Material Education for Krsna SB 1.5.22

 

 

 

 

Here Acaryadeva explains the process of globalization during the Renaissance (which happened during Lord Chaitanya’s time) and the rebirth of classical Southern European culture. In contrast to the first reaction of the Catholic Church, Martin Luther was a vehement opponent of this pagan culture. He rejected philosophy and science as a result of which the church filed divorce from science and began to gain prominence and became atheistic. Later on the church tried to reverse that process. Srila Prabhupada was never in favor of a separation of science, religion and philosophy.  He wanted devotees to become educated in material sciences so that they could teach at universities and save the world. Therefore material education is a powerful way to serve Krsna.

Acaryadeva also speaks about Vedic Culture, which is not about ethnic details, and about the need to dialogue and not become proud and contemptuous of the world, otherwise the world will become contemptuous of us.

 

Part 1

 

Part 2

 

 

Transcription:

 

This is quite in fact, as it reads in the purport, that “human intellect is developed for advancement of learning in art, science, philosophy, physics, chemistry, psychology, economics, politics, etc. By culture of such knowledge the human society can attain perfection of life”. This is not anti-education, this is not anti-science, and this is not anti-psychology.

 

There was a classical age of pagan culture. Pagan is a word that is somewhat pejorative in Christian circles and more glorious in non-Christian circles. In any case, you have the cultural achievements of Athens and Magna Grecia (Greater Greece), and of course Rome. All this together is classical civilization. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, especially the Western Empire, with the so-called barbarian invasions, culture to a greater extent collapsed. Just as nowadays, for example, we have a somewhat sophisticated culture and there are still many universities, even though there are many ignorant people and many materialistic people. There is at least, materially, a developed intellectual culture in the world at the present time. Similarly back then. With the overthrow of the Western Roman Empire, after a while, actually literacy almost banished.

 

There rose a sort of a “dark ages” where people were crude. They forgot principles of hygiene and life was very dangerous. If you visit Medieval cities in Europe you find that people lived behind city walls, and behind those walls there is hardly anything green. There was hardly a blade of grass, or a bush, or a tree within these small wall cities. The streets are extremely narrow and very dark. People hardly saw the sunshine unless they went out of their city. The reason for this was that life was so dangerous.

 

The Renaissance of course was a rebirth over classical civilization that was interested in philosophy and art and material advancement. The Renaissance called itself the Renaissance because it saw itself as a rebirth of the more advanced civilization. The Middle Ages were the middle between these two manifestations of more rational, more advanced, more open-minded civilization, in which there was actually religious diversity and not simply Christian fanaticism, violent fanaticism (Crusades and so on).

 

The greatest impetus for this Renaissance, by the way, took place during Lord Caitanya’s life, which is also interesting. The world was completely transformed during the life of Lord Caitanya. This was one of the great effects. Lord Caitanya not only came and taught perfect spiritual knowledge, but He actually transformed history so that this knowledge could spread around the world. For example, when Columbus set sail, he was trying to get over to East India. Columbus was trying to get to the place that Lord Caitanya was living in when He was six years old, in 1492.

 

Columbus setting sail during Lord Caitanya’s time transformed Europe because the discovery of new worlds gave an explosive boost to a process that began then and continues to the present day, which we now call globalization. First of all, people had to realize that there even was a globe, and what was in it. The discovery of these new worlds, and the extraordinary economic opportunities of colonizing them, stimulated great advances in ship navigation, in military technology, ship building, the printing press was also invented at that time, and practically the most fascinating form of literature. Imagine if astronaut scientists found life on other planets and sent back these stories about what they were finding, people on other planets, we would’ve hardly read of anything else. And so these stories coming back from Africa, from Asia, from the Americas, all around the world, completely mesmerized western civilization and created a new global consciousness.

