Vyasa Puja offering to Srila Prabhupada 2021

(view 2021 offerings by disciples)

Dear Śrīla Prabhupāda,
Please accept my deeply considered and most respectful obeisances at your lotus feet.

We glorify you for delivering the Western world from impersonalism and voidism.

Yet, you set in motion another extraordinary mission impossible: you dared present, to the ignoble West, what is a real civilization.

Exposing the primitiveness, you boldly taught the essential precepts and norms of real human life. Otherwise, how would “the developed world” ever know the actual human standard?

This inheritance you passed on to us still remains intact—despite the usual erosive effect of time. Constantly we ponder and deliberate the underlying themes you propounded. How to execute your desires is our life and soul.

You sought to redefine what is genuine social progress and advancement.

Śrīla Prabhupāda: So they have mentioned “American Hindus.” [chuckles] [pause] It is a dead blow to the material civilization: “No drinking and no intoxication, no meat-eating, no gambling,
no illicit sex.” Their whole civilization is finished. Because they stand on these things, four pillars.
Devotee: Therefore we must present a better civilization.
Śrīla Prabhupāda: Eh?
Devotee: We must present a better civilization.
Śrīla Prabhupāda: Yes. Not better or best. The civilization.

Five decades ago in the Wild West—despite pandemic hippiness—makeshift notions of a crude moral culture and social cohesion prevailed. But today’s version of a society posing as civilized is, on a mass scale, in many ways more barbarous and dangerous.

Your aging disciples can observe that even the primitive social mores and quasi-cultural attributes prevailing during our youth are in shreds—to the extent that, comparatively, the sixties and seventies can seem like Dvāpara-yuga.

During your days with us, thousands of refugees from the Neanderthal West flocked to your mission. But in India, the land of dharma and Kṛṣṇa, scant jīvas back then took shelter of your mission. Today the situation has dramatically reversed.

We can observe that aspects of the social terrain—the context, the milieu—do change over time. But the quintessential process you gave us—for watering the bhakti sprouts, creepers, and trees—remains as inconceivably effective as ever.

Early in 1977 you stated that the time would come when people would applaud your mission for having saved humanity in its most dire hour.

Darkening the sky, the dreadful storm-clouds of new viruses, environmental havoc, and nuclear warfare threaten the entire planet. Nevertheless, the life-sustaining bhakti seeds you planted and nurtured continue to grow.

By your fulfilling the desire of Mahāprabhu, what you granted the critically tormented world successfully persists as humanity’s genuine hope and rescue.

Your lowly servant,
Devāmrita Swami