It's Not a Matter of Taste, but of Siddhanta
BY: GEORGE A. SMITH
Nov 01, 2010 — CALIFORNIA, USA (SUN) —
"And then to George A. Smith. You very rudely refer to my Guru Maharaja as ‘Gour Govinda' and yet you call Aprakrita ‘das', offering him respect but slighting Srila Gour Govinda Swami. I have no idea who you are. If you are a new devotee, ok you need to learn some manners, but then perhaps you shouldn't be published until you know basic Vaisnava etiquette."
In Defense of Gour Govinda Swami by Janeswar dasa
Two things I do not remember: ever being new, or ever being a devotee. Nevertheless, I thank Janeswara dasa for his kind consideration. But I ask you prabhu, what are we to learn by your hypocrisy, unintended though it were, that your own actions are beyond your discrimination?
Shall we also suppose the same of you? Shall we imagine an offense when none was intended and take offense upon behalf of those who take no offense? Whose lesson I ask you shall we prefer, the one you teach or the one that the Acaryas by their example try to teach us; lower than the straw in the street, more tolerant than a tree?
I meant no disrespect to your master Gour Govinda Swami through either my observances nor my failure to address him always in the manner prescribed by Vaisnava etiquette, but it seems that since you were unable to address the points of my article, to offer any even attempt at rebuttal, that you choose to create in your mind something which you could use to justify your "righteous" indignation. Your anger, although in your article you attempt to portray differently, is for those who do not see as you see. Beware passion and ignorance prabhu, it is a most unhealthy combination. Belief is a passive parameter, and faith is another thing altogether. All that you need to know of me is that I do not believe that Srila Prabhupada, your Sampradaya Acarya, is a pure devotee of Krsna, I know that he is prabhu.
Such a conviction as the former does not however preclude your master's saintliness in my consideration, nor Rocana dasa's saintliness, or the saintliness of almost every one of you with few exceptions. East or West, we have not as a species learned very well how to see things contextually and probabilistically, rather we see things in model discreet categories. You are a movement of saints, and I? Sometimes I feel that I am only a mere witness at your crucifixion, a birth and death taken upon my behalf and upon the behalf of others like me, in a thankless attempt to convert us to love of Krsna and to life everlasting, to remove the darkness from our eyes once and forever and fill them with the sight of the cynosure of all eyes, Sri Krsna, the Absolute Truth, what a thing to be so free, eh?
I hope Rocana will forgive me for addressing one of the points that you made to him in your article. You say in your address to Rocana:
"One of the first things that struck me was your statement… "we've all experienced the expertise of Indian preachers, and how they can say things in such a way that it can be interpreted in many ways, depending on the personal position of the listener and their relationship with the speaker" –
Why is this ‘expertise' only found in ‘Indian preachers'?
Is that in all ‘Indian preachers'?
Not from any western preachers?
Straight away - you see the body. Ah he's Indian. Like Srila Sridhar Swami. Like Srila Narayana Maharaja. That's why."
You try to make it look like this is some imaginative consideration, something that Rocana das has perhaps invented, unconsciously perhaps, the product of a racist attitudes. I am sorry to correct you prabhu, but the general consideration is not a product either new or reflective of a racist attitude.
"Eighteen years before Swami Vivekananda held sway at court during the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893, the Theosophical Society had already been attempting an introduction of Indian mysticism and religious practices into the West. But rather than making them palatable to a larger Western audience, they presented those ideas in a way that was purposefully obscure, as if to be imitating the obfuscation they perceived to be characteristic of Indian gurus."
('The Great Swami's Other Legacy: Vivekananda's Influence on Western Occultism' by Alfred Vitale)
This was over a hundred years ago prabhu, and Western Occultism is just in the beginning stages of trying to recover itself from such presentations and return to personalism and to the recognition that the Gods are more than stage props, that they are real.
Our attitude is not a racist attitude, rather the result of the Mayavadi presentations that preceded Srila Prabhupada, who was remarkably straightforward, and almost altogether unlooked for, except by those who happened to recall Virgil's 4th Ecologue: 'Regarding '2,000 Year Old Directive'.
