UNRECOGNISED DIRECT MANIFESTATION
From the point that we
reached in the previous Chapter begin, with a staggering suddenness, the overwhelming
series of direct Manifestations which are also at first necessarily
unrecognized. The beginning of this change is thus described by Thakur Sree
Brindavandas. On a certain day the Lord under pretense of nervous break-down
manifested all the perturbations of loving devotion. All on a sudden he began
to utter words that are not of this world, rolled on the ground, laughed and
smashed the house. He spoke with a deep, loud voice, girded up His loins and
beat all persons whom He chanced to find about Him. His whole Body repeatedly
attained the state of suspended animation and these fits of exclusiveness were
so peculiar that they filled all beholders with terror. The friends came soon
to learn the tidings of His supposed indisposition and turned up in a body.
They busied themselves with devising the proper treatment of His mental
derangement for so it appeared to them to be. Buddhimanta Khan and
Mukunda-Sanjaya came to the House of the Lord with all members of their
families. They applied to His Head medicinal oils, technically known as Vishnu
and Narayana oils. Everyone offered the kind of help that suggested itself to
him. But the Lord does everything by His own uncontrolled Will. How could He be
cured by any external aid?
The Lord shivered in every
Limb and gesticulated violently. His loud exclamations terrified everybody. The Lord said: ‘I am the Lord
of all the worlds; I uphold the world, whence My name is Vishwambhar. I am He,
but no one knows Me.’ With these words He begins to run at all the people to
get hold of them. In this manner The Lord did disclose His own Lordly Nature
under the guise of nervous malady. Yet no one understood, being prevented by
His Power. Some held that He was possessed by a demon. Others opined that it
was the doing of witches. Some expressed the view that it was undoubtedly a
case of madness as He manifested the symptom of talking incessantly. By these
indications they failed to understand His real Nature, being thus deluded by
the Power of the Lord. They applied various curative oils to His Head and kept
His Body immersed in oil in a large vat. The Lord laughed without restraint as
He lay afloat in oil, which gave all persons the impression that He had a very
serious attack of the worst type of the disease.
Having by His Will sported
for a while in this manner, the Lord regained His normal health by giving up
the show of nervous malady. At this sudden recovery all people rent the sky
with loud acclamations of the Name of Hari. In their joy, they made lavish
gifts of clothing in such huge quantities that it baffles all calculation. All
the people were gladdened by the tidings of the Lord’s recovery. All said, ‘May
the great Pandit live for ever!’ ‘The Lord of Vaikuntha,’ observes Thakur Brindavandas,
‘made merry in this manner. Who has power to know Him if He does not make
Himself known?’
These manifestations of
spiritual perturbations described by Thakur Brindavandas in the above passage,
are liable to be misunderstood. They were manifested by Sree Gaursundar under the
form of the symptoms of nervous malady. Those who want to understand everything
in terms of ordinary mundane experience and are not prepared to admit the
existence, or possibility of existence, of the super-mundane, naturally reject
the clear testimony of the Vaishnava writers to the effect that the spiritual
perturbations are not physical phenomena at all even though they necessarily
appear as such to the clouded vision and understanding of all mortals.
The principle has already
been discussed elsewhere. It applies to the whole range of spiritual
manifestations. The Name Krishna, the Remains of the food tasted by Krishna,
the Objects used in the worship of Krishna—such as buildings, utensils, etc., the body and mind of the person who worships Krishna, are, every one of them, spiritual entities,
the consensus of opinion of all empiricists to the contrary notwithstanding. It
is a difference of view which separates those, who admit the existence of the
eternal and unbridgeable gulf that divides the spiritual from the material,
from those who consciously or unconsciously, hold that the two are identical.
The latter form the large and influential body of the anti-transcendentalists
and philanthrophists.
But the real
transcendentalists possess an intelligible and consistent theistic philosophy.
They believe in the actual substantive existence of the super mundane plane
which never submits to the inspection of the material senses. The spiritual
manifestations belong to the transcendental plane. They have to be carefully
distinguished on the one hand from all worldly phenomena and on the other from
dishonest or misguided exhibitions of the pseudo-transcendentalist. Everyone is
free to believe or not believe a thing or a proposition. But no clear thinker
would claim the right of misrepresenting, or deliberately misunderstanding, a
proposition or an occurrence. The materialists and pseudo transcendentalists
have deliberately misunderstood and mis-stated the accounts of the Spiritual
Scriptures. This is not honest blunder.
