Vegetarianism
and the Hare Kåñëa Movement
Bhakti-yoga, the science of devotion
to Kåñëa, has been faithfully handed down through the ages for the spiritual
health of humanity. The Vedic culture considers a person who caters to the
whims of the body and mind, neglecting the needs of the soul, to be infected
with the disease of materialism. As doctors prescribe a medicine and a special
diet for a disease, the Vedic sages recommend the chanting of Kåñëa's holy
names as the medicine for the materialistic disease, and prasäda as the
diet. The Vedic scriptures have predicted that this remedy for human suffering
will reach every town and village in the world.
Eager
to hasten the fulfillment of this prediction, His Divine Grace A.C.
Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupäda, following in the footsteps of his great
spiritual predecessors, dedicated his life to spreading Kåñëa consciousness. In
1965, he left India for the United States to introduce Kåñëa consciousness to
the people of the West, as his own spiritual master, His Divine Grace
Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvaté, had requested of him many years earlier. Çréla
Prabhupäda was undaunted by his advanced age and the many other obstacles that
faced him. Relying fully on the mercy of Lord Kåñëa, he started what was to
become a worldwide movement, in the form of the International Society for Kåñëa
Consciousness (ISKCON). Between 1965, when Çréla Prabhupäda came to America
from India, and 1977, when he passed away from this world, he conveyed the
fullness of spiritual life through his lectures, letters, books, and tape
recordings, as well as his personal example. He established more than one
hundred temples, translated nearly eighty volumes of transcendental literature,
and initiated almost five thousand disciples.
Çréla
Prabhupäda was motivated by a sense of urgency, because he could see that the
world needed India's great spiritual culture, which was rapidly disappearing.
In India he saw that leaders who had neither faith in the Vedic teachings nor
knowledge of how to apply them were trying to solve essentially spiritual
problems with material solutions. He saw the young generation of Indian people
turning away from their sublime spiritual heritage in favor of Western
materialism, at the same time that many people in the West, disillusioned with
materialism, were looking for a new life with a higher set of values.
Çréla
Prabhupäda was keenly aware of the problems of both India and the West, and he
offered a sensible solution. He compared India, which still has some spiritual
vision, but lacks widespread technology, to a lame man; and the Western
countries, which excel in technology but lack spiritual vision, to a blind man.
If the seeing lame man sits on the shoulders of the walking blind man, they
become like one man who sees and walks. The International Society for Kåñëa
Consciousness is this seeing and walking man, using the best of both India and
the West to revive Vedic culture in India and spread it to the rest of the
world.
Kåñëa
consciousness, Çréla Prabhupäda would often say, is not something dry. And prasäda
was one way he proved his assertion. He showed his disciples how to cook
many kinds of vegetarian dishes, how to offer them to Kåñëa, the Supreme Lord,
and how to relish the sanctified food as Kåñëa's mercy. Çréla Prabhupäda was
always pleased to see his disciples eating only Kåñëa's prasäda. Many
times he personally cooked the prasäda and served his disciples with his
own hand.
In
Volume Two of Prabhupäda Nectar, His Holiness Satsvarüpa däsa Gosvämé
describes the mood in which Çréla Prabhupäda gave out prasäda. "He
liked to give prasäda from his hand, and everyone liked to receive it.
It was not just food, but the blessings of bhakti, the essence of
devotional service. Çréla Prabhupäda gave out prasäda happily, calmly,
and without discrimination. When he gave to children, they liked the sweet
taste of it, in the form of a cookie or sweet-meat, yet also they liked it as a
special treat from Prabhupäda, who sat on the vyasasana [seat of the spiritual
master] leaning forward to them. Women liked it because they got a rare chance
to come forward and extend their hand before Prabhupäda. They felt satisfied
and chaste.
And stalwart men came forward like expectant children, sometimes
pushing one another just to get the mercy from Prabhupäda. To Prabhupäda it was
serious and important, and he would personally supervise to make sure that a
big plate was always ready for him to distribute... Although now prasäda distribution
in the Kåñëa consciousness movement is done on a huge scale, as Prabhupäda
desired, it all started from his own hand, as he gave it out one-to-one."
Çréla
Prabhupäda taught that giving prasäda to others is an important part of
the Kåñëa conscious way of life. A spiritual movement is useless without free
distribution of sanctified foods, Çréla Prabhupäda said. He wanted free prasäda
to be part of every Hare Kåñëa function. Indeed, with full faith in the
spiritual potency of prasäda to elevate humanity to God consciousness,
Çréla Prabhupäda wanted the whole world to taste Kåñëa-prasäda.
