By Bhakta Eric Johnson
Edited
by Kailasa Candra dasa

Transcendental literature is only meant to uplift conditioned souls out of the material conception of life. This is particularly the case when such transcendental writings center around the activities of a God-realized devotee, i.e., his activities during his lifetime of manifest existence. Bona fide glorification of the Lord's unalloyed devotee in such literature produces that upliftement. The more the reader appreciates the actual position of Krishna and His representative, the more the reader gives up a doggish mentality of thinking himself the controller or enjoyer.

If the conditioned soul is not only allowed, but even accidentally encouraged, to entertain the idea that Srila Prabhupada was nothing more than an extremely powerful or influential man, upliftment by such reading does not transpire. The reader instead is subtly deceived by what he reads.

If a book about a pure devotee is actually transcendental, it must make the distinction between mundane men and the shaktyavesh-avatar (the fully-empowered God-realized soul) from the very outset. That distinction cannot be mentioned incidentally. In his own writings about his guru, Srila Prabhupada does not present mundane misconceptions about Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Goswami.

Chaitanya-charitamrita similarly pushes its readers to accept the supreme divinity and transcendence of Lord Chaitanya--and Chaitanya's pastimes are detailed in later chapters. Similarly, Srila Vyasadeva, the author of the Bhagavatam, utilizes nine cantos of that work before proceeding to the pastimes of Lord Krishna.

The eyes of the stubborn and owlish conditioned soul require to be forced open by any author who purports to be presenting transcendental literature. Only then is such a writer actually his reader's well-wisher. Such a reader must be yanked out of his misconceptions; they should not be re-solidified. Otherwise, he will simply remain mired in seeing everyone as having the same conditioned tendencies which he has ("atmavat manyate jagat" ). He then thinks, "Ah, yes! How nice it is that Srila Prabhupada is really very much just like me. I can go on in my own way."

The professional Bhagavatam reciters encourage those who hear them similarly. The audience immediately hears the pastimes of Krishna. Skipping immediately to the pastimes of Krishna, the reciters omit impressing upon their audience the actual distinction between Krishna and devotees who are still conditioned by material life.

If an author is not actually authorized by Krishna, the nectar of transcendental activities he seems to be writing about will actually produce results more akin to poison. To even slightly reduce the activities of Srila Prabhupada to the level of a semi-spiritual/semi-mundane biography is a great disservice to everyone who reads it. What will people conclude when they come across intermittent mundane descriptions of the pure devotee? Consider, for example, these seven quotes from the Lilamrita:

1. "He went on with his duties, but remained shaken by the dream." Vol. 1, Ch. 3, pg. 59.
2. "Although Prabhupada's home had suddenly become an insane terror, the street at its door was also a hellish, dangerous place. He was shaken." Vol. 2, Ch. 6, pg. 95.
3. "This is what it meant to be working without government sponsorship, without the support of any religious organization, without a patron. It meant feeling vulnerable and insecure." Vol. 2, Ch. 6, pg. 96.
4. "His spiritual emotions were so turbulent that he wasn't thinking of going to Jhansi. He wanted to take a train to . . . anywhere. . . . Abhay spent his time in Jhargram chanting the holy name and becoming settled in detachment from his family." Vol. 1, Ch. 7, pg. 163.
5. "Suddenly, he was as homeless as any derelict on the street. In fact, many of them, with their long-time berths in flophouses, were more secure than he. They were ruined, but settled . . . If he couldn't go to the loft, he had no place." Vol. 2, Ch. 6, pg. 96.
6. "(His look) is peaceful and knowing, as if he has suddenly become a sadhu (holy man) on the day his father passed away." Vol. 1, Ch. 3, pg. 59.
7. "He had gotten first-hand experience of American life, and he gained confidence that his health was strong and his message communicable." Vol. 2, Ch. 2, pg. 20.

These quotes are all from the hardbound edition of the Lilamrita. In the first two quotes, Srila Prabhupada is said to be "shaken" by material circumstances. Srila Prabhupada was a fully God-realized devotee of the Lord. Vishnu in the heart is God, although Krishna is the highest form of God. In the Bhagavad-gita, Chapter Six, verse twenty-three, the yogi who has realized Vishnu in the heart is said to be "never shaken, even in the midst of the greatest difficulty." Prabhupada was--and, of course, still is--Krishna realized, and, therefore, obviously possessed all the qualifications of a Vishnu-realized yogi.

Then the book, in the third quote, presupposes that Prabhupada was "vulnerable and insecure." This because he simply lacked big-money patronage. There were God-realized devotees throughout history, such as Kholavechara Sridhara and Gaura Kishora das babaji, who possessed virtually no money whatsoever and lived in what we would consider abject poverty. Does money or material living circumstances have anything to do with the security felt by a God-realized guru?

The fourth quote covers its offense--somewhat. It refers to Prabhupada's spiritual emotions, but, nevertheless, creates the image of an attached man bewildered upon losing his family. It opines that he was so bewildered that he just had to flee . . . anywhere! Even a person who is brahma-realized, who has simply realized the effulgence of God, is fixed in a detachment completely above such kinds of bewilderments.