It was this possibility,
nay the certainty of deliberate misunderstanding on the part of all
disbelievers and pseudo-believers, that led Sree Gaursundar to devise this
method, for saving them from the offense of blasphemy, of disguising the satvika manifestations of spiritual love
under the form of the symptoms of a disease with which they have the closest
external similarity. The opinion of those, who hold the view that the so-called
satvika manifestations are also
themselves due to the diseased condition of the brain, does not carry any more
weight than deliberate misrepresentations. No physician can understand the real
cause of the appearance or cessation of the phenomenon known as disease. But it
is unfortunately only a small number of doctors who suspect and allow for this
great insufficiency of the grounds of their knowledge in opining about bodily
manifestations of any kind. Medical science is no less subject to the
fundamental limitations of sensuous empiricism than its sister sciences. No science
in the modern sense of the term would deserve a serious hearing unless it
either helped the codification or widening of our stock of worldly experience.
Considered
from this point of view the science of medicine has no jurisdiction over
spiritual manifestations, and this ought to be more clearly recognized acted
upon and proclaimed by the leading scientists of to-day than they are always
accustomed to do. They are, of course, free to criticize the methods and
experiences of the Absolutists. It is only when they are really unable to
understand spiritual matters after proper endeavor that such criticism has its
real use in exposing the vagaries or opposition of insincere persons and
thereby preventing mischief from that quarter. But let them not forget their
legitimate function by themselves setting up as spiritualists and attempting in
that unscientific manner to manufacture theories of the Absolute on the basis
of any worldly stuff and thereby prove one more nuisance and obstruction in the
way of the honest inquiry of the Transcendental. Those who willfully offend
against reason are rightly punished by the perpetuation of their ignorance, for
which they have to thank only themselves. The satvika perturbations due to love for Krishna, are objects of
longing to devotees of the very highest order who are absolutely free from all
ignorance and all taint of self-seeking. This is necessarily unintelligible to
those who have not thought it worth their while to cross the threshold of
spiritual life. Their self-sufficient attitude towards the problems of the
eternal duties, is only a proof of their utter slavery to the illusory power of
Vishnu, the goddess Maya, who is ever usefully engaged in deluding the race of
the hypocrites of all shades.
The utterances and activities
of the servants of Vishnu are a perpetual enigma to the shrewdest atheists. No
efforts of their perverted intellect can find out their real significance. The
words uttered by the Vaishnava are transcendental, as are all activities. They
are perfectly incomprehensible to conceited sinners who have been assigned this
material world as the place of their abode as the expidatory? punishment of
such perversity. The deluding power of Vishnu is ever engaged in guarding the
portals of the transcendental realm against the impious assaults of all
builders of the Babel. The realisation of this truth alone enables us to attain
that perfect humility of the spirit to which the gates of the eternal realm of
Vishnu are ever likely to open of themselves. The humility that is current in
this world is the perverted reflection of the substantive spiritual quality and
is all the more heinous because such disguised form of self-conceit constitutes
the deliberate misrepresentation of true humility. External roughness or smoothness
of conduct is no criterion of the real humility. The really humble conduct of
the self-less devotee of Vishnu may seem as rudeness, conceit and even
arrogance to the pretended view of the deliberate hypocrite. There is no help
for a person who chooses to willfully misunderstand. Such persons have been
aptly compared to the owl whose eyes are denied only the sight of the glorious
Sun.
To many impartial critics
who are fully conscious of the vagaries of our present intellect in its
pretended efforts to approach the Absolute and who are, therefore, prepared to
reserve their judgment on a subject so alien to their whole experience the
conduct of Sree Gaursundar, on this particular occasion, may still seem to be
open to the charge of apparent inconsistency. They may properly enough ask
whether Sree Gaursundar wanted to be regarded as the devotee of Krishna, or as
Krishna Himself. If He wished to teach the people of this world the highest and
only service of the Absolute Person by His own practice, how could the
Manifestation of His real Nature as Recipient of worship be consistent with
such purpose?
