Iskcon and the Guru Issue Part 19 – Satsvarupa Goswamis “Lilamrita” – “Planting The Weed”

Satsvarupa planting the weed

BY URDHVAGA DAS
IRG – USA – 8/12/98

While I have the greatest respect for Srila Satsvarupa Maharaja’s personal reform (see Guru Reform Notebook), I am unable, however, to accept his Lilamrita which I find not only very painful to read but also very offensive and distorting. I can try as hard as I like, but the “Abhay” described in the Lilamrita is not the same as the Srila Prabhupada which I have known while he was with us.

Srila Satsvarupa wrote the Lilamrita before his personal reform took place, that means when he was still under the misconception of being a “Prabhupada – appointed successor-acarya”; which he later on admitted was an erroneous presumption only.

In his Guru Reform Notebook Satsvarupa Maharaj admits:

“I have come to realise my participation in a grave error. I have allowed myself to be worshiped and regarded on the level of maha-bhagavata paramahamsa, far above my “non-guru” God brothers. As a result, I have slighted and offended my Godbrothers -and Srila Prabhupada- in various ways. And I have mistrained my disciples in these matters.”  

The Lilamrita is therefore imbued with Satsvarupa’s personal misconception and thus cannot be an authorised biography of Srila Prabhupada.

Besides falling short describing a pure Mahabhagavata Devotee of Lord Krishna, the Lilamrita also very badly misrepresents Srila Prabhupada by indicating that Srila Prabhupada left his movement in the care of eleven chosen “successor-acaryas”. By advocating a bogus guru-system the Lilamrita has not only heavily deviated from Srila Prabhupada’s originally established ISKCON Society but the Lilamrita is also perverting Srila Prabhupada’s philosophy. The book puts forth ideas which contradict Srila Prabhupada’s statements. If one accepts the Lilamrita’s conclusions, one will be forced to subtly interpret Srila Prabhupada’s books in such a way that one may somehow be forced to correspond with the distorted understandings of the Lilamrita. The author quotes a mundane professor’s review of his books describing it as a “very human story, with a very human A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami.”(Prof. Hopkin)

“I invite the reader to enjoy the very real human life story of Srila Prabhupada, who is known in this volume as Abhay Charan”. Lilamrita 1 Intro. p.19, by the author himself.

The Lilamrita is also written in a low class style prose because it portrays Srila Prabhupada in a very mundane way by attempting to show that Srila Prabhupada becomes: fatigued, goes into ignorance, gets heart stroke, diseased, starves, suffers from old age, has imperfect senses, becomes drowsy, dozes off, made mistakes, etc.

LL1, p.286 “Bhaktivedanta Swami’s neighbours observed him coming home dead tired. He stayed around 11:00 and then became drowsy. The next morning Srila Prabhupada didn’t get up. He was exhausted. It became apparent that he was over-exerting himself”.

SB 3.2.3 “In the transcendental service there is no feeling of fatigue, because it is spiritual service and not on the bodily plane. Service on the bodily plane dwindles as the body grows older, but the spirit is never old. On the spiritual plane the service is never tiresome.”

LL1 p.287 “He (Srila Prabhupada) was dangerously old and not in strong health”.

SB 5.4.5 Another symptom of a liberated person is vijara, which indicates that he is not subjected to the miseries of old age.

LL1 p.194 “Abhay suddenly began reeling, half unconscious, overcome by the heat”.

BG 6.7 The devotee of the Lord is unaffected by the dualities of material existence, namely distress and happiness, cold and heat.

LL2 p.96 “Suddenly he was homeless as any derelict on the street. In fact, many of them …were more secure then he. If he couldn’t go to the loft, he had no place.” (This horrendous quote directly compares Prabhupada to a bum in the streets. Actually it contends that the bums and derelicts in the Bowery were even more secure than him).