The fifth quote is most horrendous. It directly compares Prabhupada to a bum! In fact, it contends that the bums in the Bowery were even more secure than Prabhupada was when he lost his living place in a loft near there. Someone situated in spiritual consciousness places no significance in his living quarters or lack of it.

The sixth quote is one of the many examples of mental speculation in the book. It insinuates that it took the death of Prabhupada's father to jolt Prabhupada to the status of a holy man. Sheer speculation and sheer nonsense.

The seventh quote contends that Prabhupada needed to get experience with America and its inhabitants before he felt confident enough to preach the Absolute Truth here. Realization does not require confidence; it is beyond confidence.

Now, if the argument is raised that Srila Prabhupada himself made some of these statements in private room conversation while talking intimately with his disciples, we should avoid such rationalizations. They have no place in Krishna consciousness. When a pure devotee chooses to provoke emotions within his disciples by apparently denigrating himself, that is not meant to be written about in books which will be read by tens of thousands of neophytes and non-devotees. In Chaitanya-charitamrita, the author speaks about himself as being lower than a worm in stool. Such self-denigration is obviously an act of Vaishnava humility. If such a great devotee of God chooses to put that kind of statement in his own writings about himself, it is acceptable. No one will misinterpret it. But if a conditioned soul chooses to write about his guru in some kind of mundane biography in a similar way, that is completely unacceptable. And such books will reach tens of thousands of neophytes and non-devotees in the West. Those readers will certainly misinterpret the mundanity put in the book. Besides, there is no strong evidence that Srila Prabhupada even made any statements--or even statements like them--in the first place.

Any biography of a guru must be above suspicion. The Lilamrita does not qualify. It has so many obvious defects. Ironically, the author of that book quotes a purport by Srila Prabhupada which confirms that transcendental literature must be beyond suspicion:

"Unless one is empowered by higher authorities or advanced devotees, one cannot write transcendental literature, for all such literature must be above suspicion, or, in other words, it must have none of the defects of conditioned souls: mistakes, illusions, cheating, and imperfect sense perception." Preface, pp. xi-xii.

No sane and knowledgeable reader, after reading the Lilamrita, could consider its author either empowered or free from conditional defects. Indeed, the book creates suspicion. To talk about Prabhupada as being "Lord Krishna's empowered representative," and, within the same context, contending that his initial preaching constituted "years of struggle" is to employ a very twisted logic. Such logic is the kind which creates book titles such as " 'Guru Reform` Notebook," which is as concise a contradiction as you can get. And to constantly refer to one's own spiritual master by his childhood name (Abhay Charan) may be pleasing to the literati and people of their ilk, but it remains nevertheless an offense within genuine devotional circles.

Where does the ultimate responsibility for this Lilamrita lie? Does it lie with the author alone? He, himself, gives us a clue:

"The responsibility of commissioning such a work rested with the Governing Body Commission. . . . . . . At their annual meeting in 1978, the GBC resolved that a biography of Srila Prabhupada should be written and that I would be the author." Preface, pg. xi.

We must reject this Lilamrita because of the many contaminations within it. We have presented only a handful of them. Material conceptions do not apply to an eternal associate of the Lord such as Srila Prabhupada.

Accepting any mundane conception of the spiritual master is dangerous. While he was present in material manifestation, none of his disciples would have bought into such a mundane outlook of their spiritual master. It would not have been tolerated. The scripture describes such misconceptions of the guru as a hellish mentality. Such a mindset is capable of uprooting the devotional creeper. It is known to be a great offense to the guru, called, in Sanskrit, maha-gurv-aparadha. It is espectially so when such mundane conceptions are distributed to tens of thousands of people in written form. The Lilamrita's flaws and shortcomings are more than simple, isolated mistakes. The Bhagavatam says that the effect can always be found within the cause. Lilamrita was created in order to help produce the effects which now constitute what we know as the current corporate institution. The book took its birth during the heyday of zonal-acharya fervor, when each "new guru" was assigned a sovereign zone within which to rule and "initiate disciples." Some of the more polite (and naive) devotees may argue that the Lilamrita's author made no conscious mistakes in writing the book. Perhaps. But the effect it has helped to produce is both conscious and blatant. In essence, it becomes easier to accept an ordinary man as a guru when you are first able to bring an actual guru down to the status of an ordinary man.

It becomes easier for eleven "zonal acharyas" to deceive themselves into thinking that they were (or still are) gurus, when they are first able to deceive themselves and others that their guru also possessed various failings and fragilities. Lilamrita helped greatly in the matter of these misconceptions being able to have a fertile ground in which to grow.

In conclusion, posing as a God-realized devotee can never be inspired by the internal energy of the Lord. It does not matter whether or not such posturing was enacted individually or in unison. Such cheating is, instead, always inspired by the external energy of the Lord--by material nature. And the effect is binding to the cycle of birth and death. Twenty some years after its initial printing, the effects of the Lilamrita have been woven into the now hardened fabric of the institution which spawned that literature. It has now become a primal ingredient of that institution's foundational cement. There was an interesting book review about the Lilamrita which was reprinted in it. One of the lines of the review read: "It (the Lilamrita) is a very human story, with a very human A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami in the center." This quote came from the pen of an influential American professor. How perfectly it mocks all who have read the Lilamrita and concluded that it was a great glorification of the spiritual master.

Quotes from the books of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada are copyright by the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust