Then everything will be finished?

On the post When all the colors will bleed into One Sita-pati das wrote some comments complaining to me that I was making speculations and then being dogmatic in defense of those speculations when it came to my views on what motivated Prabhupada to misinform about and mis-translate the traditional teachings on raganuga-bhakti. For example in the comments to the post above Sita-pati wrote:

Again, I think you overstate your case. It’s one thing to point out things and say they are discrepancies. It’s another thing to then make definitive statements about someone’s motivation.

That you cannot know with the certainty that you present it.

You can speculate or surmise, or make a guess, or give possible interpretations, but when you link your analysis to dogmatic statements about Prabhupada’s intentions or motivations, as if your supposition is objective fact, then you overstate your case.

He then wrote a post for his own blog which was also directed at his complaint of me. It says:

Atmavan manyate jagat

In English, the mantra: “I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?”.

Observations are one thing, imputation* of motives another.

Whenever you hear someone talk about the motives of another, simply add this to the end of their statement for some interesting insight:

“…because that’s why I’d being doing it if it were me.”

Atmavan manyat jagat – one sees their own mind in the world. You can learn a lot about what people think by observing what they think other people are thinking. You can learn a lot about their motivation by listening to what they say about the motivation of others.

“I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?”

My advice? Don’t jump to conclusions about the internal state of others, and definitely be very careful about saying anything about your thoughts on that matter. Just as a shooter reveals their own position by opening fire, you also reveal a lot about yourself by passing comments about other

There is definitive proof in Prabhupada’s own words for his attitude towards raganuga-bhakti. In 1976 Prabhupada was informed that there were groups of devotees in a few ISKCON temples who were having private readings of Caitanya Caritamrta, specifically the parts that have to do with raganuga-bhakti and lila theology, such as:

http://vedabase.net/cc/madhya/8/en
http://vedabase.net/cc/adi/4/en

Why were they doing that? Because in official regular group classes in ISKCON temples — such as the early morning Bhagavatam class and the evening Gita class — what is usually taught is very simplistic; for example some form of:

You are not your body and therefore you shouldn’t see the goal of your life as trying to enjoy your body. By practicing bhakti-yoga you can awaken your love of God and go back to Godhead.

And also those classes are where distorted fear invoking propaganda is routinely mis-characterized as authentic Gaudiya philosophy or theology in order to try to get people to stay in ISKCON, or to be more surrendered to ISKCON and it’s gurus and leaders. Typically it’s some form of this which is central to most classes you hear in ISKCON:

The material world is a dark trap and if you try to enjoy anything outside of service to ISKCON you will fall into that trap and suffer, possibly for millions of lifetimes. The desire to enjoy, especially sex desire, is sinful and impure, and it is what is causing you to be in the material world and suffer the 4 fold miseries. Only people who have no desires to enjoy aka “material desires” are allowed “back to Godhead”, only people who only desire to be a submissive slavish servant of guru and Krishna are pleasing to God and will be allowed to leave this world of pain and misery. Serving the guru is all-important and the essential cause of your enlightenment, only by the mercy of the guru can you attain pure love of God and be allowed “back to Godhead” — and only by submissive service to a guru can you get his mercy.

Anyone who has regularly attended official classes in ISKCON knows that the above is true. I’m not saying all classes are limited to the above topics, but from my experience the majority fall within the above or similar types of topics.

What is the result? Most people get bored with those classes. Hearing the same hackneyed dogma day in, day out gets old, especially if you have been hearing that every day for years.

So what happened in 1976 or maybe earlier is that a bunch of devotees wanted to discuss something more interesting to them — the theology found in Sri Caitanya Caritamrta. So, due to the prompting of various individuals, groups of ISKCON devotees were holding regular meetings where they would read and discuss more advanced theology than what is regularly heard in official ISKCON classes. This of course is what Gaudiya Vaishnava teachings advise people to do — seek the association of bhaktas so that you can discuss Krishna-katha:

Krishna spoke in the Gita 10.9

mac-citta mad-gata-prana
bodhayantah parasparam
kathayantas ca mam nityam
tusyanti ca ramanti ca

With their mind and their life absorbed in Me, enlightening each other and ever speaking of Me, they are satisfied and delighted.

