Our friends now proceed.
QUOTE:
“Let us now go to the centre of the controversy. The final instruction.
“Although you optimistically refer to the May 28th conversation as the ‘final instruction’; on consulting our fully authorised BBT calendar we find that July actually follows on from May by two months.”
COMMENT:
Here the authors are being not only cute but insulting. “You can’t even tell time.”
If people ten or more years my junior in the Krsna consciousness movement find pleasure in insulting me, I don’t mind. I’m sure I deserve to be insulted.
I’m also sure they can find ways to “prove” they’re being Krsna conscious. Oh, well.
As vexing as it may be to have to explain what ought to be obvious—and as vexing as it may be to know in advance that for every bogus argument knocked down, two more will spring up in its place—here goes:
I refer to the May 28th conversation as “the final instruction” for a simple reason: It’s the last time in history that Srila Prabhupada is directly asked the relevant question we’re discussing—How would initiations go on after his physical departure.
The question, placed before Srila Prabhupada by His Holiness Satsvarupa Maharaja, is as follows:
Then our next question concerns initiations in the future, particularly at that time when you’re no longer with us. We want to know how first and second initiation would be conducted.
That’s precisely the question at hand. It is asked clearly and unambiguously. And that is the question to which Srila Prabhupada, on May 28, is undoubtedly responding.
You would like to believe—and you would like us to believe—that the letter written on July 9th is also a direct answer to that same question.
But why do we have to believe this? Does the letter say it? No. Then who says it? You do. Fudge!
The logic goes like this:
Thesis: The “final answer” to Satsvarupa Maharaja’s question comes not on May 28 but on July 9.
Q: How do we know that this is the “final answer”?
A: Because July comes after May.
Q. But how do we know that the letter written in July is truly addressed to the question asked in May?
A. Because it is.
Q.E.D.?
QUOTE:
“You say everyone accepts the July 9th order and the establishment of the rtvik system. In our experience most devotees have never read the July 9th letter before we give it to them, and are quite surprised when they do.”
RESPONSE:
You are becoming tiresome. How many times am I going to have to deal with statements from you beginning with “You say” and ending with something I never said?
Here’s what I actually said:
Now, let’s move on to something else that everyone agrees on.
Srila Prabhupada himself, in 1977, appointed eleven disciples to serve as rtvik gurus, or “officiating spiritual masters.”
He authorized these rtviks to decide which candidates to accept, and to chant on the candidates’ beads and give the new disciples spiritual names. The rtviks were to do this on Srila Prabhupada’s behalf, and the new disciples were to be not those of the rtviks but of Srila Prabhupada himself.
On July 9, 1977, Srila Prabhupada signed a document that makes these facts unmistakably clear.
Do you see here—or anywhere else in my paper—”everyone accepts the July 9th order and the establishment of the rtvik system”? My point was not that everyone has read the July 9th letter, or that everyone accepts your posthumous rtvik guru system, but simply that just about everyone agrees that Srila Prabhupada appointed eleven rtviks.
Yet again, you are arguing with your own straw man, not with me.
QUOTE:
“[On May 28, after some “muddled questions about disciple relationships”] Srila Prabhupada then finishes by saying that there would be gurus if he orders them, and should he ever do so there would then be disciples of his disciples. Just see.”
RESPONSE:
Notice how faithfully our friends have reported what Srila Prabhupada said.
The transcription reads:
When I order, “You become guru,” he becomes regular guru. That’s all. He becomes disciple of my disciple. That’s it. [or—an alternative transcription—”Just see.”]
But in the hands of our friends, “when” becomes “if.” And they have helpfully (that is, meddlesomely) added “should he ever do so.”
In sum: They are putting words in Prabhupada’s mouth.
They do it to me, they do it to His Divine Grace. They do it and do it and do it.
By the way, the “muddled questions” they speak of are such as this:
Tamal Krsna Maharaja: [T]hese rtvik-acaryas, they’re officiating, giving diksa. . . . The people who they give diksa to, whose disciple are they?
A muddled question indeed! But if you can’t accept Srila Prabhupada’s answer, then of course you’d like to get rid of the question.
