Dear Śrīla Prabhupāda,
I take this occasion to again celebrate your blessed appearance in our midst as an opportunity to offer prostrated, heartfelt obeisance to your lotuslike feet, and to submit this reflective attempt to offer you praise.
While reading your purport to Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 2.9.36 – the last of the four verses on “the mystery of all inquiries” identified by our ācāryas as the catuḥ-ślokī Bhāgavatam, or Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam in four verses, I appreciate your clarity in identifying the core motivation of worldly life, namely “sense gratification.” English language historians tell us that the word “gratify” in earlier times had the positive sense of showing grace or favor on someone, suggesting a spirit of goodwill toward that person, whereas now, since the eighteenth century, it indicates personal satisfaction or indulgence of one’s own desires. Your intended meaning of “gratification” is surely associated with the word’s later usage, characterized by the “me first” mentality. You have written,
The whole material existence has sprung up because of sense gratification, desires based principally on the sex desire, and the result is that in spite of all advancement of knowledge, the final goal of all the activities of the living entities is sense gratification.
By this simple analysis you, in effect, deconstruct and dismantle the entire edifice of “modern” and “postmodern” philosophical thought. More strongly put, you have gutted the edifice by your encompassing frame of “the whole material existence.”
The intellectual world – mainly in the decades following your presence among us – has seen the rise to prominence of ideas bundled as “postmodernity.” J. A. J. Storm explains that five themes are typically bundled together under the term “postmodernism”:
(1) Antirealism; (2) an emphasis on endings, which have often included disciplinary autocritique; (3) an extreme version of the linguistic turn that characterizes the world in terms of texts; (4) a broad climate of skepticism; and (5) ethical relativism (sometimes called “ethical nihilism”).*
You, Śrīla Prabhupāda, have anticipated and challenged all five of these features of postmodernism in the course of your writings and talks, but in your purport to Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 2.9.36 you hint at addressing the second feature, namely the emphasis on endings, as you note that,
[A]ll advancement of knowledge in the present context of things is being misused by cats and dogs fighting with one another for sense gratification, and all acquisition of knowledge in science, philosophy, fine arts, nationalism, economic development, religion and great activities are being spoiled by being used as dresses for dead men.
To describe “all acquisition of knowledge” as “being used as dresses for dead men” is an expression in your characteristically rhetorical style of condemnation and dismissal of any and all philosophical ventures as so many dead ends, so long as they fall short of minimally acknowledging the existence of a supreme being.
I find another striking example of your rhetorical style two verses previous (2.9.34). In your purport you use the word “sane” five times: The “sane man” is “enlightened in the disciplic succession”; “the sane man … accepts this statement of the Lord [ahaṁ sarvasya prabhavo …]”; “[t]he sane man … knows [that the “Lord is the original source of all emanations …”]; “… the sane person knows clearly that the Lord can act, even from far, far beyond our vision …”; and “… the sane person knows prakṛti as the illusory energy of the Lord.”
A critic would likely insist that your use of the word sane implies censure of all persons who don’t fit your criteria of sanity as necessarily “insane.” They would accuse you of implying – if not directly making – ad hominem arguments, a type of logical fallacy that works rhetorically by the social force of shaming.
To this I would reply that your aim is not to gain points in the halls of the logicians; rather, your aim is clearly to open minds to a most radical proposition, namely, as you write in your purport to the first of these four essential verses (2.9.33), “… one should aspire for personal realization of the Lord …” Here is the full context of this last exhortation by you:
Even in the impersonal existence of the Lord, as it is in the material creation, one should aspire for personal realization of the Lord, and that is the meaning of paścād ahaṁ yad etac ca yo ’vaśiṣyeta so ’smy aham.
My prayer to you is that I may fully imbibe this – your thoroughly deconstructive vision of this world as the product of sense gratification, and your striking reconstruction of this world’s apparent impersonhood – as an opportunity to have personal realization of the Lord. May I, by the power of your words and the profound care they carry, cherish the vision you offer through apparent rhetorical flourish. And may I thus be able to reach beyond the manifold worldly insanity that passes as “modern” or “postmodern” reasoning to deepen my aspiration for personal realization of the Lord, under your able and challenging guidance.
Always your servant,
Kṛṣṇa Kṣetra Swami
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* J. A. J. Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), p. 9.