Well, word reached Prabhupada about what was going on, and he got very upset — What was his reasoning?

“Then everything will be finished. Preaching will be finished. In this sahajiyā party, then preaching will be finished. Siddha-praṇālī.”

What they were doing had nothing to do with siddha-pranali — which is an initiation ritual accepted by some Gaudiya lineages as being necessary in order to develop bhava and rasa. The guru upon initiation tells the disciple his or her siddha-deha (eternal body and and position in Krishna’s heavenly abode), and then the disciple would mentally conceive of him or herself as that person while engaged in their raganuga-sadhana. The guru would also reveal his own siddha-deha and the siddha-deha of his guru and previous gurus in his guru parampara. Then the disciple would meditate upon serving the siddha-pranali – succession of siddhas, perfected souls – in their supposed siddha-dehas — in their meditation on asta-kaliya-lila (Eightfold daily pastimes as described in the writings of some past Gaudiya acharyas).

Some Gaudiya lineages believe that the above process of raganuga-sadhana, along with the ritual siddha-pranali process is an absolute requirement if you want to practice authentic raganuga-sadhana and thereby receive the promised result of entering into an actual bhava and rasa with Radha Krishna.

I disagree with them for various reasons which I have written about on this blog previously in detail in these posts and their comments:

http://harekrishnawomen.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/we-used-to-play-for-silver-now-we-play-for-life/

http://harekrishnawomen.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/sadomasochistic-religion/

http://harekrishnawomen.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/the-great-goddess/

http://harekrishnawomen.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/iskcon-girls-make-me-sing-and-shout/

http://harekrishnawomen.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/where-its-at/

http://harekrishnawomen.wordpress.com/2009/04/09/gimme-shelter/

What was Prabhupada so upset about? After all they weren’t reading books which were describing erotic rasa lila, like some of the works of Rupa Goswami or Krishnadas Kaviraja and others — they were only reading Prabhupada’s books! Here is Tamal Krishna Goswami telling the tale:

The Gopi-bhava Club Heresy

While negative views of mundane sexuality thread their way through much of the scripture, the same literature (paradoxically, some would say) reverences conjugal love as the highest devotion to God. That ISKCON faced a heresy involving gopi-bhava (the loving mood of the gopis) is not surprising, nor was it the first time the Gaudiya line had had to resolve such a contentious issue. The culmination of Vaishnava religious practice is the attainment of flawless love for the Deity. For Gaudiya Vaishnavas, the love of the gopis, Krishna’s cowherd lovers, is considered most consummate. But ever since Shi Chaitanya established the primacy of parakiya-bhava (love out of wedlock), there has been no dearth of questions involving morality and practice. Perhaps no other tradition explores in such vivid detail the possibilities of the conjugal relationship between the devotee and the Godhead. Considering the extensive textual tradition devoted to this subject, the reserve most practitioners display for such topics is impressive. The texts warn that highly advanced devotees can only understand Krishna’s conjugal pastimes; premature attempts to enter such esoteric topics will end in mundane lust-the opposite of spiritual love. Most advanced devotees are understandably cautious, considering themselves unqualified. It is neither practical nor theologically correct to expect everyone to be able to rise to the exalted level of the gopis’ love. Other relationships with Krishna-parental, fraternal, and servile love-are equally desirable. In fact, each soul is said constitutionally to have an eternal relationship with the Godhead, and realisation of that relationship is more a matter of acceptance than selection. In any case, attainment of perfect love is gradual, and it can be arduous.

