By Swami B.A. Paramadvaiti
Translation: Manahsiksa Devi Dasi

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Vrindavana, India

My dear devotees,
Please accept my blessings.

The gift to the sankirtanero, the puspanjali is in memory of the first and the great sankirtanero who came directly from Goloka Vrindavan to exhibit a pastime without parallel, and I am referring to Srila Prabhupada, our saviour. When he was living in Radha-Damodar, he travelled many times to Delhi his books of Srimad Bhagavatam, and by that, one could observe that he was surrendered and determined servant of his spiritual master.

To honour His pure devotee, Sri Krishna let him go through very hard and very difficult moments, and the only thing Srila Prabhupada did, was to continue take refuge to the transcendental purpose of his effort to render service to his spiritual master. Srila Prabhupada had no money. When he printed the first volume of Srimad Bhagavatam, he had no money to pay it. He printed just 100 copies, and to sell them was the only chance that he had to pay the printing. However, he already had the second volume in mind, and his sankirtan was to try to sell his books personally, like also to deliver them personally to the president of the country, the ministers, at the university, at the bookshop, yes, to everyone that he could.

To travel from Vrindavan to Delhi is a big austerity. Srila Prabhupada did it every time by train, and it was not that Srila Prabhupada had a portable computer where he carried all the ready pages to print them. He had to ask for a loan for a typewriter, and his manuscript was handwritten. And even like that, in just two years, he alone published three volumes, each one with 400 pages, of the books that still come to us today, to all his admirers and aspirants to become devotees.

He managed to get support for the printing of the third volume, from the ship magnate Sumati Murarji. This perhaps seems like a patronage for Srila Prabhupada from the rich class, but it was not like that. In the majority of harbours, they all refused to help Srila Prabhupada. When he went to Sumati Morarji, he was denied to talk to her, but instead of going away, he decided to insist. He sat down at the entrance of the building and sat there for five hours and chanted the Maha Mantra, all everyone who worked there, realized that they had an old sadhu sitting at the entrance since hours back. When Sumati Morarji went from work that day, she asked who that sadhu was, who was sitting there. They answered her, that he had been sitting there all day. Moved with this, she approached Srila Prabhupada and asked: "Swamiji. What can I do for you?", and Srila Prabhupada presented the two printed volumes of Srimad Bhagavatam to her, and he asked her to help him with the third one. She agreed, and one year later, after one more time with great insistence from Srila Prabhupada, she gave him the ticket to his historical travel. He came to United States, with just his books and without any other assets, and the sankirtan sacrifice of Srila Prabhupada continued with great difficulty.

Many times, Srila Prabhupada didn't even know what to eat these years, and each penny he got, he used for paying the books, and his enormous literary work was his extra work at night. From here come the Isopanisad, Easy Journey to Other Planets, Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and the Nectar of Devotion, for instance. If you and I today can participate in the printing and distribution of the nectar of the transcendental nectar, we should feel very fortunate. We should dance with the bags full of books, eternally grateful, and when we come back to our temples, where there are deities and nice prasadam, we should remember that we have all of this, only because of Srila Prabhupadas mercy.

When I joined, there were still no books in German, and the devotees lived mostly in cars and travelled around and did sankirtan all the year. We only came to a main temple one a week, to load the cars with the newly printed books. The histories about the ecstasy and about the nectar of sankirtan had no limits. It is the same nice story in unlimited varieties that have brought you and me all the way here, and still in these moments, many years after Srila Prabhupada's sacrifice, some preaching systems have varied, and there exist many new ideas of how to penetrate the modern society with the message of our spiritual master.

We may not forget to be austere and continue to work in the footsteps of Srila Prabhupada. Comfort and laziness does not lead to God, bur austerity and sacrifice does. Therefore, all of us should maintain connected to the Harinam Sankirtan; all sannyasis, presidents of the temple, administers… everyone should go out at least once a week to remember Srila Prabhupada, and go humbly from door to door, person to person, with the solicitation to collaborate with Krishna consciousness, to read the books, listen to our music and visit our temples.

