2011 Who Have Had Your Darśana

Please accept my humble obeisances in the dust of your lotus feet, lotus feet that carried you all over the world so that your divine words and countenance could liberate those who heard from you and saw you.

Dear master! Allow me to briefly glorify the benefit accrued to those who have had your darśana, the vision of your transcendental form, which also includes having heard from you. In Kṛṣṇa’s words, such fortunate souls are freed from material entanglement, qualified to develop love for the Lord, to see Him, and to return back to Godhead. Such is the power of seeing you!

Śukadeva Gosvāmī describes how the sons of Kuvera—Nalakūvera and Maṇigrīva—were confined by Nārada’s curse to the form of trees on the bank of the Yamunā in Gokula. On the Dīpāvalī day, Mother Yaśodā tied her child to a mortar. He then crawled between the trees and the mortar got stuck. Kṛṣṇa tugged on it and toppled the trees, freeing the two demigods. After the celestials offered the Lord prayers, Kṛṣṇa replied:

sādhūnāṁ sama-cittānāṁ sutarāṁ mat-kṛtātmanām
darśanān no bhaved bandhaḥ puŕso ’kṣṇoḥ savitur yathā,

“When one is face to face with the sun, there is no longer darkness for one’s eyes. Similarly, when one is face to face with a sādhu, a devotee, who is fully determined and surrendered to the Supreme Personality of Godhead, one will no longer be subject to material bondage.” (Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 10.10.41)

Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura cites another reading of this verse, which says that “until” one is face to face with a sādhu, liberation remains out of one’s reach and material bondage must continue.

In your own commentary, Śrīla Prabhupāda, you say that by seeing a sādhu like Nārada—or in my estimation a sādhu like you—one is delivered from material bondage. But for those who commit vaiṣṇava-aparādha—or in the opinion of Cakravartī Ṭhākura, nāma-aparādha in general—liberation will take some time. Whereas for the offenseless it is very quick. Being offensive is likened to blindness. Even if the sun rises, a blind man cannot see it until his eyesight is restored.

After they were freed from their imprisonment, and after they saw Kṛṣṇa, the two sons of Kuvera returned to their abode with the gift of love of God.

Similarly, devotees who have had your darśana will also be freed from imprisonment in their material bodies and attain love for Kṛṣṇa, along with the transcendental benefits that accrue from prema.

My conclusion is that since I had the great fortune of seeing you and hearing from you, it can only be due to the results of my offenses that I am still confined in this treelike body and deprived of Kṛṣṇa’s darśana and of love for Him.

Dear Śrīla Prabhupāda! I have full faith that by continuing to stand upon the divine soil of your ISKCON, beside the ever-flowing river of nāma-saṅkīrtana, from where I can see in the distance the Deity forms of the Lord, the effects of my offenses will one day be nullified. And because I was fortunate enough to have seen you, who are fully surrendered to Him, Kṛṣṇa will surely free me from this material confinement.

Thank you! Thank you for inconveniencing yourself by traveling all over the world so that I could be among those who saw you and heard from you. Forgive me! Forgive me for not taking full advantage of what I saw and heard. Bless Me! Please bless me that Kṛṣṇa’s mortar will soon touch me and transform me into what you laboured so hard to make me—a pure devotee.

Your servant,
Śivarāma Swami