This criticism overlooks
the fact that there is a very close approximation to the Divinity in the
highest stage of devotion when the devotee is apt to be persuaded that He is
Krishna Himself and in that mood sets himself to imitating the Activities of
Krishna. This is to be carefully distinguished from the erroneous conclusion of
the professors of the cult of the undifferentiated Brahman that the fulfillment of worship, which they regard as only
a probationary stage, is attained by complete merging with the Object of
worship Who is conceived as being absolutely devoid of form and activity of any
kind.
In the case of the true
devotee the worship is not a make-believe, temporary expedient as it is in the
case of the other. If the service which we offer to Krishna is supposed to be
due to certain changing circumstances it at once loses the character of
sincerity and truth. The Vaishnava knows Himself to be the eternal servant of
the Lord. He does not think it possible or desirable to merge in Krishna and
thereby cease to be His servant. This is the ambition of those hypocrites who,
while pretending to be the servants of a god whom they cannot or do not
purposely attempt to define, really cherish in the back-ground of their
disloyal minds the design of being some day freed from the irksome necessity of
such service as the reward (?) of their insincerity! To them, therefore, the
end is necessarily different from the means.
By the adoption, for the
time being, of a particular method, which is to be discarded on the attainment
of the object of such endeavor, the Absolute cannot be realized. The relative
can never lead, not even as a means, to the Absolute. It involves the fallacy
of the major premise. The major premise in this case is too narrow and the
middle term is undistributed. Untruth cannot lead to the Truth. By means of the
Truth alone the Truth can be realized. As we do not possess the knowledge of
the Truth and have no chance of ever knowing Him with the help of our present
limited faculties we are either doomed to the state of eternal ignorance or
liable to be enlightened from above by grace. There is no other alternative.
The Vaishnava; therefore, accepts the latter alternative for attaining to the
knowledge of the Truth. The abstract monist holds consistently neither to the
one nor to the other. He does not believe fully either in his own ability, or
in revelation. He has, therefore, no locus
standi and necessarily tumbles headlong into the depths of Uncertainty
which he calls God or Brahman in
order to delude himself and his followers with the hope, which, despite all
perversity, his and their natures instinctively demand, that they are for a
time being as a sort of servants of the Absolute. When the true devotee
exhibits the moods and activities of his Master he does so as a loyal servant
rendered completely oblivious of his own separate existence and interests, by
the contemplation of his Beloved. But he knows, specially at such moments more
fully than ever, that he himself is not the Master. The conduct of the monist
in his so-called realized state (siddhi) bears
no resemblance to the activities of the devotee engrossed by the thoughts of
his Master who, due to his consequent forgetfulness of his own self, thus
enacts the Master’s part. But the monist ceases to function on merging with the
Absolute ( ?).
In the case of Sree
Chaitanya He is sometimes found to be declaring Himself to be Krishna. Those
who want to misunderstand will say that He was guilty of inconsistency of
conduct because He could have easily avoided any suspicions being aroused
regarding the sincerity of His own conduct by abstaining from such explicit
declarations of His possession of the Master’s Nature. But at the same time we
must remember that He was not merely
simulating but actually personating the
devotee. This is incomprehensible to us. But it happens to be the fact, as
testified to by the author of Sree-Chaitanya-Charitamrita
in the opening verses of his work dealing with the object of the Lord’s
Appearance in this world. The real object, says Sree Krishnadas Kaviraj, was to
taste His own sweetness by clothing Himself with the disposition and beauty of
Sree Radhika. All other work could have been, and was as a matter of fact
actually performed by the secondary Avataras. The Lord’s own special Purpose in
appearing in the world, which cannot be realized by any except Himself, was to
experience the love of Sree Radhika for Himself. He, therefore, could not be
recognized by those who were not His innermost devotees.
It is true that He was
recognized as Krishna by His followers from whom He did not hide His real
Nature. This was necessary for the purpose of the Leela and the possession of such knowledge by His devotees served
to enhance the charm of their service and also to regulate their conduct.
Therefore, these direct manifestations possess a double face like Sree
Chaitanya Himself. Those who choose to ignore the face of the devotee, will
miss the real significance of His Conduct and Teaching, no less than those who
disregard the Divine face. All so-called partial truth is a deluding empiric
conception and has no place in spiritual experience. In the absolute realm
there is diversity, without rupturous dividing lines.
