Dear Śrīla Prabhupāda,
Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to you.
To write my offering this year, I began listening to your classes to better connect with you and help me meditate on you, which will inspire me to write the following lines. In 1977 you gave a class at the Bhaktivedanta Manor where you said: “This is the arrangement of Kṛṣṇa. If we strictly try to serve the spiritual master, his order, then Kṛṣṇa will give us all facilities. That is the secret. Although there was no possibility, I never thought, but I took it little seriously by studying a commentary by Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura on the Bhagavad-gītā. In the Bhagavad-gītā verse [2.41], vyavasāyātmikā buddhir ekeha kuru–nandana … In connection with that verse Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura gives his commentary, that we should take up the words from the spiritual master as our life and soul. We should try to carry out the instruction, the specific instruction of the spiritual master very rigidly, without caring for our personal benefit or loss.”
Listening to your impressive words, we can find in them everything that founded your success and helped you fulfill your mission. Humility, sincerity, loyalty, commitment, perseverance, and faith – for me, these are the main character traits, the virtues that I hear from your words, which have guaranteed your success in your loving service to your spiritual master.
The disciple receives instructions from the words of the spiritual master, but it is often not so easy to know what it means to fulfill those instructions. What will the full outcome of fulfilling those instructions be? The instructions you received were quite specific and quite narrow: “Write in English, publish books in English, you preach in English.”
But did this mean hundreds of beautiful temples, living farm communities, profitable restaurants, thousands of disciples, impressive Deity worship, world-renowned educational systems, and professionally organized Ratha-yātrā festivals?
These were all revealed by Kṛṣṇa over time to the extent to which your amazing service would develop. So much of these depended on your sincerity, whether you wanted “to make a mountain” out of something “seemingly very small.” You could have fulfilled the instructions you received by traveling to the West, distributing some books, and returning to India. But what you, dear Śrīla Prabhupāda, made of this the instruction your received was something truly extraordinary. This shows that you took the instructions very seriously and turned them into something magnificent.
There is the disciple who takes exactly what he has learned and masters that. He was told to do this, and he does that. This is nice. There is another disciple who takes what he had learned and says, What is the full outcome? What is the full consequence of this instruction? How can this service be developed? How can I build upon this? And then that disciple turns his instruction into something extraordinary. You are definitely the disciple who took the instructions of your Gurudeva and turned them into something very, very special.
This is our greatest fortune, this is our planet Earth’s greatest fortune. Thank you very, very much! We have all the facilities to practice Kṛṣṇa consciousness and go back to Godhead at the end of this lifetime.
Dearest Śrīla Prabhupāda, here at our Budapest yātrā we also already have a lot. We have an amazing temple building with lots of nice space in it for the people, beautiful Deities who charm everyone who sees Them, a profitable restaurant that distributes tasty prasādam, successful festivals at which devotees can celebrate various holy events, quite good book distribution, with the success of distributing full sets of your Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam on the streets, and last but not least, a few hundred enthusiastic and committed devotees.
These things are amazing, and we could reach them only by your mercy and by the sincere and loving services of many devotees. But please, Śrīla Prabhupāda, look at us with your empowering, loving gaze, and bless us to build an even more cohesive, seriously practicing, mutually helpful and respectful, mature-minded Kṛṣṇa conscious community of thousands more people! I wish we could be successful in this so that we can bring you some satisfaction as a token of our gratitude toward you! Thank you very much.
Your servant on behalf of the Budapest temple,
Gauramaṇi Dāsa