Dear Guru Mahārāja,
Please accept my respectful obeisances in the dust of your lotus feet! All glories to you on this most auspicious day of your appearance!
Today is the main festival of the year for us, your disciples! Śrīla Prabhupāda proved this fact when he called the text from the Śvetāśvataropaniṣad (6.23) the most important verse in all the Vedas:
yasya deve parā bhaktir yathā deve tathā gurau tasyaite kathitā hy arthāḥ prakāśante mahātmanaḥ
“Only to those great souls who have full faith in both the Lord and the spiritual master is all the Vedic knowledge revealed.”
Why is faith in the Lord not enough? Why is tathā gurau — faith in the Guru, as strong as the faith in the Lord — needed? Lord Caitanya Himself has given the perfect answer to this question by His own example. The great scholar Nimāi Paṇṭita, the Supreme Lord Himself, who is the Vedānta-kṛḍ (compiler of the Vedānta) and Veda-vid (the supreme knower of the Vedas) (BG 15.15), received from His Guru, Īśvāra Purī, the paradoxical order:
“mūrkha tumi, tomāra nāhika vedāntādhikāra ‘kṛṣṇa-mantra’ japa sadā, — ei mantra-sāra”
(CC Adi 7.72)
“You are a fool, You are not fit to study the Vedānta philosophy, and therefore You should always chant the holy name of Kṛṣṇa. That is the essence of all the mantras and hymns of the Vedas.”
How can the creator of Vedānta be unqualified to study Vedānta? The answer is that the essence of Vedānta is revealed solely by the grace of a pure servant of the Lord, regardless of whether one knows the text and meaning of Vedānta or has never read it.
On the path to true comprehension of Vedānta, one must admit one's complete foolishness even when one has perfect knowledge of all the scriptures and their final conclusions. And this is, truly, very difficult to do. On the contrary, it is extremely difficult to know the science of the Vedas and yet admit one's foolishness. After all, such a fool appears to be a very intelligent person: he really knows the true meaning of human life, he tries to serve God, to understand God, and sincerely strives to return to God. It is impossible in such a situation not to think of oneself as an intelligent religious person. At best, he will humbly listen to his spiritual master about his disqualification, but this does not mean that such a disciple actually realizes his foolishness.
But the example of Lord Caitanya shows this precisely: the Supreme Lord Himself, the creator of the Vedas, and in this incarnation, the great Nimāi Paṇṭita, who defeated the digvijaya Keśava Kāśmīrī, the Vedāntists of Benares, and the great scholar Sārvabhauma Bhaṭṭācārya—this Lord actually accepts the position of a fool from His Guru and completely surrenders to his instruction to chant the holy names of Kṛṣṇa. And the result exceeds even His own expectations: the ecstatic experience of kṛṣṇa-prema immediately absorbed His entire existence, so much so that He even became worried that, under the influence of deep emotions, He had lost all spiritual knowledge:
“kṛṣṇa-nāme jñāna-cchanna ha-ila āmāra”
(CC Adi 7.79)
But the spiritual master Īśvāra Purī reassured Lord Caitanya:
“kṛṣṇa-nāmera phala — ‘prema,’ sarva-śāstre kaya bhāgye sei prema tomāya karila udaya”
(CC Adi 7.86)
“All the statements of the revealed scriptures are that one has to awaken one’s dormant love of Godhead. You have done so, and therefore You are the most fortunate of all people.”
Therefore, Śrīla Prabhupāda points to absolute faith in the Guru as the “secret of success” in spiritual life. At the Vyāsa-pūjā of Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī in 1968, he told his first American disciples:
“I simply took the request of my spiritual master very seriously, although I did not know at all how to fulfill it. And Kṛṣṇa Himself arranged everything. This is the secret of success — a serious attitude to the instructions of the spiritual master!”
Dear Guru Mahārāja, you have perfectly understood the “secret of success” that Śrīla Prabhupāda revealed to us, and therefore you have achieved the highest gift of Lord Caitanya—Kṛṣṇa-prema-prayojana.
Due to your absolute faith and devotion to Śrīla Prabhupāda, you have become a great ācārya in the disciplic succession of Lord Caitanya, and you are successfully bringing more than 60,000 disciples back to the spiritual world! We can directly observe how Lord Nityānanda Himself manifests vividly wherever you serve the mission of Gaurāṁga Mahāprabhu. You are always overflowing with the infinite power and transcendental bliss of Nityānanda-Balarāma, and your instructions, like the transcendental glance of Nityānanda-Avadhūta, are capable of performing miracles of transforming the material world into oases of Vaikuṇṭha.
Now I am in great need of the power of the all-merciful glance of your blessings, since last year you kindly empowered me to perform the impossible service of dīkṣā-guru. I feel completely unqualified for this highly responsible service. My only hope is your divine kṛṣṇa-kṛpa emanating from the lotus feet of Lord Nityānanda.
In the dust of your lotus feet on the most auspicious day of your appearance,
Your servant,
Vasusrestha dāsa