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WORLD July 9, 1999 VNN4263 Comment on this story Visit to Victoria, B.C. BY ANANDA DAS VICTORIA, B.C., Jul 9 (VNN) — Please accept my humble obeisances. I would like to thank Sriman Satyahit das prabhu for his balanced reporting of the events at the Saranagati festival held last week at the ISKCON co-operative farm near Ashcroft in Central British Columbia, and for his generally friendly comments towards ISKCON, its GBC representative body, and particularly GBC-Emeritus His Holiness Hrdayananda das Goswami. Obviously Satyahit prabhu still lays disproportionate and excessive stress upon a single letter sent on one occasion, while overlooking the general preaching mission of His Divine Grace Srila Prabhupada. This is a classic case of "not seeing the forest for the trees". Apart from this bit of editorializing on Satyahit's part, there is little in his comments with which any ISKCON-supporting devotee would disagree, and I think this is a highly positive sign. Satyahit's wife, Srimati Kelilalita dasi prabhu, told us this morning over breakfast prashadam (waffles, whipped cream and strawberries, as well as other fresh and dried fruits and toasted nuts) that she could tell that the trip to Saranagati had done her husband a great deal of good, and that he was now reinvigorated and re-enthused to preach Krsna consciousness even more than in the past, and, in my opinion, this is something for which not only the gentle readers of alt.religion.vaisnava, but also the young people of British Columbia, the next devotee generation, can be grateful. On Monday, after his visits to Saranagati and Vancouver, Srila Hrdayananda Maharaj stayed with us at the Victoria, B.C. preaching centre the whole day, and we all derived great bliss from his presence among us. Victoria is located on Vancouver Island, a very large island on the Pacific Coast of Canada, and is about four hours from Vancouver (including a car ferry which takes 1-1/2 hours to cross the Strait of Georgia). It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day, and Maharaj commented that it was a refreshing change from the rain and cold he had been experiencing in Vancouver. Because of the pleasant weather, His Holiness held darshans on the patio overlooking our vegetable garden. To add to the gentle tone set by Satyahit prabhu's comments, here is a partial description of the day. My wife and I have not had the use of a vehicle for the last year or so, so we were glad to accept the offer from a sympathetic businessman, Sriman Hans Rueckert, to pick up His Holiness and to offer him a brief guided tour of the city. He treated Maharaj with great respect, verging on diplomatic protocol. Hans, the president of the local Sri Sathya Sai Baba Centre, drove me up to Swartz Bay to meet Maharaj as he arrived on the ferry from Tsawwassen (near Vancouver). We did not see him at first, but we met a very nice Moroccan-Canadian man, who noticed me looking about rather despairingly, worried that perhaps Maharaj might have missed the ferry. He told me that on the ferry he had seen a gentleman in a dhoti like mine, only orange, seated in meditation and chanting on his japa beads. So I knew Maharaj had come, and, after some time, I saw him coming from the opposite direction of the arrivals lounge. He travelled in the company of a nice devotee couple from Santa Barbara, named Sarvatma das and Divyananda dasi. Hans kindly offered a seat in his Mercedes to Abraham, the Moroccan gentleman, for a ride into Victoria proper. Abraham told us that although he was born in Morocco, he was of Algerian and Italian ancestry, and Maharaj surprised us by speaking with him in Italian. Then he also spoke with Hans in German, thereby demonstrating his charm in three different languages. Hans, Satyahit, Kelilalita, Sarvatma, Divyananda, my wife Krsnarupa and I honoured breakfast prashadam with Hrdayananda Maharaj (Keli and Satyahit prabhus very kindly offered fruit and lakshmi to help with the bhoga and expenses of hosting our three day-guests). At various darshans throughout the day, various devotees got the opportunity to have personal association with this very advanced Vaisnava scholar and gentleman. One friend of ISKCON who has mostly studied Shaivite books, but who likes to chant Hare Krishna as well, came and asked Hrdayananda Maharaj about the difficulties she was experiencing with some people at a local Hindu temple, who, she says, sometimes ignore her, because she is a divorcˇe and a Westerner. She said she had read in the Skanda Purana that she would be considered a shudra because of not having taken birth in India, and that shudras should not be allowed to read Vedic literature, and that any brahmin who taught Vedic literature to such a non-brahmin would himself become a shudra as well. Maharaj told her frankly that she was going to the wrong temple, associating with the wrong people, and reading the wrong books. She should come to Krishna consciousness programs instead of Hindu events, associate with devotees who would not condemn her because of her marital status or her condition of birth, and read the Srimad-Bhagavatam and the Bhagavad-gita instead of miscellaneous rajasic and tamasic literatures poorly translated by non-devotees who had ulterior motives in their presentation of the texts. One gentleman who boards with us asked about his personal desire to spend four months every year in permaculture, four in studying shastra, and four in book distribution. Maharaj listened with interest, and then suggested to our boarder that he might investigate the Alachua, Florida temple, where he might find a situation to his liking. Keith seemed very satisfied with this answer. Bhakta Josh arrived from Port Angeles and went out for a car trip and a walk with Maharaj, Sarvatma, Divyananda and Sriman Hans, who showed them some of the scenic spots of Victoria, including