 

And inevitably those cities which have more contact with other places tend to have more liberal people, more open minded people. Even if you hold fast your own believes, when you come into contact with many different kinds of people and see the good, decent, intelligent people do things differently than you do, inevitably it creates a certain tolerance, a certain liberality (in the causative sense of the term). Even though Europe was still fanatical, this contact with other places, with the whole world, inevitably transformed peoples thinking. It was the seed, and this happened during Lord Caitanya’s life. It was the seed of what was to become an openness to world culture and the possibility of teaching Krishna Consciousness in the Western world.

 

In addition, with the invention of the printing press literature was made available to people. Literacy came back to Europe in a big way. Thus, the possibility of reading Prabhupada’s books, and just the possibility of reading about other cultures and of opening your mind.

 

Another very powerful thing happened during Lord Caitanya’s life, actually not at all less important than the other things I’ve mentioned, and that is the monopoly on religion. A somewhat cruel and violent monopoly on the sacred of religion disintegrated during Lord Caitanya’s life. This is known as the Protestant Reformation. America was established as a new country simply because of the opportunity created by the disintegration of the Western church. In other words, because there were in fact different churches in Europe, this created a certain epistemological relativity, in the sense that people realized there could be different sources for knowledge, and ultimately some people that disagreed with the established churches came to America. And that’s why this country was established. This country was born in the spirit of religious freedom. It was, you could say, the economic and geopolitical dominance of America after the world wars of the twentieth century that spread this doctrine of religious freedom and actually created the possibility of Lord Caitanya’s movement. All these powerful historical processes began during the life of Lord Caitanya.

 

So therefore its simply good history to say that Lord Caitanya’s presence in this world actually, even materially transformed the world creating the conditions that would make possible an International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

 

That was just a little preface [laughter] …

 

With the Renaissance, or the re-birth of classical civilization, there was religious diversity and a great degree of religious tolerance. There was philosophy, and like Prabhupada said, “Religion without philosophy is fanaticism”. There was a serious interest in being rational and reasonable.

 

Perhaps the greatest single patron of this Renaissance was the Catholic Church. They were actually enthusiastic about it. Thomas Aquinas became the official theologian of the Catholic Church, with the Summa Theologica being his most famous work. Around the time that Madhava Acharya and Ramanuja were systematizing Vaishnava theology, Thomas Aquinas was systematizing religious knowledge in Europe. His work was basically baptized Aristotle because Aristotle was very big then. In Europe at that time, if you said “the philosopher” it meant Aristotle. In ISKCON if you say “the philosophy” it means our philosophy. So when Thomas Aquinas did this, it was very controversial.

 

The idea even in a faithful way, of philosophizing about your beliefs was controversial. Many people opposed it because they believed all you need was the Bible; you don’t need science, you don’t need philosophy. And many people argued by saying that if we are using our god-given intelligence, if we are supposed to engage everything in Krishna’s services, this includes our brains.

 

What’s interesting is that, by the time of the Renaissance, around two or three centuries after Thomas, the Church became an enthusiastic patron for philosophy and science; but then something happened, and that is that the Renaissance, the re-birth, was not simply a rebirth of European culture, or classical culture. It was specifically a rebirth of Southern European culture (as in Italy and Greece). The Christians in Northern Europe, people like Martin Luther, revolted against this rebirth of pagan culture saying that the only true religion is inseparably tied to Middle Eastern culture and Middle Eastern ways of thinking, and to express God’s truth, or to glorify God’s revelation in any cultural terms but those of the Palestines, is somehow to betray God and the revelation, and therefore we don’t want philosophy and we don’t want science, because philosophy and science actually came from Indo-European civilization and not the Middle East.

 

One of Martin Luther slogans was “Sola Scriptura” which means “Only Scripture”, no science, no philosophy. Because the Protestant Reformation was growing and the Catholic Church was loosing whole countries at a time, and they had to back off from the support of the Renaissance and they had to become more conservative in order to compete with the Protestant Reformation. The result of this, as the Scientific Revolution began to proceed, was that Religion in Europe filed for divorce from science.

