Memoirs by Giriraja Swami
One of the early devotees I met at the temple was the artist and musician Marek Buchwald, whom Hamsaduta dasa had recruited in Montreal to design a cover for a reprint of Easy Journey to Other Planets and who had come to Boston to meet Srila Prabhupada for the first time. When Marek arrived—the same day I had met Prabhupada, the day after the Brandeis program—he said, “I could smell the incense from some distance away, and as I came up to the door of the temple and peeked inside, I saw two young women dancing in a circle, one strumming a dulcimer and the other playing small hand cymbals, just dancing around and chanting. I was very conscious that this was some kind of fulfilment, that a story was being fulfilled.
“Srila Prabhupada arrived in Boston shortly after, and everybody was invited to go and visit him in his room, which was just a little down the street. I filed in with the rest of the hopefuls—my first glimpse of him. He looked unlike any picture of him I’d seen—unshaven, with several days of growth on both his head and face. He looked like a white, angelic flower, all fuzzy and white. He was sitting and smiling, quiet and serene, but he was not really paying attention to the people coming in; his eyes were fixed on a book sitting open in front of him. His eyes moved across the page, as if he were reading. I have met my true father, I thought. I am seeing my original father. I was just falling in love with him; my heart was melting.
“Then he looked up, smiled, and said, ‘Just see. Just a tiny little insect.’ There was an ant or something crawling on the book, and Prabhupada was following its movements. ‘Just see how wonderful Krishna is: He has given complete freedom to even the most insignificant creature. It goes here and there, wherever it wants. And Krishna is guiding it. He has created such a wonderful creature and has given it complete independence—freedom. Can any scientist claim anything like this?’ ”
When Marek had first walked into the room, he told me years later, what he experienced was love, just love—and the realization that Krishna consciousness was simply love masquerading as a philosophy. And when he told me that, I had the same realization: “Yes, Krishna consciousness is just love.”
“Eventually almost everyone left,” he said, “but Hamsaduta wanted me to stay. ‘Swamiji,’ he addressed Prabhupada, ‘I think this boy would like to be initiated.’ I nearly died when I heard him say that. I’d never expressed such a desire, but Hamsaduta just threw me to Prabhupada’s feet. I was shocked; I was frightened. I hadn’t expected anything like that, and I certainly didn’t think that Prabhupada would take it seriously. But he said, ‘Yes’ and just completely blew away all my fears, all my hesitation. And when I heard him say, ‘Yes,’ I responded, ‘Yes.’ And that was that.
“Then Hamsaduta told him that I was an artist. ‘Do you want to paint for my books?’ Prabhupada asked. ‘Do you want to paint for Krsna book? We need you.’ And he took a picture off his desk—Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu doing sankirtana, the one where He has hair, walking with the rest of the Pancha-tattva—and said, ‘You should copy this and show it to me.’
“My initiation came just a few days later. Chris, my friend and bandmate from Montreal, and I were getting shaved up, and he was saying, ‘I must be crazy. I must be off my rocker!’ But we went through with it: Chris became Chandan Acharya, and our other friend, Ivan, became Ishan dasa.
“When the time came for me to hand Srila Prabhupada my beads, he seemed a little disappointed with their size. ‘You could not have gotten bigger beads?’ he asked. Still, he chanted on them, then handed them back to me, with the name Baradraj dasa.
“A day or two afterwards, while I was cleaning up the basement, the brahmachari ashram, which was a total disaster—dark, damp, and rat-infested—I found 109 larger, cherry-sized, green wooden beads scattered all about the floor and strung them together. And when I brought them to Srila Prabhupada, he chanted on those.”
“After Prabhupada had been in Boston for a few days,” remembered Arundhati dasi, who had been living in the temple since the end of 1968, “Satsvarupa [who was temple president] spoke to him and said he didn’t know what to do about us brahmacharinis, who were arguing with each other and not in good health. ‘That is because they need to be married,’ Srila Prabhupada said. ‘That is natural for them, to be protected first by their father, then by their husband, then by their elder son. Immediately arrange for them to be married. I will perform the weddings.’
“We were all pretty shocked by this—just like that, it seemed, everything was going to change. A few of the brahmacharinis were already associating with male devotees, but neither Jahnava nor I had been.
“Some brahmacharis had come down from Montreal to see Prabhupada, and Jahnava was fixed up with Nanda Kishore. Prabhupada said that I could marry a devotee named Dayal Nitai, but I became very upset. I felt no attraction at all, and I felt strongly that I did not want to marry him. I was crying, praying to Krishna—I didn’t know what to do. Prabhupada had said to marry him, so I had this big conflict.
“When Satsvarupa saw me crying, he brought me to see Prabhupada and told him I was upset about this proposed marriage. Srila Prabhupada was so kind. He said, ‘That is all right. Nothing is by force in Krishna consciousness. If you do not want to get married now, you can get married at some later date.’ I was so relieved! Srila Prabhupada was my guru, and I felt that he was also my father.”