Etc. etc. etc. etc. Since my list goes on for 39 pages, it is to much to include here. If someone, in the name of glorifying His Divine Grace Srila Prabhupada, also criticizes him by attributing to him such mundane qualities as destitution, insecurity, vulnerability direction less, familial attachment, dependency on others, attainment of knowledge via material experiences, etc., then Srila Prabhupada’s spiritual quality is brought into question. Also interpreting the vedic literature minimises the authority of the vedas. Mixing the spiritual with the mundane allows the mundane to be accepted as spiritual, and the spiritual to be considered in a mundane manner. The Lilamrita is not only unbonafide and unauthorised but also very offensive because the author portrays Srila Prabhupada in such a way, that the reader might get the wrong impression of Srila Prabhupada as a mere mortal being (human swami), or just another of the many Indian hippie-gurus who came to the West to save some freaked-out Western drug-addicts and hippies.

The Lilamrita’s description does not sound very glorious when it proceeds to delineate the pure devotee’s activities and qualities, from its incomplete and imperfect vision, which regularly is found to contradict that of Sastra (Srimad Bhagavatam )

The Lilamrita also refers to the bona fide spiritual master, Srila Prabhupada as “Abhay”. The authors of the Lilamrita are initiated disciples of Srila Prabhupada, but unfortunately the have the boldness to refer to their guru as “Abhay”. It is no wonder that the reader of this book consider Srila Prabhupada a “very human swami with a very human story”.

Srila Satsvarupa Maharaj says that he does not like the flowery prose style that is used , for example, in the gaudia-math tradition, and that Prabhupada wrote in a more down-to-earth, clear-cut prose. But in his own writings about his own spiritual master, Srila Prabhupada does not present mundane misconceptions about his guru. Srila Prabhupada referred to his spiritual master, His Divine Grace Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Goswami Maharaja, in these exalted terms, even when he referred to a pastime of his spiritual master as a 6 month old child.

Accepting any mundane conception of the spiritual master and considering him a “very human swami” is dangerous. The scriptures describes such misconceptions of the guru as a hellish mentality .It is capable of uprooting the devotional creeper of even a staunch devotee, a nistha-bhakta. All true vaisnava devotees would view mundane statements about the acarya, especially if they were printed in a book distributed to over a million people, as maha-guru-aparadha.

Any biography of an acarya must be above suspicion, but the author of the Lilamrita admits in his Guru Reform Notebook that he has slighted and offended his Godbrothers -and Srila Prabhupada- in various ways by allowing himself to be worshiped and regarded on the level of maha-bhagavata paramahamsa which was a grave error. Satsvarupa a maha-guru-aparadhi.

If an author is not actually authorised by Krishna, the nectar of transcendental lila he seems to be writing about will actually produce results opposed to nectar. Perhaps this is the cause of the authors permanent and constant sickness over the many years. Instead of watering the seed, the Lilamrita is “Planting The Weed”. No sane and knowledgeable reader of the Lilamrita could consider its author either empowered or free from conditional defects, which are requirements, as quoted by the author himself. We therefore must reject this Lilamrita, because of so many contamination’s with in it. It gives a completely distorted view of Srila Prabhupada’s spiritual activities and erroneously speculates about the emotions of His Divine Grace.

If the BBT publishers have any regard for Srila Prabhupada as a nitya-siddha devotee, then they will declare the Lilamrita as unbonafide and unauthorised and will prohibit it from being further printed. It first has to be corrected and redone in a proper manner, eliminating the completely distorted mundane view, of Srila Prabhupada, presently given.

The book took birth during the heyday of the zonal acarya fervor. The eleven self appointed zonal acaryas deceived themselves into thinking that they were pure gurus despite their bad habits, offences and deviations. The Lilamrita’s mundane portrayal of Srila Prabhupada is the inevitable product of accepting ordinary conditioned souls as liberated maha-bhagavatas equal to Srila Prabhupada.

yours, in the service of Srila Prabhupada
Urdhvaga das

Please also see: The Lilamrta A Review & Philosophical Analysis By Sriman Yasodanandana dasa, 1996

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http://www.harekrsna.org/satsvarupa-hist.htm

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