Everything is proceeding by Krsna's arrangement.
Rocana prabhu is not inventing something in his mind, or something new, and though you might not see that this is not a "racist" attitude, but one that is reactive to the type of presentations made before Srila Prabhupada's, part of a cultural consideration, the other components of which make The West very amenable to any presentation coming from the East. For the West still looks towards the East for it's enlightenment, as it did over a hundred years ago, it just doesn't usually expect it to be something that it understands right away. In fact, it expects obfuscation and can get a bit down in the mouth if the guru isn't mysterious and inscrutable, and those whose opinions are more informed know that this is true.
Now let us get to the important issue, since no one seems as yet to have brought it up and since Janeswar das is trying to make it seem like Gour Govinda Swami's disagreement with and contradiction of Srila Prabhupada is just a matter of a disagreement between two equals about something which is non-essential to the Sampradaya Acaryas' continued line. Let us bring into focus what Gour Govinda Swami is in reality contradicting Srila Prabhupada about in the example previously cited. It is not some matter as innocuous as how much turmeric should be used to 14 cups of soup. Gour Govinda Swami is contradicting Srila Prabhupada about guru-tattva.
"One has to hear. It is not that, "All right, tapes are there, I'll hear the recorded tapes." sabda-brahma will never descend. […] You should be greedy. Physical contact is required. You must hear directly, not just by listening to tapes. Sabda-brahma will never descend through a tape. One must hear from a physically present Sri Guru."
(Gour Govinda)
"The potency of transcendental sound is never minimized because the vibrator is apparently absent." [Srimad-Bhagavatam, 2.9.8, purport] "You should have a fire sacrifice and the second initiates should hear through the right ear the mantra on my recorded tape."
(Srila Prabhupada Letter, November 13th, 1975
That Gour Govinda is preaching differently and that he is disagreeing with and contradicting Srila Prabhupada is obvious from the quotes provided above. Similarly, that Gour Govinda claims to be a disciple of Srila Prabhupada, who gave him Sannyasa initiation, is also well known. But while these two points are, in and of themselves sufficient to call into question the truth of Gour Govinda's claims that he is representing Srila Prabhupada, there is nothing in my previous post that explained or eluded to the essential element of guru-tattva that Gour Govinda is contradicting, that wasn't just a feature of Srila Prabhupada's mission, or "unique" presentation as some try to represent it, but of his own spiritual masters mission, and thus, unquestionably an essential element of his and our parampara -- the essentialness of vani and it's eternal nature, which from the quotation provided above, Gour Govinda considers to be irrelevant past the disappearance of the spiritual master whose spiritual vibrations were recorded.
"Srila Prabhupada wrote that we are a mission of the vani. We may not collect so much money. Money is not such a great thing. But the vani we must follow."
(Srila Prabhupada on his own spiritual master's mission)
"Please accept my blessings. I am in due receipt of your letter as I was leaving the temple to come here to Bombay. You have rightly said that the best way to associate with the spiritual master is to follow his instructions. There are two ways of associating, by vani and by vapu. Vani means words and vapu means physical presence. Physical presence is sometimes appreciable and sometimes not. Therefore we should take advantage of the vani, not the physical presence, because the vani continues to exist eternally. Bhagavad-gita for example is the vani of Lord Krishna. Although Krishna was personally present 5,000 years ago and is no longer present physically from the materialistic viewpoint, still Bhagavad-gita continues. So you have correctly concluded."
(Letter to Suci Devi dasi, November 4, 1975)
According to the two quotes above, vani is the essential nature of our movement since before Srila Prabhupada and it also exists eternally, and those who do not think that it does so are in a materialistic mentality.
If memory serves me, it is considered offensive for us even to discriminate between the one or the other as being of greater or lesser significance than the other. According to Gour Govinda Swami's presentation, however, in his disagreement and contradiction of Srila Prabhupada he is presenting the spiritual master's vani as being completely irrelevant.