Our friends then proceed further with their interpretation of the exchange on May 28th. No need to comment on that here. In a paper by Giridhari Swami, Umapati Swami, and Badrinarayana Prabhu, that interpretation has already been demolished.
Only perhaps one more point, in passing: They again assail “your M.A.S.S. doctrine,” as if they were attacking something my paper advocated. Again, clearly this is easier than addressing what the paper actually says.
QUOTE:
“The final order
“Moving on to the actual ‘final order’, . . . “
RESPONSE:
Again: Why is this ‘the final order’ as to initiation after Srila Prabhupada’s departure? Because Krishnakant and Yaduraja say it is, that’s why. It is “the final order” merely by their fiat. Phooey!
The paper continues with some brief sophistical arguments not worth talking about. Then. . .
QUOTE:
“From where do you derive the notion that Srila Prabhupada wanted the system to stop at his departure?” [emphasis in original]
RESPONSE:
That’s what my paper was about. But while busy jousting with straw men, you seem to have missed it.
How much time am I supposed to waste going around in circles with you? For the answer to your question, read my paper again.
QUOTE:
“[T]he most important issue, the one which Satsvarupa Goswami and all the GBC had specifically asked him about, i.e the process of initiation for after his departure and on for ten thousand years, he remained utterly silent on. No written instructions to his temple presidents, no orders to the GBC, no signed letter. The absurdity of this proposition beggars belief.”
RESPONSE:
Srila Prabhupada speaks to a delegation of his GBC men, and because he doesn’t put his words into writing, according to you he is “utterly silent.” The absurdity of this proposition beggars belief.
QUOTE:
“If Srila Prabhupada’s teachings on how to run the parampara in his absence were as crystalline clear as you imply they were, for an entire decade, so clear he did not even need to issue a specific directive to the movement on the matter, why on earth did the GBC send a special delegation to his bedside in the first place?”
RESPONSE:
Again, you are badly missing the point. My paper is not about “how to run the parampara.” It’s about the fact that there’s supposed to be a parampara.
Which—ok, ok—our friends accept. There’s supposed to be a parampara, a disciplic succession—just there aren’t supposed to be any successors. More precisely: For the next 9,500 years, no successors. After that, no nothing.
Just as Prabhupada taught us, right?
QUOTE:
“The only examples you can offer of Srila Prabhupada ever mentioning his disciples initiating are extracted from letters to ambitious deviant devotees like Tusta Krsna.”
RESPONSE:
Well, I suppose I could offer more examples. But what would be the use? Whatever words from Srila Prabhupada I might offer, you can simply wave them away, as you do here, in this case by a character attack on Tusta Krsna.
If I were trying to defend your argument, and if I were up against such a clear, unequivocal, unambiguous statement as we find in Srila Prabhupada’s letter to Tusta Krsna, I suppose I’d be desperate to get rid of it too.
You can speculate on Srila Prabhupada’s motives. You can try to trivialize Srila Prabhupada’s letter by disparaging its recipient.
But you can’t get rid of it. In fact, here it is again, this time in its entirety.
New Delhi
2nd December, 1975
My Dear Tusta Krishna Swami,
Please accept my blessings. I beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter dated 21 November, 1975. Every student is expected to become Acarya. Acarya means one who knows the scriptural injunctions and follows them practically in life, and teaches them to his disciples. I have given you sannyasa with the great hope that in my absence you will preach the cult thruout the world and thus become recognized by Krishna as the most sincere servant of the Lord. So I’m very pleased that you have not deviated from the principles I have taught, and thus with power of attorney go on preaching Krishna consciousness, that will make me very happy as it is confirmed in the Guru vastakam yasya prasadat bhagavata prasadah just by satisfying your Spiritual Master who is accepted as the bonafide representative of the Lord you satisfy Krishna immediately without any doubt.
I am very glad to inform you that Sudama Vipra Maharaja is also now following my principles. So I am very very happy to receive all this news. Thank you very very much.
