Revatinandana: The kirtan ended, and Prabhupada put his spectacles on. This was in early 1968, and he was using his own Srimad-Bhagavatam that was in front of him. He read from it and then spoke much of the time with his eyes closed. He wasn’t advertising himself or trying to appear as a holy man, as other so-called gurus did. He was just speaking the teachings from the book and then explaining them. I recall him remarking, “Now they say that everyone is God. You are God, I am God, there are so many gods loitering in the street. If you think of God in that way, then God does not mean very much to you.” He also said, “G-OD, D-O-G. What is the difference? You say you are God. I say you are dog. If we are all God, and gods are loitering in the street, then what is the difference between God and dog?” It immediately struck me that he was right. How could God be in such a bad situation?
Revatinandana: One day I was cooking in the temple kitchen with Aniruddha. Aniruddha came back in from seeing Prabhupada and said, “Prabhupada just told me that we are not supposed to cook with mustard seeds or mustard oil or fenugreek anymore.” Prabhupada wanted us to use simple spices, cumin seeds, chiles, asafoetida, as well as simple techniques. He specifically mentioned not using mustard seed and mustard oil, as well as fenugreek. In India later on, he once remarked, “My God-brothers generally prefer mustard oil, but I like ghee.”
Revatinandana: Srila Prabhupada gave a Sunday feast lecture about kirtan, and he said things that I never heard him say at other times, particularly not during a lecture. He remarked that melodic instruments, including the harmonium, are not meant for kirtan, and he explained why. He said that the ear will automatically follow musical strains, and then our attention will be diverted from the mantra. He said that rhythm instruments are good for kirtan because they make one more inclined to dance, and dancing, in turn, unlocks devotion. He liked graceful dancing. He used to mention that Jayatirtha was a graceful dancer. He said, “See how he dances. This is very good. This will help one feel more devotion.” Another time he told Vishnujana that he did not like melodies that had long, extended notes in them. He liked the melody to be filled with the mantra. During the lecture he gave that day he also said, “Don’t harmonize during the response.” The leader may sing little variations, but the group should sing a steady response. One person shouldn’t be singing one melody and another doing another melody during the response. “These things,” he said, “will help one pay more attention to the mantra as one is chanting and dancing. That way one will get the maximum benefit, and the kirtan will also become more ecstatic.” He also said that the dancing should be graceful and gentlemanly. Then, during the second kirtan, he got off the vyasasana and danced in the middle of the kirtan party. He danced back and forth very gracefully in what we called the “swami step.” After a while he put his hands up and started leaping up in the air straight up and down. He wasn’t shaking his body around. His hands were up, and he was leaping in the air. He kept leaping and leaping and leaping for a long time, and we were doing it with him. I got tired. I stopped and started to dance back and forth at one point. I was twenty-two years old at the time, and he was over seventy. Yet Prabhupada went right on leaping. He seemed to have no physical exhaustion at all. I was impressed because I thought, “I play basketball and here this guy can jump more than I can.” I shouldn’t say “guy,” but those are the kind of thoughts that were going through my mind. It was the first time I had ever seen him dance, and I was amazed.
Revatinandana: One morning in India I was very sick, but I went to the pandal program anyway. Prabhupada was lecturing about Ajamil and about prayaschitta, or atonement for sins. Sometimes I thought he was giving those Ajamil lectures for me because Ajamil’s fate might also be my fate. Anyway, in the lecture that day, Prabhupada said that the problem is that you atone but you do not remove the seed of sinful desire from your heart, and therefore you sin again. Thus you go through sinning and atoning again and again. So atonement is not the solution. One has to purify the heart. He talked about how chanting purifies the heart and eventually cleanses even the seed of sinful desire from the heart, and then he said something that I’ll never forget. He said, “But do not be impatient. After all, it took me thirty years to chant in this way.” Some people hypothesize that Prabhupada was this or that in his past life. Once in Calcutta he said, “In my previous life I was a doctor, and I lived sinlessly. Therefore, I was able to take up devotional service seriously in this life.” But in the pandal lecture that day, he said it took him thirty years to chant with the devotion and purity that he chanted with, which was obviously with pure ecstatic love.