 

The idea we have that science and religion are in opposition, that they are somehow hostile to each other, was not the way it was originally. Actually you had faithful scientists like Galileo and Newton, and like the great astronomers, who were deeply religious, who really understood that they were glorifying God, that they were revealing the grand plan of God by showing the rational structure of the universe. It was the Church that filed for divorce and abandoned science, which then began to develop in its own way, and gradually became atheistic. When science, through the technological, Industrial Revolution, began to actually gain prominence, even more prominence than religion in Europe, the Church sort of pleaded for reconciliation, but by that time science was on a roll and did not reciprocate with them.

 

Science itself has been relativized in many ways by its own discoveries and by its own catastrophes. For example, in Hollywood there is a large genre of movies that depict the evil, mad scientist, creating some technology that blows up the world. You see this in Batman movies, X-man, for example. It is a very common Hollywood stereotype, which tells us something about our culture. Now there are some attempts to reconciliation. There are science and religion conferences.

 

Where do the Hare Krishnas fit in here?

 

Prabhupada is saying, “Yes, we do want philosophy, we do want science.” He is saying that so emphatically here, over and over again. When I first joined the Hare Krishna movement in 1969, I was a student in Berkley. I had a scholarship in UC Berkley, and I didn’t know whether I should drop out of school and just do full-time service. I wrote Prabhupada a letter, and I was prepared to do full-time sankirtan or stay in school in Berkley. Prabhupada wrote back and said, “I want you to stay in school.” He said, “I want you to be nicely educated so you can preach to similarly educated people.” What Prabhupada didn’t say to me was, “You don’t need to go to college, just read my books and that’ll do it.”

 

Obviously Prabhupada’s books are the center of our life, we understand everything through the lens of Prabhupada’s books; but Prabhupada specifically wrote to me and said, “I want you to be nicely educated in the University so that you can explain Krishna Consciousness to similarly educated people.” I found in my own life experiences that Prabhupada was perfectly correct, that by going through the whole academic thing, it greatly empowered me and prepared me to communicate effectively, just as Prabhupada said, with similarly educated people, in a way that I could not, even though I read Prabhupada’s books over and over again. I think I knew them fairly well, but it greatly enhanced my ability to communicate. When Prabhupada sent me to Latin America, for instance, I had to learn Spanish and Portuguese, because that’s what people speak there.

 

Now it’s interesting, there is a saying, “Don’t try to be more catholic than the Pope.” There are times when we try to be more pure than Prabhupada asks us to be, or our conception of pure. For example, when Ravindra Swarupa Prabhu joined the Hare Krishna movement in Philadelphia, he was in a doctoral program in religious studies in Temple University, and he wrote Prabhupada a letter saying, “Should I continue this program or drop out and just do regular Temple service?” Prabhupada wrote back saying, “No, this is very valuable, stay and do your program.” Now, when the devotees read Prabhupada’s letter, I think in all sincerity and in all youthful fanaticism, they said to him, “Look, it is clear that Prabhupada wants you to drop out of your program, but he sees that you are attached, and therefore he said that, but if you really want to please Prabhupada, show him you’re not attached and drop out of your program.” They thought they were being very loyal to Prabhupada by insisting that this devotee do exactly the opposite that Prabhupada just told him to do.

 

On June 22 1975, a day that will live in ISKCON fame, in a room conversation in LA, in New Dwarka, the devotees proposed to Prabhupada that if his disciples or followers got advanced degrees in the University, they could teach Krishna Consciousness appropriately in Universities. Prabhupada’s response was very enthusiastic, very adamant. He said, “Yes, I want this”, and three times he said, “Do it, do it, do it. ”

 

If this can happen, if devotes can be trained so they can teach in Universities, he said, this will save America and it will save the world. When I obeyed Prabhupada’s instructions, and some time later went back to school, many devotees thought I was in maya. I received a letter from a sannyasi saying, “I’m very sorry to hear about your fall down, please come and stay with us and we’ll get you back in shape, we’ll get you back on your feet.”