I have found only one place where he might have gotten what he considered to be validation for his useless opinion. After reading the following I think I might have found where he picked his mistaken idea up, that after the departure of the spiritual master, his vani is more or less accountable for nothing.
"vani and vapu, and vapu means the physical body, and vani means the
vibration. So we are not concerned about the physical body. Not concerned means… We are concerned, of course, because the spiritual master, those who are acaryas, their body is not considered as materiel. Arcye sila-dhir gurusu nara-matir. Just like the statue of Krsna, to consider that "This is a stone…" Similarly, arcye sila-dhir gurusu na… Gurusu means those who are acaryas, to accept their body as ordinary man's body, this is denied in the sastras. so although a physical body is not present, the vibration should be accepted as the presence of the spiritual master, vibration. what we have heard from the spiritual master, that is living.
(Letter to Bahurupa, November 22, 1974)
The word "that" is used in the English language for several grammatical purposes, to introduce a restrictive clause, as a demonstrative pronoun, as a complementizer. Gour Govinda Swami seems to have accepted his own assumption that the word "that" was referring to a living guru, rather than to the vibration from a "seemingly" physical body of a guru who was no longer seemingly alive. As such, a consideration goes against the grain of the narrative, or of Srila Prabhupada's entire presentation, one would think that Gour Govinda would have at least looked at the other ways that the word could be interpreted before he accepted his assumption. And it is indeed unfortunate that Gour Govinda succumbed to Maya's allurement and accepted the temptation to render his spiritual master's entire vani irrelevant, as least as far as the living vibration "alive in sound" through such a mistaken interpretation. I include this later quote in an attempt to explain how it could be that Gour Govinda Swami became mistaken. Even saints can be mistaken.
In the opinion of Srila Prabhupada, Gour Govinda's accepted spiritual master, it is the vani or the recorded words of one's spiritual master that are of the greatest importance and those words can be recorded using whatever recording media is available to us, in books, in letters, in tape recordings, even in our own memories, and so the vani of Srila Prabhupada. Srila Prabhupada is never dead to us, but forever alive, as he will live forever, throughout all time, nor will his works ever become "dated", as Gour Govinda implies -- a further testament by the author of such a consideration offensive mentality and true lack of understanding on just how things work "spiritually".
Gour Govinda tries to avoid showing his mentality by not blaming Srila Prabhupada directly for what he obviously sees as Srila Prabhupada's own inadequacy -- his inability to do anything other than lead his Western disciples to the path… not to explain the deep, deep philosophical meaning, or even the most shallow and superficial ones very well. He blames it on Srila Prabhupada's audience, he plays the race card:
"Prabhupada was teaching Westerners, mlecchas and yavanas, eating beef and drinking liquor. They were hippies – mad fellows taking strong drugs, LSD, and marijuana. What they can understand of this philosophy? He did what was needed for them at that particular time. He did a great job and brought us to the path. Otherwise so many persons would not have come here. But now the time has come to understand this philosophy."
Even if we accept that in Gour Govinda's mind, all Westerners were like a good portion of the Hindu population -- born sudra, taking strong drugs like Marijuana (our chemist Dick Patel, an Indian and Shivite, told me about the use of marijuana as a sacrament concoction known as Bhang) -- only an idiot or a dishonest person would accept or put forward the notion that all were. And since Gour Govinda's only seeming qualifier making such yavanas and mlechas unsuited for understanding the philosophy was their continued usage of such substances and maintenance of other bad habits, since it appeared the he was more than ready to teach the yavanas and mlecchas the deep philosophical meanings when he was around, this is complete nonsense. The effects of marijuana wear off in hours and those of other strong drugs wear off too. Unless we are to assume not only that all of Srila Prabhupada's disciples were drug users, mad fellows, not only when they came to the Krsna Consciousness movement, but also after they accepted initiation and the four regs, Gour Govinda's entire argument seems only to me to have been presented in this way to mask his own private consideration that Srila Prabhupada could not communicate the Vaisnava philosophy and it's deeper truths, not because of his audience, but because of his own incapability.
