Bombay. He was outraged. He was obsessed with it day and night. He couldn’t believe that in the land where Krishna appeared, where Krishna spoke the Bhagavad-gita, they wouldn’t give the temple an occupancy permit. At every darshan and class, he would just pound the politicians and the Indian government. I had never seen Prabhupada that angry before and never again. But he was definitely in a Nrsimhadeva mood. All of us were running around meeting with politicians trying to straighten this out, but we’d come back every day without anything being accomplished. Finally Prabhupada himself met with the leader of the local Shiv-Sena party, which I think is still in existence in India today, and because they were so impressed with Prabhupada, they gave us the permit. When Mr. Nair sold the property to ISKCON, in reality it was a scam. He was going to take the money that we gave him and then pull some strings with some of his political friends to get the property back since Juhu was extremely valuable. Today it’s like prime Beverly Hills or South Beach real estate. Mr. Nair was trying to cheat us but Prabhupada outsmarted him. Like a chess match, Prabhupada moved the devotees onto the property and set up residence. Then he installed the deities onto the property thinking that no Indian would ever disturb the deities. Prabhupada was from Goloka Vrindavan and he had a strategy and was fully aware of this political warfare. He was a brilliant tactician. My impression was that regarding politics in America, Prabhupada deferred to the Americans. In a letter he wrote to me and said, “One time I was also interested in politics and one time I was involved in Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. But I am not so interested anymore, so all you Americans do what you think is best and just put Krishna in the center. Don’t forget about Krishna.” He didn’t want to appear to be some Svengali guru from India putting a spell on everybody. He was very deferential to Americans managing according to American customs. But in India it was a different story. He would personally be involved in every detail of Indian management whether it be construction or politics, or whatever. He was expert in every aspect of it. He revealed that not only did he have full spiritual knowledge but within that spirituality there was also the material energies and he was an expert in tactics and manipulating the material energy on behalf of Krishna and Lord Chaitanya’s movement. He was not daunted by material affairs in the slightest. On one occasion we were in Prabhupada’s quarters chanting a bhajan. Afterwards Prabhupada gave a purport as to the meaning of the bhajan that served me well later on in life. He said, “This chanting and dancing in the association of devotees is very powerful. Even if the association becomes intolerable, you must tolerate. That’s how important it is. Tolerate the intolerable.” And that is what got me through so many trials and tribulations over the years. Not so much the three-fold miseries of material nature, but the trials and tribulations of the politics in ISKCON. Being a lawyer for ISKCON things sometimes got hot and heavy. So Prabhupada’s instruction to “tolerate the intolerable”, is what has gotten me through all these years. In retrospect, it reminds me of the story of Bali Maharaj and everything that he had to go through when he had conquered the entire universe. When Lord Vamanadev defeated him and he was arrested, Prabhupada said, “Any other person would have died had they gone through what Bali Maharaj went through.” He called these trials and tribulations an examination that Krishna puts us through and pushes us to the limit, but simultaneously gives us the strength to survive to make it through these ordeals.

To view the entire unedited video go to Memories 55 - Amarendra, Ananga Manjari dd

The full Prabhupada Memories Series can be viewed here and also at www.prabhupadamemories.com