 

There are all these cases where even if you are following a direct instruction from Prabhupada there are very zealous, well-meaning people who think that is actually in maya to engage these things in Krishna’s service. They used to have a “Prabhupada Speaks Out” section in Back to Godhead magazine, and one time they printed this dialogue where someone asked Prabhupada whether Joan of Arc was described or mentioned, or prophesized in the Bhagavatam (sort of an unusual, but interesting question). Prabhupada’s answer is fascinating. He said, “If historical books describing Joan of Arc tell us that she was actually God conscious, then these books are also the Bhagavatam.” Then Prabhupada said, “Why only this Bhagavatam in Sanskrit, why not the other Bhagavatam?” The word Bhagavatam, by the way, means “about God” (Bhagavan is God, Bhagavatam means “about God”). This was actually printed in BTG.

 

I don’t mean to say now that we are going to become a totally eclectic ‘International Society for the study of world religions operation’. Of course, we are focused on Prabhupada’s books. We are focused on Lord Caitanya’s teachings. However, Prabhupada himself had an undergraduate college education, and he constantly used that education in his preaching. If you know about the English curriculum back then, there are so many things that Prabhupada said, which we take simply as pure Vedic culture, like “please accept my obeisances, please accept my blessings, your humble servant”. That’s actually European. It actually comes from England, along with the harmonium.

 

Even his English presentation, his language, a lot of it came from Europe. Why? Because it was “Vedic”. What does “Vedic” mean? The word veda means knowledge. Krishna says in Bhagavad-Gita 15.15 vedaiś ca sarvair aham eva vedyaḥ, “by all the Vedas”, which literally means by all knowledges, “I alone am to be known.” Krishna also says in the Bhagavad-gita traiguṇya-viṣayā vedāḥ (Bg. 2.45), the Vedas, speaking explicitly about the Sanskrit Vedas, and specially the earlier Vedic samhitas, are traigunya - their subject matter is things related to the three modes of nature; and therefore Krishna says, nistraiguṇyo bhavārjuna - transcend this subject matter of the three modes of nature. Be transcendental.

 

Also Krsna says evaṁ trayī-dharmam anuprapannā gatāgataṁ kāma-kāmā labhante, he speaks about trayī-dharma. Dharma means spiritual, religious or sacred principles. The word dharma also means law in Sanskrit. Religious principles may be sometimes misleading. In earlier traditional civilization, before the modern age, society was non-secular. In other words, there was no such thing as secular society. Virtually, in all pre-modern societies - pre-very-modern actually - religion was not one department, or one aspect of life. It was the framework in which all of life was conducted, not just one department of life. Therefore dharma was not, in a modern sense, religious principles, as opposed to philosophical principles, sociological principles, political principles, or economic principles. In the Vedic culture, and virtually in every pre-modern civilization, the political, social, philosophical and even economical principles, were all understood as an aspect of religion.

 

Why do you organize society in a certain way? Because it says so in some sacred text. Why do you govern society? For example, you find in India, and also in Europe, divine right monarchy. The word for king in Sanskrit is naradeva, a god among men. Divine right monarchy was the standard political system based on a religious understanding. Even economic issues like taxation rates, and rules of charity, are all dharma. So to call this a religious principle is fine as long as you understand we are not speaking about a modern use of the world religion, as one separate activity that human beings engage in as opposed to or as distinguished from political, social, economic, artistic and philosophical activities. Dharma really means law, it means principle or sacred law. It means the principles that govern all of life, not merely religion.

 

In fact if you read Mahabharata, Srimad Bhagavatam, there is no such thing as religion as we now understand, as sort of a private, sectarian corporation or community. There is no such thing. Read the Bhagavatam, they didn’t have churches or denominations. There are communities of people with different spiritual persuasions; but in understanding this word dharma, we can’t be anachronistic, in other words, in the wrong time period. We have to look and see what it really is. Krishna says in Bhagavad-gita, evaṁ trayī-dharmam anuprapannā (Bg 9.21) trayī-dharmam - the triad referring to here is the Rig, Yajur, and Sama Veda. The fourth Veda, the Atharva Veda was left out because it contains a bunch of Vedic voodoo, which kind of embarrassed the more educated brahmanas.