A personal visit, a contact face to face, or who knows - from hear to heart, is the most important for to preach Krishna consciousness, the most unforgettable. Krishna consciousness is something personal. Krishna is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and His love for us, is the reason to why He ignored all our deficiencies and sent us His pure devotee, Srila Prabhupada, to save us.

One should have literature. If one cannot get in, then let print it, present the mission of you spiritual master. Invite people to a place where you once more can present the nectar of our life - Srila Prabhupada's books. The life and the spirit in a temple is the daily classes in Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhagavad-Gita and Caitanya Caritamrita. What is significant for the Vaishnavas is exactly the classes from the holy scriptures. People gather all over the world, anywhere since time immemorial, but not only to read the revelation scriptures, but to speculate. Now we can receive and spread pure nectar, sabda brahma… the transcendental sound, something that defeats the ignorance and makes us feel shame, if there are still any demoniac qualities within us.

So, you great sankirtaneros, don't ever again permit the marathon of your life to lead to discouragement. After all, it is not what we take and not what we get, that makes us happy, but what we have to give, what we can offer, the attention that we were able to give to others. There is the food of the transcendental pleasure, to get away from the consciousness of the tongue to the consciousness of the maha prasadam and to all pizza fans, who does not forget to offer the pizza before to eat it.

There is not a single moment when we can play with the human life, and life is to preach, systematically or not, but to preach. One can preach with a catalogue for seva, and to preach solutions for all problems of mankind, or one can simply jump on a bus with a single little booklet and ask people to read it, and one can invite them and arrange the temples for the reception like the entrance to Vaikuntha. So there is no way to avoid responsibility, in the same way as there is no way for a mother to deny her child a complete and continuous attention.

To preach means to invite new children, new brothers and sisters who are as desperate as you, to meet devotees and true friends, to find a refuge and a transcendental mission.

For my own part, I do not like the material world, I do not even like the temples and the mediocre life together with the neophytes and the cheaters who mix with them, but there is nothing better than this. Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur said that sometimes the association with some devotees seems unbearable, but he said that one has to stand it anyway, since there is nothing better than the devotees, despite their deficiencies or immaturity. They at least accept the Supreme Lord and that one has to follow principles. They at least theoretically accept that one has to subdue the false ego. At least they can understand that there is a responsibility, karma and reincarnation, and they can at least talk about Srila Prabhupada and not about Charlie Chaplin. They at least accept that one should serve the others, even if they forget it sometimes, and besides this… among them, one can real saints too; persons who are ready and very surrendered. These friends of the poor souls, who always have time fir the unfortunate, and even the mediocre ones, sometimes become excellent. They become better by good association, realize what it means to be a surrendered and serving devotee, and that all fights and laziness is against his own interests.

So, sankirtan is an instrument for the family to grow, to increase the number of devotees, to increase our responsibility, increase our headache and increase our spiritual progress. Her own parents love a child even when she is sick, right? Like that, Srila Prabhupada loved us sick ones, when we came to his mission.

A sankirtanero is a messenger of Love. The loneliness of an eremite, who searches for a cave for his own liberation, cannot compare to the soul who deliver the message of Lord Caitanya's love to every place where Krishna let him go. The lonely bhajan was not what Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakur was so fond of. What he like the best, was the intensive fight to always be on place as transcendental firemen to extinguish the fire of the material world.

So I offer my most humble obeisances and want to touch the feet of all the transcendental firemen who are inspired by Srila Prabhupada, all over the world. I ask for their blessings and pray to Krishna that I may be able to live a life without offending them, and if I have done so in some moment, that they are so kind to forgive me. In this age of Kali, in this world of conflicts, it is always difficult to be as amiable as our ideal, but one who is a devotee, a sankirtanero, a preacher, should always show great appreciation towards his spiritual brothers and sisters, and at the same time continue the fight that our spiritual master gave to each one of us.

With these words, I finish my puspanjali to the sankirtaneros, the friends of the poor, the desire trees.

Always your well-wisher, Swami BA Paramadvaiti