In order to be able to
understand the activities of the devotees of the Absolute Person Vishnu it is
necessary to remember that enlightenment from above is the indispensable
essential precondition. It is futile to attempt to know Him by means of our
present limited understanding. Hence the necessity of having recourse to the
spiritual preceptor and spiritual initiation. Initiation (diksha) consists in complete submission to the Absolute, which is
equivalent to loyal and sincere submission to the guidance of the spiritual
Preceptor, such submission being identical with obedience to the Word of
Krishna as revealed in the satvata Shastras
of which the spiritual Preceptor is both the only bona fide exponent and follower, the indispensable requisites for
spiritual preceptorship.
The act of the disciple in
submitting to the Preceptor, is not to be confounded with the renunciation of
the right of private judgment or subordinating one’s own judgment to another’s.
Both Preceptor and disciple are under obligation to obey only the spiritual
Scriptures. It is a matter of willing admission of superior progress on the
path of the Eternal, and not a question of enforced servitude. Both preceptor
and disciple are free and sincere enquirers of the Absolute by the method of
unconditional submission to the Absolute. Both realize the necessity and the
rationale of such submission. Both know that the only real freedom consists in
absolute submission to the Truth. All these conditions are scrupulously
observed in their mutual relationship by the bona fide Preceptor and disciple.
The effect of such practical submission to the Absolute is freedom from the
limitations of the materialized senses. No sooner is this act of complete
self-surrender to the spiritual Preceptor made then the devotee is accepted by
Krishna as His own. The body, senses and mind of such a person are surcharged
with the spiritual essence by the Grace of Krishna. And the initiated thereby
becomes eligible for eternally serving the Feet of Krishna by the purified
body, senses and mind.
The service of the Absolute
is possible only on the plane of the Absolute and in the spiritual body by
means of the spiritual senses. The soul of jiva
possesses body, senses and mind. Krishna has also His own Divine Form, Senses
and Mind. The soul of the jiva is
constituted to serve Krishna with his spiritual body, mind and senses. The
activities of the jiva in this world,
in the fallen state, is a perverted deluded caricature of his true and eternal
function. The body, mind and senses of the devotee appear to conditioned souls
to be similar to their adventitious material body, senses and mind. But this is
not really the case. It is the effect of delusion. The satvika perturbations
which are possible only in the spiritual body, appear to the materialized
vision of sinful jivas as possessing
the character of physical manifestations. Such conclusion is equally deluded.
Those who do not admit the necessity of submission to Krishna, cannot
necessarily understand what the practice of such submission implies. The act of
submission is the key to the spiritual realm. The denial of this is tantamount
to ignorance. The refusal to submit to the Truth is the logical equivalent of
the slavery of untruth by means of the deluding physical senses. The atheists
are the only ignorant and unfree persons by their refusal to follow the
guidance of their reason.
Sree Gaursundar talked much
while He was exhibiting the Leela of
Direct Manifestation under the guise of nervous distemper. This confirmed the
suspicions of those who were looking out for the symptoms of disease. The words
uttered by the devotee are transcendental sounds that have the power of
producing spiritual enlightenment by freeing from worldliness, if the unprejudiced
ear is turned to them. The Transcendental Lord is served as the Transcendental
Sounds. Those who admit the spiritual nature of the devotees of Krishna know
that they are constantly engaged in the service of Krishna on the plane of the
Absolute. The utterance of too much earthly sound is no doubt a sign of
aggravated worldliness and is the malady of madness to which we are sometimes
subjected by the mercy of Krishna so that we may be reminded thereby of the
insubstantial and transitory nature of our most highly valued worldly
possessions. One suffering from the aggravated disease of worldliness is not
healed by the application of medicines which are supplied by physical Nature
for the restoration of the worldly delusion. Such malady, treatment and cure all
belong to the realm of delusions. They only serve to keep up the deluded idea
of the wholesome nature of this world and its concerns for the correctness of
atheists by such bitter experience. The delusion of those who put their trust
in the delusion of the earthly physicians, who have a very high opinion of
themselves, their science and its utility, is augmented by the practice of such
trust.