He wants to make it seem like what the “Gopi-bhava club” was all about was studying the more erotic works of the 6 Goswamis and other previous acharyas. What they were doing (from reports, I wasn’t there) was studying Caitanya Caritamrta. When it comes to bhava and rasa — it is instructional, i.e. giving the process on how to attain bhava and rasa, i.e. raganuga. Of course there has to be some description of bhava and rasa between Radha and Krishna in order to teach about it. But it isn’t at all like some of the erotic poems and plays and stories of the previous acharyas. Those are not instructional theological manuals on raganuga, they are esoteric descriptions of lila meant for teaching about the nature of bhava and rasa. Tamal Krishna was repeating the false doctrine that Prabhupada taught: only very advanced bhaktas are qualified to study rasa-shastra, what to speak of trying to attain to your eternal bhava and rasa.

Tamal Krishna continued;

In his discourse, Prabhupada usually spoke of bhakti generically. Yet he did not hesitate to translate Rupa Goswami’s Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu, a work entirely devoted to analysing devotional relationships. His seventeen-volume translation of Krishnadasa Kaviraja’s Shri Chaitanya-charitamrita highlights many intimate pastimes in which Chaitanya and his companions became absorbed in and identified with the conjugal mood of Radha and her companions. However, Prabhupada repeatedly warned his audiences not to compare these wholly transcendental descriptions with their seemingly mundane equivalents.

I agree that transcendental bhava and rasa is not the same as mundane bhava and rasa, but Gaudiya Vaishnavism is all about trying to develop transcendental bhava and rasa. In the writings that teach that process the authors make it clear who is qualified to take up the more intimate raganuga-sadhana — anyone who eagerly wants to be in a relationship with Radha Krishna — that is the sole qualification. We are told repeatedly by Mahaprabhu, Rupa and others after them that raganuga-bhakti has only one qualification — wanting to be close to Radha Krishna. So, to claim that people who have dedicated years of their lives to bhakti-yoga, who had been doing sadhana for many hours every day, studying scriptures every day — that they are not qualified to try and be more intimate with Radha Krishna because they will become lusty? That is a totally fraudulent teaching.

The warnings against people studying or reading rasa-lila was for very beginner neophytes, not for people who had been practicing bhakti-yoga for any length of time, what to speak of having more than a year of total immersion in bhakti-yoga in an ashram. What were the warnings about? Taking the rasa-lila writings too literally is a mistake and can lead to a warped sense of lila and your place in it — without understanding that Radha Krishna is the all-pervading supreme controller of the universe, rasa-lila can be misunderstood to be only about the sex life between Radha and Krishna. It ends up being looked at like mundane romance novels, instead of being seen as esoteric instructions on how to develop our own bhava and rasa with Radha Krishna. Most devotees learn that rasa-lila is not like a mundane romance novel fairly early in their bhakti study, they learn that Radha and Krishna are the supreme lord of the universe, and that their pastimes presented for our study are for the purpose of developing bhava, rasa, and prema.

Tamal Krishna continues:

In spite of this, a group of his disciples – perhaps twenty-five women and an equal number of men – began meeting surreptitiously to read the portions of Chaitanya-charitamrita that describe Radha and Krishna’s intimate pastimes. News of the ‘Gopi-bhava Club’ reached Prabhupada during his visit to Los Angeles in June of 1976. Calling the available GBC members and sannyasis, Prabhupada ordered an investigation. He expressed grave concern that such meetings, if allowed to go unchecked, would lead to illicit activities, thus thwarting the preaching mission.

The club leaders appeared before Prabhupada explaining that they were not trying to imitate Radha and Krishna’s love affairs but simply studying the descriptions in order to develop such desires. Prabhupada’s lips quivered with anger: “First deserve, then desire! . . . So long as there is any pinch of material desire there is no question of desiring on the spiritual platform!” (dasa, H. 1992: Vol. II: 268)

In the bold above we see Tamal Krishna trying to make it seem that Prabhupada felt that those people reading what they were reading: “would lead to illicit activities” — meaning they would end up having sex instead of becoming enlightened. Prabhupada did say that, but not at first. Prabhupada’s first response was after he was told that the devotees in those groups were not “going out on sankirtan” — which by 1976 was a euphemism in ISKCON for either begging for donations in the name of some made-up charity, or selling books:

Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: Yes, well it’s a bunch of notes they mail out on a regular basis. It’s really poisonous. Pradyumna has been investigating. He got a bunch of their notes photocopied. The one thing I’ve noticed about the people that are involved with this, two features I particularly have noticed. One of them is that they don’t go out on saṅkīrtana. Everyone I’ve seen…

Prabhupāda: Then everything will be finished. Preaching will be finished. In this sahajiyā party, then preaching will be finished. Siddha-praṇālī.