 

anuprapannā - by resorting to, by depending upon the dharma, the principles of the three Vedas, evaṁ trayī-dharmam anuprapannā gatāgataṁ kāma-kāmā labhante (Bg 9.21), those who simply, literarily, desire their desires. In English, a desire can be the verb, the action of desiring, or it can be the object of that action, your desires or your wishes. So the English word wish and desire, can either be the actually action itself of desiring or wishing, or the object of those action. It is exactly the same thing in Sanskrit, and therefore kāma-kāmā means literarily “those desiring their desires”.

 

Those desiring their own selfish desires, they achieve simply going and coming. In other words, they go up to svarga, the heavenly planets, to come back down. What Krishna wants to say here, is that this is an exercise in futility. Krishna also says in the Gita that the Vedas are traiguṇya-viṣayā, their subject matter is material life, and that those who are veda-vāda-ratāḥ - delighting in or dedicated to Vedic language - are materialistic, and nānyad astīti - they claim that there’s nothing more than this, the fruitive activities, the karma-kāṇḍa rituals which are sort of religious in nature, but which aspire for material rewards, as you can see every Sunday on television. So you have all these statements by Krishna, where He is speaking critically, pejoratively about the Vedas. I have just given you these three examples. Therefore, the Bhagavad-gita is rejecting this as the true purpose of life. The Bhagavad-gita itself says that the Vedas, or at least portions of this Vedic culture are materialistic.

 

Another point is that, typically in the Hindu mind, the culture, the civilization described in the Mahabharata, is quintessentially Vedic culture. In other words, if we think what Vedic culture was like, most people would think back to the world described in the Mahabharata, or even Bhagavatam. Now, in the midst of that “quintessential” Vedic Culture, with varṇa and āśrama intact, with sacrifices going on everywhere, and all the rituals, Krishna says the actual spiritual science has been lost.

 

So in all of what we are seeing in the Mahabharata, all that sort of hyper Vedic civilization, the real science has actually been lost. Krishna says yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānir bhavati bhārata, when dharma is collapsing, abhyutthānam adharmasya, adharma is flourishing or growing strongly, tadātmānaṁ - “I manifest myself”. If Krishna says I come when dharma is collapsing and adharma is going strong, that means that Krishna is depicting or certifying, or declaring that the civilization in which He appeared, is a civilization in which dharma has collapsed or is collapsing.

 

So let’s look again at that “quintessential” Vedic culture. It is not so quintessential, is it? Krishna says in Bhagavad-gita: vedaiś ca sarvair - by all the Vedas I alone am to be known. And yet in chapter two He says that the subject matter of the Vedas is material life. This is not a contradiction, it is a paradox. (The difference is that a contradiction, literally “contra”, means against or opposed, and diction means speaking. A paradox means something which is apparently contradictory, but really isn’t. Paradoxical speech forces the reader to think deeply and find the ultimate unity of apparently opposing views.) I think the solution of this is that Krishna is speaking first of all of ultimate purposes, and also about knowledge. He is using the word Veda in the literal sense, “knowledge”. From the Sanskrit word veda we have the English words ‘vision’, ‘video’ and ‘wit’ (the knower). We also have the Latin word ‘vedere’ (to see) and the German “wissen” (to know). Literarily Krishna is saying that, “By all types of knowledge the ultimate purpose is to know Me. “

 