Revatinandana: In Calcutta Prabhupada once said that when a pure devotee leaves his body he takes another birth on the planet where Krishna is appearing. Then, when Krishna leaves that planet, the devotee goes with Him back to the spiritual sky for good. So there is one more birth after one becomes a pure devotee, but it’s not a material birth, because it is a birth with Krishna where He is appearing and having His pastimes, and after that one goes to Goloka with Him. Another time in his room in Calcutta I asked him, “Because you are a devotee of Radha and Krishna, does that mean all of us are inherently devotees of Radha and Krishna?” He said, “Not necessarily.” I said, “So we might be devotees of say, Lakshmi-Narayan or Sita-Rama?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Am I to understand that by doing this process our relationship with Krishna, in whatever form, will be uncovered?” He said, “Yes,” again. Ultimately not every devotee would become attached to Radha and Krishna. I was thinking of the story of Murari Gupta in the Caitanya Caritamrta, to whom Lord Chaitanya said, “You are a pure devotee of Lord Ramachandra. You are Hanuman.” In other words, there are some devotees who are constitutionally attached to other forms of the Lord. But Radha and Krishna contain all the other forms within Them, and by purification we would find our ultimate relationship. At least that’s what he told me in Calcutta.
Revatinandana: The room wasn’t very big, and there were forty or forty-five of us in it, along with Prabhupada and a couple of guests. During the evening Bhagavad-gita classes he would sit in a chair at one end of the room, and the rest of us packed in. One night Prabhupada was looking around and everybody was there but Jayananda. Prabhupada said, “Where is Jayananda?” We said, “He is still out parking the van, Srila Prabhupada.” Prabhupada waited, and when Jayananda walked in, Prabhupada looked at him, smiled, and said, “Oh, Jayananda looks just like Lord Chaitanya.” Jayananda blushed purple. He blushed and blushed because he was a homespun, shy, humble devotee.
Revatinandana: He went into his room and called for Jayapataka. We were standing outside on the covered balcony at 3 Albert Road in Calcutta. Prabhupada practically roared at him, “Why is your complexion greenish?” Jayapataka stammered something. Prabhupada said, “If you do not eat better, you will die. The devotees are looking weak. All of you are not eating properly.” He said, “Everyday go to the place where the sweet merchants buy the freshly made curd that’s delivered from the countryside, and buy curd for each devotee. Fry it with a little salt and asafoetida, and give it to the devotees along with other, more substantial food.” We were having a lot of puffies as well as dahl and chapatis, but it wasn’t enough for us. When Prabhupada came he immediately saved us. He saw that the devotees in the temple at that time were suffering from malnourishment.
Revatinandana: Prabhupada spoke from the vyasasana saying, “On one side there is a blazing fire,” and he pointed towards the street end of the building because Calcutta is Calcutta, “and on the other side there is Radha and Krishna. People do not know that there is an alternative. We have to give them the alternative.” In the Calcutta temple, it was refreshing to see the nice Radha-Krishna Deities, who were wonderfully worshiped by Yamuna, Kaushalya, Chitralekha, and Devananda Swami. The Deities were decorated with lots of little, white jasmine flowers as well as champak garlands, so They looked pretty and smelled heavenly. There was a window behind Them allowing light to come in, and black bees would also sometimes come in, fly around the Deities, land on a flower or two, and then go out again. Prabhupada said, “When those black bees come, it is a sign that Krishna is pleased with the Deity worship.”