The maladies of both
worldly patients and worldly doctors can be healed only if they learn to
distinguish between the symptoms of real disease, the punishment of sin, and
the similar spiritual manifestations of devotees who are absolutely free from
all taint of worldliness, which are the only cure of all diseases. But the
ill-fated have not the leisure, so wholly engrossed they choose to be in their
worldly concerns and self-gratulations, to exercise their unprejudiced reason
on the subject of their disease of the worldly sojourn. They are so absolutely
persuaded of their own rectitude that they employ their wits in disproving the
claims, to any real goodness, of those very persons who endeavour to cure them
of their worldly disease by affording them the opportunity of listening to
those redeeming sounds that bring the tidings of the Absolute to all benighted
souls. They mistake, as the symptoms of an unsound mind with which
unfortunately they are only too familiar, words and utterances that are the only medicine of their diseased souls.
This infatuity is the corrective punishment of their unwarrantable
self-complacency. Krishna’s Deluding Power is ever seeking the holes in the
coats of everyone of us in order to disturb us in the most sensitive parts and
thereby to cure us of the disease of such fatuous reliance on the resources of
our deluded, limited understanding. He, therefore, sends His own beloved ones,
in the guise of patients, to the doctors of this world for delivering such of
them as keep their ears open to the voice of Krishna spoken through the mouths
of His devotees. But the other sort seeing, sees not, and misses their only
opportunity, as further corrective punishment for their gross, deliberate
worldliness. This is the fate of those worldly-wise people who consider the
Unrestrained Talk of Sree Gaursundar as a conclusive proof of His madness.
Of course it is possible,
not inevitable for a time even after initiation, for a person to exhibit the
state of suffering from the actual effects of sensuous activities that he had
indulged in before his initiation. This does not come amiss to the bona fide
probationer who never wants to get rid of his merited sufferings in lieu of
his intention to serve. Such suffering causes the genuine probationer no pain
but, on the contrary, is to him a source of unalloyed spiritual bliss as
providing greater opportunities of service. To the uninitiated the sight of
apparent suffering of the devotee presents a double face, viz., of those patient sufferings and merited punishment, both of
which are untrue and are a trick of the Deluding Power to prevent the obstinate
impious from serving the devotee as
devotee. The doctor who may be called by the devotee to treat him is
afforded the opportunity of rendering unconscious service to the Vaishnava and
will obtain his reward in the shape of a lessening of his worldliness, if he is
careful not to allow his mind to cherish any prejudice against the bona fide
of the real devotee merely from the fact that he might have been guilty of
worldly conduct in his past life. This total absence of all irrational
prejudice is possible only in a person who is sincerely conscious of his own
imperfections.
A doctor who treats a real sadhu without prejudice thereby
unconsciously serves Krishna Himself and obtains as his reward freedom. from
all ignorance by the mercy of the sadhu
who is pleased to manifest to him his real spiritual nature by the will of
Krishna. As soon as one obtains the real sight of the Vaishnava he instantly
awakes from the deep waking slumber of ignorance to which he was being lulled
by the deluding tricks of Maya. No amount of any so-called unprejudiced service
rendered to a non-Vaishnava can lead to such a result. On the contrary if a
non-Vaishnava is too zealously served his so-called benefactor (?) is liable
to be punished by an increase of his delusion as he would thereby only develop
the vanity of false humanity which makes him overlook the distinction between
the Vaishnava and the non-Vaishnava as recipients of our service. Such a person
can hardly be expected to be ever able, unless after he is really cured of his
fondness for non-Vaishnavas, to grasp the real significance of the eternal
distinction between the spiritual and the material, or to realize the truth
that his soul has no affinity whatever with the objects and aspirations of this
world.
The apparent defects of a
bona fide Vaishnava have been aptly compared to the mud and froth that are
sometimes found in the holy water of the Ganges. These in no way affect the
eternal and unchangeable purity of the sacred stream that issues from the Holy
Feet of the Supreme Lord. On the contrary even such mud and froth themselves
imbiblie, by contact with the chastening water of the Ganges, the quality of
delivering all really unclean persons from the sticking dirt of worldliness. It
requires a really impartial and supremely patient judgment to be able to enter
into this spirit of the philosophy of theism. Sree Gaursundar’s teachings are a
sealed book to the crooked and captious, but are easily understood by the
really candid. Worldly merit or demerit is of no help in this matter. Sincerity
of the soul is ~e one thing needful. Insincerity is the concomitant of
worldliness which is the cause of all our self-made ignorance and misery.