We always say Vedic culture, and there of course is a Vedic culture. However we should keep in mind that for the English word culture there is no direct Sanskrit word. In other words, when we say Vedic culture we are not translating a literal Sanskrit term. What is the Sanskrit word for Vedic culture in the Bhagavad-Gita or Bhagavatam? It is dharma. If we look at the word culture and the word dharma, they are not identical. They overlap in some areas, but they are not identical words. For example, in English you can speak about let’s say Cajun culture, or you can speak about New England culture, or Mexican culture, or you can be more specific like Wahakan culture, or the culture of Halisco, and so on. What does it mean when we use the word Polynesian culture? We mean a certain way of cooking, certain kind of architecture, dance, folk music, isn’t it? Is that the word dharma? If we say Vedic dharma, dharma is a cultural principles. Sometimes the way we use the word culture in the modern world can refer to an ethnic package; but dharma, especially in the sense of sanātana dharma or Vedic dharma, is not something necessarily referring to some eternal ethnic tradition. For example, Krishna when talks about food in the Bhagavad-gita, he doesn’t say, offer Me pakoras and halava. (Halava is a Muslim preparation of course, and therefore didn’t exist when Krishna appeared.) Krishna doesn’t give in the Bhagavad-gita, or in the Bhagavatam, a cookbook or a recipe list. What Krishna gives in the Gita is a cultural principle, not an ethnic detail. Krishna talks in the Bhagavad-gita about sāttvika bhojanaṁ - food in the mode of goodness. In the Bhagavad-gita things in the mode of goodness are always the highest in this world, and we should offer them to Krishna so they become spiritual. Basically what the Gita is teaching is that you take something in the mode of goodness, whether it is food, or an attitude, or a way of acting, a type of charity - you offer it to Krishna and it becomes spiritual. Literarily, it becomes viśuddha-sattva, purified goodness.

 

So keep this in mind, the spiritual platform is purified goodness. It is sattva, but it is purified, and the way it becomes purified is by offering it to God as Krishna clearly explains in Bhagavad-Gita, brahmārpaṇaṁ brahma havir brahmāgnau brahmaṇā hutam

 

When Krishna talks about sāttvika bhojanaṁ, food in goodness, He says, it is āyuḥ-vivardhanāḥ, it increases and causes to flourish our duration of life. Food which does not promote your physical health because it triples your cholesterol etc. is not in the mode of goodness according to the Bhagavad-gita. Krishna also says that ārogya-vivardhanāḥ - literarily it increases health, and āyuḥ, it increases duration of life. In offering food in the mode of goodness to Krishna, we are offering healthy food that gives you a longer life. That’s what Krishna actually says in the Gita.

 

It is a broad cultural principle, not an ethnic detail. Another example is chastity. Certainly within the context of the Gita or the Bhagavatam, men and women should be chaste. So what does it mean to dress chastely? There were times in India as we know from very well documented history, when completely chaste women, respectable chaste women, might not cover the top of her body. Now, don’t try to imitate former ages. There are other periods in Indian history where a woman should cover her head, which is of course not found in the Bhagavatam, nor in the Gita, and which appears to come from Islamic cultural influence.

 

What is Vedic culture? Does it mean to cover to cover your head, does it mean to go topless? There are certain variables. Regarding dress it means whatever culture, time and place you live in, you should dress in a way that is not erotic, and that does not sexually agitate other people in society and take their mind away from Krishna and put their mind in your dying body. If someone forgets God, and instead meditates in your body, what is it going to do for them? It is actually a type of exploitation for my vanity. For my vanity I am willing to ruin someone else’s consciousness. Is almost like going to a meeting of alcoholics anonymous, and saying, “Anyone wants a drink? I got these extra bottles and I don’t really need them. Ok, you don’t have to take them, but I’ll just leave them here for you”.

 

There were times as we know in European history when a woman’s neck was more erotic than her chest. You could see this in European paintings, painting of queens and noble women. They have these plunging neck lines, which were completely chaste and motherly and their necks are covered. There is a book called “Joseph Andrews”, one of the first novels in the 18th century where a boy and girl, who eventually get married, during their course of adventures fall down some slope and the girl’s neck covering comes off. The boy sees her bare neck which was whitish – doubly agitating – and almost faints. Somehow in ISKCON, for some inexplicable reason, women bracingly leave their necks uncovered …

 

This is just an example of what can go wrong in our understanding if we identify dharma with a detail, an ethnic detail, rather than a broad principle, which in this case means I should dress in a way which is appropriate and which does not disturb anyone’s mind, which does not arouse anyone’s material desires. Whatever society you live in, you should know where you are.