Revatinandana: One day we were going to a Gaudiya Math in Calcutta. This particular Math had a bookstore with all kinds of old Gaudiya Math publications, some of which were quite rare. Prabhupada and I were standing in the doorway of the ISKCON temple on Albert Road, and I asked, “Srila Prabhupada, I understand that your books are all that we need, but there will be books for sale at the Math. Once you told Bali Mardan that if he read the Brahma-samhita he would become a good preacher. I was wondering if it would be all right if I bought the Brahma-samhita and some other books, since we are going to this place.” Prabhupada answered my question in three parts. He said, “For one thing, I do not think you will be able to understand those books very well. My Guru Maharaj was not pleased with the sincerity of most of his disciples, and he wrote his books in a difficult language so that almost none of his disciples could understand them.” Then he said, “Actually, my Guru Maharaj wrote those books for me. Only I could understand them.” Another thing he said was, “We shouldn’t read anything published by the Gaudiya Math after 1932, because by that time politics were entering into the editions that were being printed.” I said, “Didn’t your Guru Maharaj pass away in 1936?” He said, “Yes, but in the last four years he was infirm and was not directly supervising the editing.” The final thing he said was, “Besides that, for an intelligent disciple, what his spiritual master provides is sufficient.”
Revatinandana: In the spring of 1975, Gurudas took sannyas at the Stewart Street temple in Berkeley. Prabhupada gave a very nice lecture that day. He spoke just as highly, if not more highly, of Yamuna, Gurudas’ former wife, than he did of Gurudas. At one point he said, “His wife is practically a sannyasini.” When the program was over and Prabhupada was walking back to his room, I asked him if it was conceivable that women in our movement might formally take sannyas. Prabhupada looked at me, made a very disgusted expression and said, “Never!” It was an emphatic answer. From his point of view, that would never be possible.
Revatinandana: One day had been especially difficult for me. I had been on the street collecting for a long time, I was tired, and I had just fought with another devotee. I felt that I couldn’t go on, that it was time for me to disappear and leave. That night, after another eight-hour day of street sankirtan and magazine selling, we were driven over to the bungalow where Prabhupada was speaking. I didn’t get into chanting during the first kirtan because I didn’t want to get carried away again. Every time I felt like leaving, it was either one of Prabhupada’s lectures or a feast that would wind up changing my mind to stay. Maya was really tugging at me. When Srila Prabhupada started to lecture that night, I had my head down. Prabhupada said, “When one is engaged in devotional service he will become joyful. If one is morose, that means he is not Krishna conscious. If one is Krishna conscious, he cannot be morose.” That hit me hard. I looked at him, and his eyes were right on me. He was speaking to me at that moment, but I was so psychologically fragile, if he had singled me out I would have probably run from the room or broken into tears or gotten very agitated, even angry, and left. Instead he did it in a lecture. I knew that he had seen exactly what I was feeling, and he said it for me. And I knew he was right, because all day I had refused to engage myself and, therefore I had been miserable. My legs hurt, I was tired, I was this, and I was that. Otherwise, I would have been absorbed, time would have passed, and little by little I would be getting stronger. Periodically other devotees had experiences similar to mine. Prabhupada was very good at reading faces. He once said that the face was the index of the mind, and he had that art down by training or intuition or both. He knew what to say at a particular time to keep us from faltering or to encourage us in different ways.
Revatinandana: In the mid-seventies, Nitai das, a devotee Sanskrit scholar, started hearing from a Brijbasi Goswami and left ISKCON as a result. Nitai claimed that Prabhupada had not given us all the information we needed. He criticized Prabhupada for not telling his disciples about their eternal rasa with Krishna. So, in Berkeley in 1976, I asked Prabhupada, “Are there any matters concerning the nature of our devotional service and our relationship with Krishna that you have not explained to us? In the future will it be necessary for us to find someone else for more instructions? Or, if we follow your prescription for sadhana, sankirtan, preaching, and chanting, will our hearts be purified so that Krishna will reveal subsequent things to us from within?” When I said the latter part, Prabhupada smiled and said, “Yes, that is the way. You will not have to go anywhere else. If you simply follow my instructions, everything will be revealed to you from within.” He had a pleased look. It was clear to me that there was no need for information about our rasa, because everything is revealed to a purehearted devotee.