Looking at it logically, and because Gour Govinda's presentation here isn't logical, there is really no other way to explain it, other than that perhaps Gour Govinda himself was a "mad fellow". Let us also not forget that persons like Socrates, Aristotle, Plato and Albert Einstein were also yavanas and mlecchas and so was Kant, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, so many who despite their bad habits, could have run rings around Gour Govinda, but who would have respected and perhaps even surrendered to Srila Prabhupada, had they ever met him. The idea that Srila Prabhupada couldn't educate the yavanas and mlecchas but that Gour Govinda can is obvious:
"Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada said, "Everything is in my books." He has given everything, but it is in seed form. He has only given a hint. Now you have to dive deeper and deeper, to the deepest region, then you will collect the invaluable gems that are there."
What Gour Govinda is doing here is thinking himself to be very spiritually advanced and exclusively the beneficiary of Srila Prabhupada's mercy. I did this once during a Sunday Feast at New Dwarka some years ago, as the speaker on the vyasasana, not very much interested in Krsna Katha, was talking inanely about aliens and other dimensions after watching something on television. All of a sudden I began to receive a stream of realizations with the resultant feeling that I was so very special (so puffed up), until I happened to glance at the Jagannatha Deities, specifically at Lord Balarama, Who happened to be frowning.
There are so many muscles in just a human face, all of them combining to express the variety of emotions underneath. Have you ever seen a father who is both amused and proud of his child, but at the same time wishes to express to his child with a frown that what the child is doing is not appropriate?
No Marijuana, no LSD, not psychotic and not an advanced devotee, just someone who is truly appreciative of Srila Prabhupada and of Sri Krsna, who really, really, in as much as it is possible for a beast like myself to appreciate and love them for what they have given me does. It has never entered my mind that Srila Prabhupada suffered from the constraints of any inadequacy, or that Lord Krsna cannot convey in English whatever it is that He wishes to communicate through His pure devotee, and to do so would be to think that matter could be a barrier to both Krsna and His pure devotees, when it is only ourselves, our own lack of surrender that remains a barrier to that transcendental benediction of Sri Krsna's and Srila Prabhupada's infinite mercy and grace.
Gour Govinda Swami was evidently reading Srila Prabhupada's books and getting what he thought to be realizations from them, and thinking perhaps that only he was getting them, that he was oh so special, he was the chosen one. But Srila Prabhupada had never given him the order to become guru; he got that okay from ISKCON, apparently.
After reading some of his statements, it seems that he had gotten himself into maya rather deeply and was quite delusional, as in the case where he is thinking that linguistic structural factors, which explain the notorious inability of even genius to translate a poem from one language into another, except very approximately, present the same stumbling block to the communication of a transcendental value into the receptive, eager and appreciative reservoir of the jiva's pure cognitive essence.
This would be true, however, only if the subject being translated were both mundane and the medium for the transmission of the subject metaphoric, merely a linguistic grid consisting of symbols and the game rules for employing them, of metaphors, symbols of the things being communicated rather than the thing itself. If Krsna's Name was only a symbol for Krsna, entirely separate and possessive of not a single drop of His sweetness, like the word "apple" possesses not a hint of the taste of the actual fruit, then this would be true.
There are things that can be known by the hand or by the head, but it is the pure cognitive essence of the living entity, a faculty beyond the mind, that receives the noble, glorious and blissful truths of transcendental realization from the lips of guru (vani and vapu), and in turn informs one's conceptual understanding, illuminating or enlightening one. At that point the world possibly comes alive for us in ways unimaginable before, and seemingly material objects, seeming symbols of the things that they merely appear to represent, may reveal themselves to our newly awakened perception. Perhaps then the two horrible feelings of separation and compassion vie within, and with each deepening of commitment to the service of our spiritual master, the pain of separation increases until nothing remains except Krsna's Holy Names to cling to. I wouldn't know, that last part's entirely speculation. A lot of good things about being only a bhakta way back in the 70's, and a fringy since then, is that no one expects me to be serious or sincere. No one, that is, except Srila Prabhupada.
All glories to Srila Prabhupada
Ys George Smith