Dallas Road along the beachfront, the nice homes in the Uplands area, the Parliament Buildings and Inner Harbour, and Beacon Hill Park. Josh was not able to stay for the kirtan and pravachan in the evening, because he had to return early (his wife was becoming too harried with their three little girls and needed his supportive presence), but he, too was very satisfied, explaining to us that, although he could go to Bellingham or Seattle for kirtans and Bhagavatam classes, this was his first opportunity to achieve the personal association of such a great and advanced Vaishnava as His Holiness Hrdayananda Maharaj. Josh, Sarvatma, Divyananda, Varaharupa and his wife Paratpara and their friends Linda and Jane, as well as Darren (an old personal friend), and my wife and I joined Maharaj for dinner (rice, corn on the cob, steamed broccoli and salad (made with radishes and salad greens from Krsnarupa's garden), accompanied by a nice cilantro-lime-yogurt sauce. In the evening, Josh, Linda and Jane had to leave, but everyone else, joined by Carrie, Nimmi, and Bhakta "Valmiki" Greg, stayed for a nice discourse by Hrdayananda Maharaj on Hinduism. He explained that, while the word "asura" means a demon in Puranic Sanskrit, in Vedic times it actually meant the opposite, a devotee, coming from the word asu (a word found in the Bhagavad-gita), rather than a-sura. The Zoroastrian Persians use the cognate word "Ahura" in their Avesta scripture, for example, to denote the Supreme Lord. Just as the Persians take a word which originally had an "S" in the initial or medial position, and substitute an "H" in the asura-ahura pair, similar things happened to the word "Sindhu" (a river mostly in Pakistan today better known to most Westerners as the Indus). Sindhu became "Hindhu" and the people living in the area of that river became known to the Persians as Hindus, which word then became widely adopted by the Islamic colonizers of India. So, while the word Hindu nowhere occurs in ancient Indic texts, it is found in the Middle Ages in the writings of the Muslim occupiers. Maharaj explained that a word may sometimes be adopted in a special context to make meaning clear when one is speaking to a certain class of people. (At the printshop where I work, the cameraman is named Theodore, but everyone knows him as "Bud". So if you call him Bud, he turns his head and responds. To his wife, however, he will always be Theo. When my little brother Leif calls in to work to say he is sick and can't come in, he says, "This is Woody. I'm too sick to come in today." Although I had never before heard my brother referred to by that name, my brother is apparently sufficiently comfortable with the name "Woody" to use it to describe himself.) This is the sense in which ordinary Indians eventually start to use the term "Hindu" to describe themselves. (Similarly, the Doukhobors, a Canadian pacifist sect with Russian roots, originally were called "Doukhobors" as a term of disparagement, meaning "those who wrestle against the Holy Spirit of God." The Doukhobors, however, eventually came to celebrate the name by which others knew them, reinterpreting the term to mean "those who wrestle on BEHALF of the Holy Spirit.") Finally, you have the modern militant phase, in which some "Hindus" begin to reinvent their past and actually to claim that their religion has ALWAYS been called Hindu, which is patently false, although certain tedious "net nuts" (if the shoe fits, wear it, Jai!) are always ready to repeat such nonsense on any forum they are able to post to. We had a nice kirtan expertly led by Sarvatma prabhu, while Mother Divyananda prabhu performed the arotik ceremony. This was followed by an enlightening discourse by Hrdayananda Maharaj on Bhagavad-gita, 18.19-22. He pointed out that while of course all devotees must know that they are really the indwelling soul, not the body (a distinction Srila Prabhupada used to make in almost every lecture), in ordinary dealings even devotees sometimes use the word "self" when referring to the mind or body, just as some people who are focussed excessively on their vehicle might say "you hit me!" to another driver whose car bumped theirs. For example, we might tell a person for whom we feel loving concern over his or her temporary state of ill health, "Take CARE of yourself." On another occasion, if the person has spoken to us of a spiritual problem, we might possibly say, "Take care of your SELF." Maharaj also spoke of how all souls possess the same spiritual nature, although everyone is simultaneously a unique individual. In response to a question, he commented that although the material tendency is to make distinctions among people such as white or black, Albanian or Serb, etc., when devotees make distinctions between pious and impious, or devotee and karmi, that need not be invidious, as it is necessary when preaching to make such distinctions. Such distinctions, however, do not imply that a person classified as a non-devotee will always be a non-devotee, or that such a person's soul is different in any essential nature from the souls of devotees. Everyone who had the opportunity to meet with Hrdayananda Maharaj, either in the public lecturee, or in individual or group darshans, seemed highly satisfied to have met this very nice devotee. On behalf of all the Victoria devotee community, I would like to thank him very much for coming, and to invite him back at the earliest opportunity. Unfortunately, my tape recorder malfunctioned, and I was unable to record Srila Hrdayananda das Goswami's lecture, but Sarvatma prabhu made a recording and it will be available from his tape ministry in due course. All glories to Srila Prabhupada, to his many pure devotee disciples and grand-disciples, and to Sri Krsna Caitanya Mahaprabhu. Comment on this story  Contact VNN about this storySend this story to a friend
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