Keep trained up very rigidly and then you are bonafide Guru, and you can accept disciples on the same principle. But as a matter of etiquette it is the custom that during the lifetime of your Spiritual master you bring the prospective disciples to him, and in his absence or disappearance you can accept disciples without any limitation. This is the law of disciplic succession. I want to see my disciples become bonafide Spiritual Master and spread Krishna consciousness very widely, that will make me and Krishna very happy.
I hope this letter finds you well,
Your ever well wisher,
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami
Of course, we’re supposed to believe that this letter is just a sop for a deviant. The rest of us can blithely disregard it, because—how obvious!—it wasn’t published to the world. And what Srila Prabhupada told Tusta Krsna about making disciples was of course something the rest of us had never heard about. As if we’d never read the first verse of Upadesamrta:
vaco vegam manasah krodha-vagam
jihva-vegam udaropastha-vegam
etan vegan yo visaheta dhirah
sarvam apimam prthivim sa sisyat
A sober person who can tolerate the urge to speak, the mind’s
demands, the actions of anger and the urges of the tongue, belly and
genitals is qualified to make disciples all over the world.
So long as he does it as a rtvik, right?
I’m sure there’s a Krishnakant purport to that verse. But here’s Srila Prabhupada speaking—secretly? to ambitious deviants?—in the Srimad-Bhagavatam class in Sridham Mayapur (March 6, 1976), 10 days before Gaura Purnima:
[P]eople in general, they cannot understand, but those who are
preaching, they must be very sincere, the same way. Rupa raghunatha
pade, haibe akuti. They should read the literatures, the instruction,
just like Upadesamrta, The Nectar of Instruction. We should follow,
strictly follow. Then prthivim sa sisyat. Then you’ll be able to preach
and make disciples all over the world. This is the injunction.
It really is.
WINDING UP:
I’m getting tired of this. I’ve been through ten pages of your piece, full of specious arguments, and ten pages are yet to go, full of arguments equally crummy. Am I supposed to take it all seriously? Your paper doesn’t deserve it.
Anyone who hasn’t figured out by now that your paper and its theories aren’t worth two turds in hell would be unlikely to get the message even if I were to write a book as long as the Mahabharata, as tight as the Vedanta-sutra, and with footnotes as numerous as the verses in all the Vedas.
Oh, yes. I can hear it already: “Jayadvaita Swami chickened out. Our arguments were so powerful there was nothing he could say.”
Fine. You can spend the next 9500 years preaching to the world that Srila Prabhupada has frozen the disciplic line, from now till the year 11,500, by little more than one “henceforward” and three words about property trustees in his will. Meanwhile, I’m getting on with my work.
Just one more thing. . .
QUOTE:
“THERE IS NO REGULAR VANILLA. . . . [capitals in original]
“In summary, you insist on the following:
“a) The rtvik system must stop.
&
b) It must stop on Srila Prabhupada’s departure.
“Neither statement a) or b) appears in the July 9th letter. They are purely your own invention. An invention inspired by the ‘regular vanilla parampara system’, which, as we have clearly shown is itself another fiction created from your own imagination, with no basis in reality.”
RESPONSE:
For some reason, the July 9th letter is now supposed to be the essence of everything, and nothing can be said without reference to it. Nonsense cannot be called nonsense unless Srila Prabhupada explicitly said it was nonsense in a letter on July 9, 1977. A curious restriction on evidence.
Anyway:
For anyone who might think that earlier you were merely being cute, not insulting, this time the insult should be clear.
I am supposed to be Srila Prabhupada’s disciple, a preacher of his words, yet what I present as his plain teachings, you dismiss as a fiction, an offspring of my imagination.
As I mentioned before, I’m sure I deserve to be insulted. But Srila Prabhupada’s teachings do not.
And so I am adding as an appendix to this paper my supposedly fictional work, this time with footnotes. However much you say you honor Srila Prabhupada, I don’t believe you should be allowed to walk up and punch his teachings in the face.
Hare Krsna.
In Srila Prabhupada’s service,
Jayadvaita Swami
———————————————————————————————-
© 1998 Jayadvaita Swami. You may freely copy and distribute this document, provided you do so keeping it unaltered and complete, with all its components—the introduction, Part 1 and Part 2. Hare Krsna.
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