HH Romapada Swami
om ajnana-timirandhasya jnananjana-salakaya
caksur unmilitam yena tasmai sri-gurave
nama om visnu-padaya krsna-presthaya bhu-tale
srimate bhaktivedanta-svaminn iti namine
namas te sarasvate deve gaura-vani-pracarine
nirvisesa-sunyavadi-pascatya-desa-tarine
mukam karoti vacalam pangum langhayate girim
yat-krpa tam aham vande sri gurum dina-taranam
My dear and most respected spiritual master and eternal father,
Please accept my most humble and respectful obeisances in the dust of your most merciful lotus feet! All glories to you, Srila Prabhupada!
Even more than being recognized by Sri Srimad Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Gosvami Maharaja as a gifted writer as early as 1935 for your Vyasa-puja homage to him, which was presented both in poetic form as well as an essay, your greatest satisfaction was knowing that you had pleased him very much by offering service to him through your God-given gift for writing. “Whatever he writes, publish it,” was the instruction Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati gave to the editor of the Harmonist.
Absolute is sentient
Thou hast proved,
Impersonal calamity
Thou hast moved.
Srila Bhaktisiddhanta took your words in this stanza as an indication of how well you knew his mind and mission; it captured the essence of your spiritual master’s preaching against the Mayavadis. The essay was likewise deeply profound! Your mature life was replete with such loving expressions of service to His Divine Grace’s mission, in all respects.
When you left household life for vanaprastha in 1954 at the age of 58, you endured much hardship and anonymity. Little has been recorded about those testing years. After wandering here and there for two years, striving to assist your Guru maharaja, you took up residence for six years—1956 through 1962—at the family-owned Vamsi-gopalaji temple, near Kesi-ghata. Your room was tiny and barren. Hardly could one even imagine that a world acarya would evolve from such humble beginnings.
A testimony of your unbridled determination, against all odds, manifested in an unexpected manner. By your following up on a notice of an event to be held in Japan in May of 1961, an invitation was extended to you from Japan to personally attend the conference, called “Congress for Cultivation of Human Spirit.” Although your sights had been set by Srila Bhaktisiddhanta upon addressing the English-speaking part of the world, without any assets or assistants you set about the project of writing Light of the Bhagavat, based on Chapter 20 of the Bhagavatam’s Tenth Canto, to address this assembly. You prepared a 20,000-word manuscript for the occasion, with an explicit request of the conference organizer to produce one oriental painting to accompany each section of the book.
As it turned out, the book was finally published a full twenty years later, since in 1961 you had no funds, even for the airfare to Tokyo.
Srila Prabhupada, the language in this manuscript is so powerful! Brilliant, perfectly suited for the audience, and embodying the same core messages you shared with the world audience over the next two decades. Your fidelity to the strong points repeatedly found in the writings of Srila Bhaktisiddhanta is so apparent, even at this early stage!
One outstanding example I particularly noted was this: “Human beings have two kinds of tempera-ment. Some are introspective, and the others are extravagant.” And “Nature divides human activities into two different spheres, one external and the other introspective. As long as a man is dominated by the modes of ignorance and passion, he is active externally in desire and lust.” The wise are those who look inwardly and can guide the misguided. You repeatedly appeal to the reader to become inwardly directed instead of extravagant and externally oriented.
This language is precisely the same as the primary emphasis and objective of Srila Raghunatha dasa Gosvami’s Sri Manah-siksa, which he naturally extends to its ultimate limit—inward cultivation of attachment to the type of krsna-prema found in Vraja. You beseech your audience to turn away from the contaminating influences acting upon covered souls and instead to embrace purity, as found in great souls such as the Six Gosvamis of Vrndavana. In this early literature, at least directionally, you clearly advocate and endorse inward cultivation, eloquently found in seedlike form within Chapter 20 of the Tenth Canto.
As introduced in this concise, eloquent book, “Light of the Bhagavat,” gradually you expanded this aspiration further by personally giving Vrndavana to us as our real home, along with the lives and writings of the Six Gosvamis as the gateway to enter the holy dhama. By your grace, my internal life of devotion to Vrndavana-dhama has been immensely nourished this past year by immersion in the glorious details of the lives and writings of our beloved Gosvamis of Vrndavana.
For those of us not yet qualified to live in Vrndavana full-time, you, following in the footsteps of Srila Rupa Gosvami, taught us to cherish Vrndavana as our real home, and to covet one day becoming quali-fied to make the eternal Vrndavana our eternal home.
Finally, I want to report to you the current progress of the court case filed in 2004 by the plaintiff
GBC to regain full control of the same ISKCON Inc. corporation that you personally established in July 1966. After more than eighteen years of legal battling, a full trial on the merits is looming. I earnestly appeal to you for your full blessings for a favorable decision from the court. With your mercy, together with intelligent guidance by our attorneys and sincere prayers of the Vaisnavas, success will naturally follow.
I am most grateful and indebted to you for all that you have abundantly given to me personally and to all others who are willing to receive true abundance from you. I pray for your empowerment so that I may unceasingly receive these gifts, as well as assist you in this very mission of giving the same to others.
Kindly accept me, despite my error-filled attempts to assist and serve you favorably. Pleasing you is my life and soul, the real meaning and value of my life.
I am at your feet, begging for your continued mercy. Please keep me forever and ever engaged in your service.
Your humble servant,
Romapada Swami