 

Rupa Goswami wrote a book called Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu in which he Krishna-ized a very popular thinking at that time which was rasa. He didn’t invent it. Santanta Goswami wrote a book, Hari-bhakti-vilāsa, providing a type of ritual and sādhana-manual, with all kinds of details to which Rupa Goswami in Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu says that, “I am not interested in because I want to give basic principles. What we know from Rupa and Santana Goswami’s writings, from Baladeva Vidyābhūṣaṇa and Ramānuja’s writings is that they did not only read the scriptures of their tradition. They were very learned in general intellectual currents, and they addressed them using the same language as lead thinkers of their time who existed outside of their own tradition.

 

When Prabhupada, for example, met Thoudam Singh (who would become Svarūpa Dāmodara, a spiritual leader in ISKCON) and he found out, like Ravindra-svarūpa Prabhu, that he was in a doctoral program, in this case in science, Prabhupada did not tell him, “You need to drop out of school and just read my books.” His reaction was exactly the opposite. Prabhupada was euphoric, he was so happy about this. If you look it up in the Veda base, you’ll find that everywhere Prabhupada went in the world, he bragged about the fact that there was a scientist who is joining them. He talked about it everywhere. He was thrilled that Svarūpa Dāmodara, as he became, was gaining a PhD in Science. (He thought that was the best thing since sliced chapattis!)

 

To me, to Ravīndra, to Svarūpa Dāmodara, Prabhupada was delighted, and strongly encouraged us to continue in our studies, because he understood that if we want to persuade intelligent people, which Prabhupada thought was absolutely essential for our mission, we have to have some background. Prabhupada himself constantly recycled his own college education. The conclusion here is not that everybody has to go to college; simply that material education is one very powerful way to serve Krishna. Is not for everyone, yet it is one very powerful and necessary way to serve Krishna, among other powerful ways.

 

In this purport Prabhupada says that human intellect is developed for the advancement of learning in art, science, philosophy, physics, chemistry, psychology. Again and again Prabhupada lists these fields and says, “Yes, we want these things to be used for Krishna.” We are not back in the early days of the Reformation, sola scriptura, we don’t want science, we don’t want philosophy. What you have got from that is some very violent fanaticism, because there’s no philosophy.

 

If everything in the world was the same color, you would not have the notion of color, you would not have the category of color in your head. In order to grasp the very notion of color, there have to be at least two. In order to grasp the notion of person, there have to be at least two. If you were the only person in the world, you could not know yourself as a person. But when there is a second person, and there is a relationship, you begin to understand that you are a person.

 

Similarly, everyone can serve Krishna in their own way. But for those who want to present Krishna Consciousness in a serious philosophical way, it is by understanding, to some extent, the range of philosophy that you can go back to our teachings and really see them as philosophy - not just as ‘the’ philosophy, in other words not just as a doctrine: “this is our doctrine, this is what we teach, this is our dogma”. To actually have the sense of it as a philosophy, one has to have a general sense of what philosophy is. In fact, throughout Vedic history, anyone who was trying to make philosophical arguments was required, and this is certainly true for all the Vaishnava philosophers in history, to present what was called in Sanskrit the pūrva-pakṣa, literarily the former side, or the first side. In other words it is what your opponents say, the philosophical point of your opponents. Prabhupada says this himself. He said that before someone sits in the vyasāsana they have to be able to defeat all the six philosophies. If you look at those six philosophies that you have to defeat in order to sit on the vyasāsana, one of them is the Vaiśeṣika philosophy, which is a sort of Vedic atomism (the world is made of atoms).

 

Do you think nowadays it is more relevant to defeat current atheistic theories, or at least show Krishna consciousness in the context of state of the art theories and physics, which are being learned by intelligent people all over the world, in every country in the world, or is it more relevant to refute a medieval technical Indian theory of atoms which is being taught in few places on the planet and which hardly anyone, including the Indians is interested in? How many Indians have a serious intellectual enthusiasm to learn about Vaiśeṣika-vāda?

