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 confirmed this truth when he described the following verse from the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad (6.23) as the most important 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 equal to that in the Lord—also required? Lord Caitanya Himself gave the perfect answer by His own example.
The great scholar Nimāi Paṇḍita—the Supreme Lord Himself, the Vedānta-kṛd (compiler of Vedānta) and Veda-vit (knower of the Vedas) as stated in Bhagavad-gītā 15.15—received from His guru Īśvara Purī a paradoxical instruction:
"mūrkha tumi, tomāra nāhika vedāntādhikāra
‘kṛṣṇa-mantra’ japa sadā,—ei mantra-sāra"
(Caitanya-caritāmṛta, Ādi 7.72)
"You are a fool. You are not qualified to study Vedānta philosophy. Therefore, always chant the holy name of Kṛṣṇa. This is the essence of all Vedic mantras."
How could the creator of Vedānta be unqualified to study it? The answer is that the essence of Vedānta is revealed solely by the grace of a pure servant of the Lord, whether one knows its texts or has never read them.
On the path to true comprehension of Vedānta, one must admit one’s complete foolishness—even when one possesses perfect scriptural knowledge. And this is truly very difficult to do. In fact, it is extremely difficult for someone who understands the śāstra, serves the Lord sincerely, and strives for self-realization not to consider themselves spiritually intelligent. At best, such a disciple might humbly listen to the guru speak about their disqualification, but this does not guarantee actual realization of one’s foolishness.
Yet Lord Caitanya set the perfect example. Though He was the very author of the Vedas and in this incarnation was Nimāi Paṇḍita, who defeated the Digvijaya Keśava Kāśmīrī, the Vedāntists of Benares, and the great scholar Sārvabhauma Bhaṭṭācārya, still He accepted the position of a fool before His guru and completely surrendered to his instruction to chant the holy names of Kṛṣṇa.
And the result exceeded even His own expectations. The ecstatic symptoms of kṛṣṇa-prema immediately overwhelmed Him so thoroughly that He even worried He had lost all spiritual knowledge:
"kṛṣṇa-nāme jñāna-cchana ha-ila āmāra"
(Cc Ādi 7.79)
But His spiritual master reassured Him:
"kṛṣṇa-nāmera phala—‘prema,’ sarva-śāstre kaya
bhāgye sei prema tomāya karila udaya"
(Cc Ādi 7.86)
"All the statements of the revealed scriptures declare that one must awaken one’s dormant love of Godhead. You have done so, and therefore You are the most fortunate of all people."
Thus, Śrīla Prabhupāda revealed to us that faith in the guru is the “secret of success” in spiritual life. At the Vyāsa-pūjā of Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura 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 this secret of success revealed by Śrīla Prabhupāda, and thus you have attained the greatest treasure of Lord Caitanya’s mercy—kṛṣṇa-prema-prayojana.
Because of your unwavering 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 witness how Lord Nityānanda Himself manifests wherever you serve the mission of Gaurāṅga Mahāprabhu. You are always overflowing with the infinite power and bliss of Nityānanda-Balarāma, and your instructions—like the compassionate glance of Nityānanda-Avadhūta—are capable of performing miracles, transforming the material world into oases of Vaikuṇṭha.
At present, I am in great need of that merciful glance and your blessings. Last year, you kindly empowered me to accept the inconceivably elevated service of dīkṣā-guru. I feel completely unqualified for this highly responsible task.
Right now, I acutely feel my absolute ignorance—even in those areas I once thought I understood. In such a helpless state, I can only rely on the miracle of your śikṣā-śakti, because I believe that you are a direct representative of Lord Nityānanda, the source of the Supersoul in every heart:
"jīve sākṣāt nāhi tāte guru caittya-rūpe
śikṣā-guru haya kṛṣṇa—mahānta-svarūpe"
(Cc Ādi 1.58)
"Because the Supersoul is not visible to us, the Lord appears before us in the form of a devotee, a liberated soul. Such a spiritual master is none other than Kṛṣṇa Himself."
For the Supersoul, nothing is impossible. And so, your divine kṛpā, emanating from the lotus feet of Lord Nityānanda, can make the dumb speak:
"mūkaṁ karoti vācālam" (Cc Madhya 17.80)
Therefore, my only hope is this: that by the divine power of your order—“Become a guru!”—the miracle will occur, and a complete fool like me may somehow become an obedient instrument in the guru-paramparā.
In the dust of your lotus feet on this most auspicious day of your appearance,
Vāsusreṣṭha dāsa