The
doors are open to the public every day at each of the two hundred Hare Kåñëa
temples and thirty-five farm communities around the world, where anyone can
take free Kåñëa-prasäda. On Sunday, each center invites the public for a
sumptuous multicourse "love feast", a program Çréla Prabhupäda
started in 1966 at the first temple on the Lower East Side of New York City.
Every center also has several public festivals a year, such as Ratha-yatra, the
Festival of the Chariots, perhaps the world's oldest spiritual festival. And at
each festival, tens of thousands of people see the beautiful form of Kåñëa and
eat Kåñëa-prasäda.
In
1979 some devotees in North America created the "Festival of India",
a touring cultural program that cries-crosses the United States and Canada
every year, holding 40 festivals in 20 major cities. Under six large tents and
at numerous booths and display panels, thousands of people experience Vedic
culture as it was presented to the West by Çréla Prabhupäda, through drama,
dance, music, diorama exhibits, Vedic literature, and free vegetarian feasts.
The
Hare Kåñëa movement also has restaurants in major cities like London, Paris,
Milan, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Sydney. As far as possible, the restaurants use
ingredients grown on farms run by Kåñëa devotees. The devotees also give
courses in cooking Kåñëa-prasäda. In England, the United States, and Australia,
the Hare Kåñëa Vegetarian Club on many of the major campuses, provides a humane
alternative to the slaughterhouse-oriented college nutrition courses. And
having become acquainted with the Kåñëa conscious philosophy, which encompasses
all of the ordinary arguments for vegetarianism, and then goes beyond by giving
lucid spiritual arguments, most of the people who participate in these clubs
become very resolute vegetarians.
Many
people have come to know the devotees of Kåñëa through the public congregational
chanting of Kåñëa's holy names. This public chanting, inaugurated in India five
hundred years ago, is always accompanied by the distribution of free prasäda.
In
some countries, the temples sponsor free prasäda restaurants. For
example, at Mukunda's Drop-In Centre in Sydney, Australia, over one million
meals have been given away by the end of 1985.
Another
prasäda-distribution program started in 1973, when Çréla Prabhupäda looked out
the window of his room one day in Çré Mayapur, India, and saw a young girl
searching through some garbage for food. At that moment he resolved that no one
within ten kilometers of the Hare Kåñëa temple in Çré Mäyäpura should ever go
hungry, and he told this to his disciples. A few days later, looking out the
same window, Çréla Prabhupäda was happy to see his disciples passing out prasäda
to hundreds of villagers, who sat in long rows eating heartily from round
leaf plates.
"Continue this forever," Çréla Prabhupäda told his
disciples. "Always distribute prasäda." This was the birth of
the ISKCON Food Relief program, which now distributes more than fifteen
thousand meals each week, especially in India, Bangladesh and Africa.
A
similar project, Hare Kåñëa Food for Life, lives up to its motto "Feeding
the Hungry Worldwide" by distributing over twenty thousand plates of prasäda
every day to needy people in both the Third World and the industrialized
countries of the West. The Hare Kåñëa movement is one of the world's leading
promoters of a vegetarian diet as a long-range solution to the problem of world
hunger. And to relieve the immediate effects of hunger, the devotees of Kåñëa
are feeding disaster victims, the homeless, the unemployed, and the hungry
through this "Food for Life" program. Working in cooperation with the
local officials in different countries, "Food for Life" is often
helped with government grants and donations of surplus foodstuffs.
These
programs give away more than food, however. Çréla Prabhupäda emphasized that
simply feeding the hungry was not enough, that it was false charity to feed
someone unless you gave him prasäda and thereby liberate him from birth
and death.
It
is not surprising, then, that the Hare Kåñëa movement is often called the
"kitchen religion," the movement that combines philosophy with good
food. And though some people may not accept the philosophy, hardly anyone says
no to the food. In fact, every year more than twenty million people relish
Kåñëa-prasäda, food offered to the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Lord Kåñëa.
We
look forward to the time when unlimited amounts of prasäda will be
distributed all over the world and people everywhere will offer their food to
God. Such a revolution in this most universal of human rituals-eating-will
certainly cure the materialistic disease of mankind.
No comments:
Post a Comment