But some may still raise
the objection that Sree Gaursundar could have done even greater good and
obtained a better hearing for His teachings if He had exhibited no such
symptoms even of apparent madness. Of course the Supreme Lord is free to do
whatever He likes and there can be no defect in what He Wills or Does.
Gaursundar was, in this instance, exhibiting the Leela of the ideal devotee. The necessity for such performance lay
in the fact that the deliverance of all fettered souls is absolutely dependent
on the realization of the transcendental nature of the devotee of God. Such
realization can alone enlighten him regarding the spiritual nature of His own
proper self. The object of Sree Gaursundar was to remove all misconceptions
that stand in the way of such realization.
One of the commonest
fallacies of this wide world is that religion is only one specific department
of human activities out of many; or, in other words that it is possible to
serve both God and Mammon at the same time, or at any rate in recurring
succession. This idea, it would not be an exaggeration to observe, has been allowed
by culpable negligence on the part of writers to pervade all literature of
modern times. Religion is pedantically differentiated from politics, from
morality, from aesthetics and from worldly activities of all sorts, not so much
for the purpose of emphasizing the eternal distinction between the spiritual
and the material but with the sinister motive of restricting the scope of
religious activity itself within defined worldly bounds. If this fallacy, which
is so widely disseminated, once finds a real lodgment in the brain, one can
never realize the nature of the spiritual service of God, nor understand that
it is possible to practice the same even while we are placed in this world
without doing harm to anybody. I may notice in passing that the practice of so-called
religious toleration, which is so
much affected by a particular stamp of thinkers, is also based upon the above
fallacy, viz., that it is possible
without any real danger to anyone to keep religion out of the other affairs of
life. One, who prays regularly to God in the evening and morning and thinks
that thereby his obligations to Godhead are at least partially fulfilled,
utterly misunderstands the nature of his duty as the exclusive servant of the
Lord. The obligation to serve Krishna is a self-imposed principle which knows
no limits. Krishna can and ought to be served in all circumstances by each and
every person of this world. One who really serves Him does so in his every act and thought. The devotee
serves Krishna at all times both when
he wakes and when he seems to sleep. Every act of the devotee under every
circumstance is an act of service. One who fails to understand this fundamental
principle of spiritual existence, cannot recognize the devotee of God and is
doomed to sin and worldliness for this reason, notwithstanding all his
exertions resembling the external conduct of the real sadhus.
The devotee of Krishna
serves Him under all circumstances and he does nothing else. He neither eats
nor sleeps but only serves. When He exhibits the activity of apparent eating
and sleeping he does so for our benefit in order to show us how ever we, for
whom eating and sleeping are necessary, can get rid of this false existence
with its whole round of so-called interminable duties and obligations, if we only
obey the Word of God manifested in the holy Scriptures and explained by the
discourse and practice, of the eternal servants of Krishna who, by His command,
make themselves visible to our mortal senses and who live and move in our midst
for the fulfillment of the beneficial Purpose of the Supreme Lord in regard to
ourselves. Such is the real nature of the true servants of Krishna. The
Vaishnava tells us that the soul of every entity has the capacity of serving
Krishna however circumstanced he may appear to be. The souls of the stone, the
tree, the baby in the womb, the lunatic, the dying and the dead, are all
equally eligible in this matter. Because no circumstance of this deluding
world, however formidable or adverse it may seem to be to our eclipsed cognition,
can offer any real obstruction to the spiritual service of the Lord. It is the
truth of this proposition that the devotees are engaged in establishing for the
benefit of the unbelievers of this world, by all their teaching and practice.
It would be a great
blunder, therefore, to suppose that any evil can befall the servants of
Krishna, here or elsewhere. The devotee is put by Krishna in all possible
situations in order to train up the judgment of those who profess to believe in them It is only when a person’s budding faith
survives this purgatorial ordeal that he is in a position to understand the
teaching of the Vaishnava which is identical with his conduct. Conversely the
hypocrites are prevented from committing the offense of the pretense of serving
the devotee by such constant searching of their weakest points. These
exhibitions serve the doubly beneficial purpose of enhancing the faith of all
sincere seekers of the Truth and keeping at a distance all those who have no
inclination to serve Krishna but only themselves.