 

I’m not saying in order to be a guru you have to have a college education, but what if I consider myself a guru occupying the highest spiritual position in the Krishna Conscious movement, and somebody asks me a question and I don’t really understand the question? I don’t really have the language to respond, I don’t really understand the issues, I don’t understand the prejudices or the preconceptions or the assumptions of the other person, I don’t understand traditional arguments against what I’m about to say. So I just fall right into a trap of saying something which triggers a negative reaction, whereas if I said the same thing in a slightly different way I could have avoided that negative reaction. In other words, being contentious of the world is not the way to save the world. Thinking that no one that ever lived outside our movement, ever said anything worth hearing, is extraordinarily cultish.

 

Prabhupada was not like that, Bhaktisiddhānta was not like that, and Bhaktivinoda Thākur was certainly not like that. He was actually quite enthusiastic about engaging culture for Krishna.

 

What’s remarkable about Gaura Kishor das Babaji – he was simply a super babaji. But in terms of the three great Vaisnava ācaryas of the modern age, who actually guided the Krishna Conscious movement, what’s remarkable is that they were all very educated. And they all used constantly their education. Now, someone could say, well now those really great souls have come, there’s no need for any more education in the world because in fact, at least in the last fifteen years, no one in the face of the earth, outside of the Gauḍīya-Vaiṣṇava movement, ever said anything worth listening to. If someone believes that, …uh, … Hare Krishna.

 

I’ll give you one simple example. I received a letter several years ago from some sincere young devotees who were trying to do college preaching in Durban, South Africa. And they wrote to me because I’m sort of known, or I was somehow involved, with college preaching. They said, “We are really hitting a brick wall. No one is interested.” I wrote back and said, “Well, are you interested in them? Why don’t you go back to the campus and not just as a tactic, but sincerely, try to be interested in the people you are talking to, find out what they think. Otherwise it is like a doctor who says, “I don’t need to diagnose you, I don’t need to give you any tests, I’m just going to throw some medicine at you, because I kind of like this medicine, this is what I want give you.”

 

So they took this advice, they went back to the university and they tried to be sincerely interested in the people they were talking to, to get to know who they were. They wrote back to me and said they are having great success, that everything had change.

 

A grand Vedic monolog is not going to save the world. It has to be a dialogue. Dialogue will save the world. We have to engage people in dialogue. For example, Lord Caitanya listened for one week to Sārvabhauma, and then found the point. Look at Lord Caitanya with Keśava Kāśmīrī Pandit, he asked him to compose hundred verses to Gaṅgā-mātā, and then found the point and converted him. Lord Caitanya was demonstrating to respectfully listen to people, understand what they are saying and then respond intelligently. That's Lord Caitanya's own example, and that's the example of various ācaryas. Just like Prabhupada was so enthusiastic about Svarūpa Dāmodara. If you want to really address the scientists of the world, you have to know science. If you want to address the psychologists of the world, you got to now psychology. If you want to address the historians of the world you have to know history.

 

Lord Caitanya took sannyasa from an impersonal sampradaya because that was the accredited sannyasa decree. He wanted an accredited decree. As you may know, in August I’ll begin teaching at the University of Florida, and I’ll be covering various subjects such as Vaisnavism and Vedanta, Śankara, Buddhism and so on and so forth. Prabhupada said three times, “I want this,” and “Do it, do it, do it”.

 

The Gita teaches that ultimately we have to see Krishna everywhere. And according to the Bhagavad-Gita I think that the real Krishna Consciousness is when you see Krishna everywhere and see everything in Krishna, and to really engage the world, to spiritualize the world the way Rupa Goswami krishnized rasa theory. He could have not Krishnized rasa theory unless he studied it.

 

Ramānuja walked from Tamil Nadu all the way up to the Himalayas. That’s basically like walking from Florida to New England. Why? To get a book, and it wasn’t even a Vaiṣṇava book. He would study it in order to prepare a Vedanta commentary. Jiva Goswami studied in Benares grammar, logic, he studied all kinds of “karmi” books. Jīva Goswami, Rupa Goswami, Santāna Goswami, these were learned people who intensely engaged their education in their mission. So again, this is not a service for everybody, it is just one very important service, which some people, a minority of people will engage in. But it’s very important, very powerful.

 

(Thanks to Jaya Sita dd for the transcription)