Please accept my humble obeisances
All glories to Srila Prabhupada!
In regards to the emphasis on having a spiritual master, in the recent "Thought for the Day" questions and answers:
In Chapter 9, Text 34 of the Bhagavad-gita, Krishna says, "Engage your mind always in thinking of Me, become my devotee, offer obeisances to Me and worship Me. Being completely absorbed in Me, surely you will come to Me." In Chapter 12, text 8 Krishna says, "Just fix your mind upon Me, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and engage all your intelligence in Me. Thus you will live in Me always, without a doubt." There is no mention of a spiritual master in these texts. Your comments will be much appreciated. Feel free to share with all your readers.
S.D. |
In the verses you have quoted Krishna says that if we become His devotee, we will come to Him. So it is a fact that all we have to do to go to Krishna is to become His devotee. When it comes to learning how to become Krishna's devotee, who can be a better authority to teach us how to become His devotee than Krishna Himself? So let us learn from Him how to become His devotee.
tad viddhi praṇipātena
paripraśnena sevayā
upadekṣyanti te jñānaṁ
jñāninas tattva-darśinaḥ
"Just try to learn the truth by approaching a spiritual master. Inquire from him submissively and render service unto him. The self-realized souls can impart knowledge unto you because they have seen the truth."--Bhagavad-gita 4.34
Krishna is clearly instructing us to take lessons from and render service to the spiritual master. Therefore if we want to become Krishna's devotee, we are obliged to obey this instruction to accept a spiritual master. Plus Lord Krishna directly tells us in the Adi Purana how to become His devotee. He say to do this we must become a devotee of His devotee.
ye me bhakta-janāḥ pārtha
na me bhaktāś ca te janāḥ
mad-bhaktānāṁ ca ye bhaktās
te me bhakta-tamā matāh
"My dear Arjuna, those who are My direct devotees are actually not My devotees, but those who are the devotees of My devotee are factually My devotees."
If we tell Krishna that we do not want to be the devotee of His devotee, that we only want to be His devotee, He will say that we are not His devotee. In this connection Srila Prabhupada often quotes the English saying, "if you love me, love my dog." He explains that the spiritual master is the dog of God, that if you want to love God you must also love His dog, the spiritual master.
The final conclusion is that we have to accept Krishna's teachings in full. It is not that we can accept the verses we like and reject the verses we don't like. If we do that, we are guilty of the fallacy known as half-hen logic. There was a farmer who had a hen who laid very nice eggs that commanded a good price in the market. The only problem was that the hen ate a lot of chicken feed. The foolish farmer came up with a "bright solution." He decided to keep the end of the hen that lays eggs and cut off the end of the hen that eats. The result was he killed the hen and there were no more eggs. So if in the same way we think that we will accept the verses we like and reject the verses we don't like, the result will be that we will not become Krishna conscious, and we will not go back to Godhead. Therefore we should accept Krishna's teachings in full by becoming the devotee both of Krishna Himself and His pure devotee, the bona fide spiritual master. In this way we will become qualified to return to His kingdom at the end of this lifetime.
There are many, many more verses throughout the Vedic literatures stating the necessity of accepting a spiritual master. For the sake of brevity I have mentioned only two.
Sankarshan Das Adhikari |
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