Today we celebrate Vyāsa-pūjā, literally the worship of Śrīla Vyāsadeva, the great sage who com-
piled the Vedas. We worship our spiritual master, Śrīla Prabhupāda, as the divine representative
of Vyāsadeva because from him we have received the Vedic knowledge, by which we can attain
eternal life. This liberating wisdom emanates from the Lord himself.

sarvasya cāhaṁ hṛdi sanniviṣṭo
mattaḥ smṛtir jñānam apohanaṁ ca
vedaiś ca sarvair aham eva vedyo
vedānta-kṛd veda-vid eva cāham

“I am seated in everyone’s heart, and from Me come remembrance, knowledge, and forgetfulness.
By all the Vedas I am to be known. Indeed, I am the compiler of Vedānta, and I am the knower of
the Vedas.” (Bhagavad-gītā 15.15)
The Lord personally imparts the Vedic knowledge to Lord Brahmā, who initiates our
sampradāya.

yavan aham yatha-bhavo
yad-rupa-guna-karmakaḥ
tathaiva tattva-vijṣanam
astu te mad-anugrahat

“All of Me, namely My actual eternal form and My transcendental existence, color, qualities and
activities – let all be awakened within you by factual realization, out of My causeless mercy.”
(Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 2.9.32)
Brahmā teaches that same Vedic knowledge to his son Nārada, who in turn instructs his dis-
ciple Vyāsadeva, from whom it descends in an unbroken line or paramparā, eventually reaching
Śrīla Prabhupāda, to whom we offer our most profound adulation.
Our debt to Śrīla Prabhupāda and all the previous spiritual masters is incalculable. While
instructing Śrīla Sanātana Gosvāmī, Lord Caitanya said,

kṛṣṇa bhuli’ sei jīva anādi-bahirmukha
ataeva māyā tāre deya saṁsāra-duḥkha

“Forgetting Kṛṣṇa, the living entity has been attracted by the external feature from time immemo-
rial. Therefore, the illusory energy [māyā] gives him all kinds of misery in his material existence.”
(Caitanya-caritāmṛta, Madhya-līlā 20.117)
We have been languishing in material existence, enduring “all kinds of misery since time imme-
morial,” which means nobody can calculate how long we have been entrapped. We can perhaps
get some idea when we consider the current epoch. We learn from the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam that the
jīvas are injected into the creation through the Lord’s glance at the beginning of Brahmā’s life:

kāla-vṛttyā tu māyāyāṁ
guṇa-mayyām adhokṣajaḥ
puruṣeṇātma-bhūtena
vīryam ādhatta vīryavān

“The Supreme Living Being in His feature as the transcendental puruṣa incarnation, who is the
Lord’s plenary expansion, impregnates the material nature of three modes, and thus by the influ-
ence of eternal time the living entities appear.” (Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 3.5.26)
At the end of each of Brahmā’s days, when he sleeps and there is an annihilation, those souls
who have not been liberated enter Lord Viṣṇu’s body until the following creation in the next day
of Brahmā. Each of those days represents 1,000 cycles of the four yugas, equivalent to approxi-
mately four billion Earth years, with the ensuing nights being the same length. According to the
ācāryas, Brahmā has lived approximately half of his life, or around fifty of his years, so it appears
we have been dwelling in this universe for over 150 trillion years. However, it is possible we came
from another universe before that, where we would have remained for its entire duration. And it is
not impossible that we lived through other creations before that. Time itself commences with the
commencement of each universe, so we cannot even estimate how long we have been in material
existence.

“All kinds of misery” means every type of material body, from germs to gods. In our determined
quest to find happiness separate from Kṛṣṇa, we have tried everything possible, repeatedly. Thus,
we have suffered every imaginable agony, taking birth and dying countless times, repeatedly
plunging into hell, and experiencing an untold number of catastrophes as we endured the cosmic
devastations at the end of each day of Brahmā and even during those days. Sometimes, growing
tired of the futile attempt to satisfy our senses, we renounced everything and practiced austerity
in the hope of achieving liberation. In this way, we might have achieved temporary respite from
the furious storm of suffering, only to again return to it when we became jaded with the state of
inertia.