In this world we cannot
really serve Krishna; we can only serve those servants of the Lord who are
mercifully sent by Him into our midst to deliver us from the state of sin and
ignorance. Krishna cannot be served by the sinful and the ignorant. Those who
think that it is possible to serve Krishna with the resources of our limited
understandings or by the physical bodies, confound the transcendental service
of Krishna which passes the understanding of man with the corresponding
atheistical performances. To complete this delusion they are also firmly
persuaded by reason of their cultivated aversion to Krishna that whatever any
individual sinner may choose to fancy as the Truth contains an element of
truth. What they really want is that Truth must serve them and not they the
Truth. They want to be the masters and not the servants of Krishna. But these
irrational, hypocritical, self-seeking, misguided atheists are prevented, by
their perversity due to such senseless prostitution of their freedom of will,
from having the Sight of Krishna or His devotees.
Those who fail to realize
the fatal nature of the offense committed against the Vaishnavas, are unfit to
serve the devotees of Krishna although by such service alone conditioned souls
can be delivered from the consequences of their willful transgressions. It is
an offense against the Vaishnavas to suppose that a bona fide Vaishnava does anything else than the service of Krishna
which is absolutely free from the least taint of worldliness. It is also an
offense against the Vaishnavas to serve or associate with a non-Vaishnava, or
to suppose that a sinner while in the state of sin is a Vaishnava. Until we are
freed from these impious errors we cannot be said to desire the mercy of the true
devotees of the Lord. The transcendental activities and teachings of Sree
Gaursundar as expounded and practiced by His associates and the followers of
His associates, can alone save us from these errors to which an Age given to
superficial controversies, like the present, has an abnormal besetting tendency
to subscribe.
The real significance of
these Pastimes of the Lord, although they happened to be perfectly explicit,
were not apparently permitted to be understood even by the devotees in order to
impress upon worldlings the truth that no one is able to know Him until and
unless He enables one to know.
The tidings of the recovery
of Sree Gaursundar filled everyone with joy. The Vaishnavas specially availed
of this opportunity of impressing upon Him the necessity of serving the Feet of
Sree Krishna by arguing the reason that there is no certainty of life or
sanity. Sree Chaitanya was naturally partial to the Vaishnavas. Their
exhortations made Him smile as He stopped to do obeisance to them all on His way
in the company of His innumerable pupils.
Sree
Chaitanya then resumed His duties as teacher. He taught His pupils inside the
Chandimandap of the house of Mukunda-Sanjaya. While the Lord was thus engaged
in expounding the texts to His pupils perfumed medicated oil was applied to His
Head by some exceptionally fortunate persons of many good deeds. Sree Chaitanya
took His seat in the middle of the room and was surrounded by His pupils who
sat in a circle round their Teacher. That gathering is without a parallel in
the annals of the world. Sree Brindavandas Thakur ransacked the Scriptures for
a parallel instance for the purpose of comparison. At Badarikasrama Sree Narayana
teaches Sanaka and other Rishis sitting round Him in a circle. The Act of Sree
Gaursundar resembled this Leela of
Sree Narayana Himself. The comparison holds good for the reason that the
Darling of Sachi is the Same as Sree Narayana who dwells at Badarikasrama. It
was, therefore, the very same Pastime of Badarikasrama that Sree Chaitanya was
thus enacting in the company of His disciples at Nabadwip.
At
the conclusion of His teaching by mid-day Sree Gaursundar would go out with His
pupils to the Ganges for His Bath. After sporting for a time in the holy water
of the Ganges He returned home and worshipped Vishnu. Offering water and
circumambulating Sree Tulasi He sat to His meal by uttering repeatedly the Name
of Hari. Sree Lakshmi Devi served the Food and the Lord of Vaikuntha ate the
same. The pious mother was privileged to have the full view of this Sight.
After meal He used to chew betel and then retired for rest. Sree Lakshmi Devi
tended His Feet as the Lord laid Himself down in His Bed. The Lord then bent
His Auspicious Glance on the goddess who serves in the office of Sleep of the
Supreme Lord. Having rested for a while Sree Gaursundar used to go out of the
house a second time with His books.