Dear Śrīla Prabhupāda,

nama oṁ viṣṇu-pādāya kṛṣṇa-preṣṭhāya bhū-tale
śrīmate bhaktivedānta-svāmin iti nāmine
namas te sārasvate deve gaura-vāṇī-pracāriṇe
nirviśeṣa-śūnyavādi-pāścātya-deśa-tāriṇe
Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Your Divine Grace.
I was requested to write your Vyāsa-pūjā offering on behalf of the New Dwaraka temple. After
several tries, yesterday, when I went out on book distribution, what I had wanted to say became
clear.
So much becomes clear when there is your book distribution. Having the opportunity to pres-
ent your Bhaktivedanta translations and purports to the Bhagavad-gītā to the students at the col-
leges is a very rich and satisfying experience. They seem to be dismayed about what is going on in
the world. It is very easy to see that the quality of their lives is not the same quality of the lives of
young people fifty years ago.
Everything you predicted is coming true. You predicted that the American people would lose
all their pious merit because they have thrown out God and embraced science for the purpose of
improving sense gratification. You predicted an increasing lack of protection of the weaker citi-
zens, such as old men, women, young people, and animals. Today’s young people cannot expect
stability – not from the economy, their leaders, their employers, not even from the weather. I feel
relieved and grateful when your beautiful Bhagavad-gītā is placed in their hands or it goes into
their homes. Even if they do not look at it for years, there is no better insurance for their future.
Evidently, other distributors feel the same way, because so many, many of your transcendental
books have been distributed. The amount more than triples the amount distributed when you
were physically present! Currently, entire sets of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam and Caitanya-caritāmṛta are
received by delighted people every day. Millions of your books are warehoused for this purpose
all over the world. ISKCON educational institutions, teaching Bhakti-śāstrī and Bhakti-vaibhava
classes, as well as massive prasādam distribution programs, serve tens of thousands of people daily
on this planet. All of this is due to the expertise of your disciples and granddisciples in a truly
grand cooperative effort.
When I first became a devotee, just after your departure, I witnessed how the initial enthusiasm
in your Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement fell into some chaos and lack of clarity. Then a fire of
purified and refined feelings of love and undeniable gratitude for Your Divine Grace burned up
all the confusion and hesitancy. The result? In our community we have seen amazing expertise in
handling all forms of deviation with single-minded attention to your instructions, at any cost! I
think this must have happened all over the world, because we see the same result everywhere. This
vyavasāyātmikā-buddhi determination has endowed us with an atmosphere for beautiful, expansive
temple communities and congregations at hundreds of locations.
As you envisioned for your devotees, the quality of our lives is ever increasingly enhanced. In
your ISKCON we are experiencing an ongoing evolution of Vaiṣṇava culture: kīrtana, bhajana,
dance, art and design, architecture, festivals, education in śāstra, a growing enthusiastic congrega-
tion, the implementation of the social divisions of varṇa and āśrama, vegetarian prasādam, and
Vaiṣṇava dress. It should be mentioned that the opportunity in your ISKCON for Deity worship
is unique in the world of bhakti. Your instruction to worship and decorate the Deities with great
attention, as gorgeously as possible, is a great challenge as well as an enthralling pleasure. And
how did we learn all this?
All of this has come to us because your most loyal devotees have spent their lives training us
in the understanding of what they learned from you. For example, over and over again I have
seen your disciples at New Dwaraka train a new person who may fall away, just in the hope that
they will somehow, or someday, become attached to Kṛṣṇa’s devotional service. Do your disciples
turn their attention elsewhere? No. That is because they are fully committed to you. The loyalty
and love your disciples have for you are rarely found anywhere. What is the effect? We get the
shelter of your lotus feet and become sane, and even full of joy. We dance and chant. We are saved
from material suffering. The most fearsome danger of repeated birth and death is avoided if we
can begin to appreciate this loyalty and love coming to us through you and the entire disciplic
succession.
Śrīla Prabhupāda, you had no opportunity like we do to pick up a mṛdaṅga and books and go
to a safe, legal location to do harināma-saṅkīrtana. You didn’t have a harmonium or legal status
or strong health or experienced followers. You wrote back to India many letters that reveal your
helplessness to get support and paraphernalia. Yet because you loved Kṛṣṇa and His parts and
parcels more than your own life, because the order of your spiritual master was your only priority,
you did not waver or bend. For an elderly person to be far away from his homeland, surrounded
only by confused young people in the severe New York weather, with scarce finances, often poor
accommodations, and then come out of it absolutely undeterred can only be seen as supernatural.
You are simply Kṛṣṇa-natural.
In your classic Bhaktivedanta purport to Bhagavad-gītā 18.75, you explain the Kṛṣṇa-
supernatural ability that empowered you to directly deliver Kṛṣṇa consciousness to others: “Vyāsa
was the spiritual master of Sañjaya, and Sañjaya admits that it is by Vyāsa’s mercy that he could
understand the Supreme Personality of Godhead. This means that one has to understand Kṛṣṇa
not directly but by the medium of the spiritual master. The spiritual master is the transparent
medium, although it is true that the experience is still direct. This is the mystery of the disci-
plic succession.” This explains how you are continuing to give Kṛṣṇa to others to this day and
eternally.
We offer our humble obeisances to Your Divine Grace, who loves Kṛṣṇa so perfectly. We can
only offer our respects to you and try to follow and serve you in constant debt for having gotten
the chance to appreciate your perfect love for Kṛṣṇa.
Your humble servants at New Dwaraka
(written by Karuṇa Dhāriṇī Devī Dāsī)

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