In early April, Arundhati, along with devotees from up and down the East Coast, had gone to New York City to meet Srila Prabhupada. She had seen him daily in the 26 Second Avenue temple and also gone for darshan in his second-floor rear apartment. After the first darshan, when Prabhupada had asked his personal servant Purusottama dasa to see if someone would like to bathe his Deities, she had spoken up: “I’ll do it, Srila Prabhupada!”
“Okay,” he said, “come to my room tomorrow morning.”
The next day, in his apartment with his six-inch-tall brass Radha-Krishna Deities, Prabhupada had sat on the floor next to Arundhati, told Purusottama to make a paste of tamarind, water, and claylike fuller’s earth, and smeared the paste all over Srimati Radharani. He had taken a cloth and removed the paste and polished Her, then handed Krishna to Arundhati and said, “Now you do Krishna.”
Arundhati had applied the paste and started polishing, and Prabhupada had gone back to his seat. “I became very anxious,” she later described, “thinking I could not get Krishna shiny enough.”
After some minutes, Prabhupada had said, “Yes, very good. You come here every morning and do this service.” Sometimes Prabhupada would be present, sometimes he would be on his morning walk, but she had continued her service throughout his time in New York, and when he had come to Boston, she had returned and, at his request, resumed her service.
The following year, when Prabhupada visited Columbus, Ohio, where Arundhati was then living and his Deities had appeared after being missing for a few days, he told her, “The Deities liked the way you took care of Them. Therefore They have decided to return. So you may continue doing your service to Them again here.”
Arundhati sometimes spoke to me about our relationship with Krishna and shared teachings from the Bhagavad-gita and other scriptures. “Glenn was very eager to know everything and seemed to be a natural devotee,” she recounts. “I liked him a lot. He seemed a very kind, soft-spoken, intelligent, sweet person.”
The marriages were performed two days later, on May 6. When one of the brides-to-be, Saradiya dasi, had heard that Prabhupada wanted her to get married, she had told him that she wanted to marry Vaikunthanath dasa, and Prabhupada assured her that he would arrange it, and when he told Vaikunthanath that Saradiya wanted to marry him, Vaikunthanath agreed to the proposal. Another young devotee, Saradiya’s best friend, Rukmini dasi, was to marry Baradraj, and the third couple was Jahnava and Nanda Kishore dasa.
Baradraj’s parents were not happy about the wedding; they were, in his words, “incensed about the whole thing.” His mother had even sent Prabhupada a telegram expressing her displeasure. “So, just before the wedding,” Baradraj remembers, “Prabhupada called me in and, holding the telegram, said, ‘I have received a telegram from your mother. She says that you are crazy and that whatever happens, she will hold me responsible.’ She had already lost a son and now I was going to be lost to some woman in a cult. Prabhupada seemed quite disturbed. ‘Is this true?’ he asked. ‘Are you crazy?’ ‘No, Srila Prabhupada,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’m crazy. But maybe she is.’ He said, ‘Yes. So, as far as anyone knows, I never received this telegram.’ ”
The devotees set up the fire yajna in one corner of the temple room, arranging a mound of earth, bowls of grains, acamana cups, colored powders, sticks of wood, and a container of melted ghee and a ladle. Fifty or sixty people gathered for the event. Prabhupada usually lectured from a dais—we did not yet have a proper vyasasana—but for the wedding, he sat on a pillow beside the couples—all of them, himself included, wearing flower garlands. He taught the men how to apply kumkum to the parts in their brides’ hair and personally conducted the ceremony, instructing the couples what to say and do. Prabhupada directed Satsvarupa to act as Saradiya and Jahnava’s father and give them away.
“So, those who are to be married may come here,” Prabhupada began. “Right side bride, left side bridegroom.” Then he had the couples perform acamana, the ritual of purification in which one places three drops of water in one’s palm and sips the water while chanting the names of the Lord.
“Anyone’s father or mother has come?” he asked.
“My father and mother,” Rukmini replied.
Then Prabhupada chanted, with the devotees responding:
om apavitrah pavitro va sarvavastham gato ‘pi va
yah smaret pundarikaksam sa bahyabhyantara-sucih
sri visnu sri visnu sri visnu
[“Either pure or impure, or having passed through all conditions of material life, if one can remember the lotus-eyed Krsna, he becomes externally and internally clean.” (Garuda Purana)]
Prabhupada recited the prayers to the disciplic succession, those spiritual masters who had come before him in the Gaudiya Vaishnava sampradaya, lineage, and then spoke:
This evening we are going to hold a marriage ceremony for three couples of our students. The Krishna consciousness movement is to understand, to always bear in mind, or always be in the consciousness that we are eternally related with the Supreme Personality of Godhead. So, the process is to utilize this human form of life for elevating oneself to the highest perfectional stage.
There is evolution of life from lowest animal in the water and up to the highest platform, or highest planetary life, where the duration of life is many, many millions of years. The highest planetary system is called Brahmaloka, or where the first created being, Brahma, lives.