Vyasa Puja offering to Srila Prabhupada 2024

(view 2024 offerings by disciples)

Dear Śrīla Prabhupāda,
Please accept my awed and full-hearted obeisances in the dust of your divine lotus feet.
Allow me to express, with deepest solemnity, my utmost gratitude for your presenting the possibility of your followers living in Vṛndāvana anywhere and everywhere. By your alerting us to the availability of this benediction, you so compassionately bring home to us a peak potential of the complete bhakti package you’ve bestowed.

Even though such spiritual graces appear so faint and far-off, how enlivening and motivating it is to know what can await dedicated servitors of your mission as they near the end of the long tunnel through material existence.

In a Bhagavad-gītā class given on June 25, 1974, in Melbourne, Australia, you triumphantly
declared: “And as soon as you offer yourself to be enjoyed by Kṛṣṇa as servant – according to His order you serve – then immediately you are in the spiritual world. So you can become in the material world or spiritual world, as you desire. As you desire. If you want to remain in the spiritual world, this temple is the spiritual world. We are not living in Melbourne. This temple is not Melbourne. It is Vaikuṇṭha … It is Vṛndāvana.”

Our heart begs you for even the slightest fragrance of this transmundane reality.

In the Madhya-līlā (16.281) of Śrī Caitanya-caritāmṛta, Śrīla Gadādhara Paṇḍita, clasping Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu’s lotus feet, asserts that “wherever You stay is Vṛndāvana.” In the purport you present a long list of Mahāprabhu’s exalted associates who never visited Vṛndāvana; yet they are certified as “eternal vraja-vāsīs.”

Next, you point out more recent great ācāryas who resided mainly away from Vṛndāvana. “Śrīla Narottama dāsa Ṭhākura, Śrīnivāsa Ācārya, Śrīla Jagannātha dāsa Bābājī Mahārāja, Śrī Bhagavān dāsa Bābājī Mahārāja, Śrīla Gaurakiśora dāsa Bābājī Mahārāja, and later, Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura of Calcutta, always engaged in nāma-bhajana and certainly did not live anywhere but Vṛndāvana.”

What follows always astonishes me. In the same purport you extend such a possibility even
to your followers serving in metropolises, Kali-yuga fortresses, all over the globe. They can also live in Vṛndāvana consciousness no matter their locale for sevā: “Presently, the members of the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement throughout the world live in materially opulent cities, such as London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Moscow, Zurich, and Stockholm. However, we are satisfied with following in the footsteps of Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura and other ācāryas. Because we live in the temples of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa and continuously hold hari-nāma-saṅkīrtana – the chanting of Hare Kṛṣṇa – we consequently live in Vṛndāvana and nowhere else.”

When will the qualification for that day of realization be mine? Only by your mercy would I
even merely know about this opportunity; only by your favor can I strive for just a glimpse of it; and only by your permission can there be any hope of the slightest attainment.

Your aspiring servant,
Devamrita Swami