The enormity of our stubborn resistance to Kṛṣṇa’s will is indeed staggering. For endless eons
we have resolutely refused to accept His supreme position and our subordination as His servants,
endeavoring to act as would-be lords ourselves. This has presented us with an insurmountable
problem, as Kṛṣṇa states in the Bhagavad-gītā:

daivī hy eṣā guṇa-mayī
mama māyā duratyayā
mām eva ye prapadyante
māyām etāṁ taranti te

“This divine energy of Mine, consisting of the three modes of material nature, is difficult to over-
come. But those who have surrendered unto Me can easily cross beyond it.” (Bhagavad-gītā 7.14)
Until we surrender to Kṛṣṇa, we must remain in the inescapable fortress of material existence.
We cannot extract ourselves by any independent effort. We need the Lord’s intervention. Lord
Caitanya told Sanātana Gosvāmī:

māyā-mugdha jīvera nāhi svataḥ kṛṣṇa-jñāna
jīvere kṛpāya kailā kṛṣṇa veda-purāna

“The conditioned soul cannot revive his Kṛṣṇa consciousness by his own effort. But out of cause-
less mercy, Lord Kṛṣṇa compiled the Vedic literature and its supplements, the Purāṇas.” (Caitanya-
caritāmṛta, Madhya-līlā 20.122)

In his purport to this verse, Śrīla Prabhupāda describes our awkward situation of entrapment
in material consciousness, mistakenly thinking ourselves part of the material world and thereby
undergoing the concomitant vicissitudes. We become the slaves of lust, greed, anger, and envy,
and when the inevitable results of that become too much to bear, we serve “mental speculation.”
In other words, we try to devise a way to end our misery while remaining averse to the real
solution: surrendering to Kṛṣṇa.

Thankfully, the Lord takes pity on us, as Śrīla Prabhupāda goes on to say: “Out of His cause-
less mercy and compassion, Kṛṣṇa has compiled various Vedic literatures in His incarnation
as Vyāsadeva. Vyāsadeva is a śaktyāveśa-avatāra of Lord Kṛṣṇa. He has very kindly presented
these literatures to awaken the conditioned soul to his senses.” (Caitanya-caritāmṛta, Madhya-līlā
20.122, purport)

As the means to end our miserable state will never occur to us, Kṛṣṇa comes personally to spell
it out in the Vedic literature. However, we still require the Lord’s mercy to understand the Vedas.
As Lord Brahmā says in Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam:

athāpi te deva padāmbuja-dvaya-
prasāda-leśānugṛhīta eva hi
jānāti tattvaṁ bhagavan-mahimno
na cānya eko ’pi ciraṁ vicinvan

“My Lord, if one is favored by even a slight trace of the mercy of Your lotus feet, he can under-
stand the greatness of Your personality. But those who speculate to understand the Supreme
Personality of Godhead are unable to know You, even though they continue to study the Vedas for
many years.” (Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 10.14.29)

That mercy comes to us through Vyāsadeva’s authorized representative, the spiritual master,
whose guidance is essential. Only by the guru’s grace can we comprehend Vedic truths. As the
Upaniṣads say:

yasya deve parā bhaktir
yathā deve tathā gurau
tasyaite kathitā hy arthāḥ
prakāśante mahātmanaḥ

“Only unto those great souls who have implicit faith in both the Lord and the spiritual master are
all the imports of Vedic knowledge automatically revealed.” (Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 6.23)
The Vedas themselves confirm this point. Paraphrasing the words of the personified Vedas from
Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 10.87.33 in his Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Personality of Godhead (chapter 87), Śrīla
Prabhupāda writes: “The personified Vedas continued: ‘Dear Lord, although great mystic yogīs
may have full control over the elephant of the mind and the hurricane of the senses, unless they
take shelter of a bona fide spiritual master, they fall victim to the material influence and are never
successful in their attempts at self-realization. Such unguided persons are compared to merchants
going to sea on a ship without a captain. By one’s personal attempts, therefore, one cannot get
free from the clutches of material nature. One has to accept a bona fide spiritual master and work
according to his direction. Then it is possible to cross over the nescience of material conditions.”
We thus owe everything to Śrīla Prabhupāda, the authorized representative of Vyāsadeva.
Without his grace, we would be rotting in this material world, with no idea how to save ourselves –
especially as we now find ourselves immersed in the darkness of Kali-yuga, where ignorance
abounds. As the sages of Naimiṣāraṇya said to Sūta Gosvāmī:

tvaṁ naḥ sandarśito dhātrā
dustaraṁ nistitīrṣatām
kaliṁ sattva-haraṁ puṁsāṁ
karṇa-dhāra ivārṇavam

“We think that we have met Your Goodness by the will of providence, just so that we may accept
you as captain of the ship for those who desire to cross the difficult ocean of Kali, which deterio-
rates all the good qualities of a human being.” (Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.1.22)

The spiritual master is the captain of the ship that sails us to freedom, rescuing us from a shore-
less sea of suffering in which we have floundered for longer than we can even begin to imagine.
Our debt to him and all his forbears is inestimable and can never be repaid. We therefore worship
his lotus feet with utmost respect on the auspicious occasion of Vyāsa-pūjā.

– Krishna Dharma Dāsa

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