He feared what I have said previously was obvious in his motivation to distort — he didn’t want his followers trying to follow the authentic path of Gaudiya Vaishnavism with it’s emphasis on the importance of raganuga, i.e. trying to develop intimacy with Radha Krishna from within — because he believed his organization would suffer i.e. people would want to spend less time “out on the pick” begging for money for building temples, for publishing books, and for maintenance of ISKCON and it’s leader’s lifestyles.

You can see when this topic is initially brought up to Prabhupada he brings up two things — sahajiyaism and siddha-pranali. He immediately wanted to demonize anyone who believed they could advance beyond the neophyte stage. All they were doing was studying his books — and yet he claimed if they did that they were or would become sahajiyas and sex fiends.

In this conversation when this topic was first brought up to him, it seems that Prabhupada didn’t know what to say because they were only reading his books. On the one hand he didn’t want his followers to take up raganuga-bhakti, but on the other hand — in his books which he said his followers need to learn — there is instruction from Mahaprabhu on the importance of raganuga. Look at how Prabhupada became unintelligible when someone made a simple point:

Rāmeśvara: Śrīla Prabhupāda, some devotees, sometimes they feel that in ISKCON we’re talking so much about the business of how to spread Kṛṣṇa consciousness, but we’re not talking enough about Kṛṣṇa’s pastimes, kṛṣṇa-kathā, they say. So that’s another reason why they want to read all these pastimes.

Prabhupāda: Then let them read. What kind of kṛṣṇa-kathā ? The kṛṣṇa-kathā test is as soon as he’ll get the taste, he’ll lose this taste. That is the…. What is this nonsense?

Rāmeśvara: Won’t it purify them? That’s what they say, “It will purify me.”

Prabhupāda: What you are purified? You have become a, what is called, putrefied, not purified.

Devotees: Jaya, Prabhupāda.

Rāmeśvara: You can become purified, and sometimes you can increase your…

Prabhupāda: No, no. You can read. Be purified. You can read. But where is your purification?

Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: Putrefaction.

Prabhupāda: The books are there for reading. By reading, you become purified. [break] In 1935, our Guru Mahārāja, Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura, he went to Rādhā-kuṇḍa for kārttika-vrata. So at that time he was reading Upaniṣads. So first of all, these bābājīs they were coming. Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī had come at Rādhā-kuṇḍa. He’s giving some class. So they used to come. But as soon as they saw that he was reading Upaniṣads, they stopped coming. They saw: “They are jñānīs, they are not bhaktas. ”

Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: What did they want to hear? Daśama-skandha (tenth canto of the Bhagavatam)?

Prabhupāda: Like that. So Prabhupāda condemned them that “They are not living in Rādhā-kuṇḍa. They’re living in Naraka-kuṇḍa.” I heard it, “They’re living in Naraka-kuṇḍa.”

What’s ironic is that the very first hardback book that was profusely sold and given out to the public at large by ISKCON was Krsna Book — which is nothing more than the very thing that Prabhupada said was bad for beginners! Krsna Book of course is the tenth canto or Daśama-skandha of Srimad Bhagavatam in story form.

Since that time we have seen membership in Gaudiya organizations who do not disallow the discussion of more advanced topics — like Narayana Maharaja — grow and grow. While outside of India and parts of Eastern Europe, ISKCON — which discourages anything but super simplistic and distorted theology — membership has become smaller and smaller.