Most Revered and Most Beloved

My humble obeisances to all who are here in this conference. And, of course I would like to say that my most humble prostrated obeisances to the most divine, most revered His Divine Grace Śrīla Bhakti Ballabha Tīrtha Gosvāmī Mahārāja. When I say most revered, actually, 'most revered' while being formal, to some extent, is not how I actually feel. It does not actually convey the right feeling. I prefer to think in terms of the most beloved Śrīla Bhakti Ballabha Tīrtha Gosvāmī Mahārāja. 

Śrīla Bhakti Ballabha Tīrtha Gosvāmī Mahārāja is the very personification of divine wisdom and devotion. I have never met anybody who compares to Śrīla Gurudeva. His compassion and affection are seen towards his disciples, and not just to his disciples but to all the people he comes in contact with, all the fallen souls of this Kaliyuga. These qualities are superlative in Śrīla Gurudeva Bhakti Ballabha Tīrtha Gosvāmī Mahārāja. 

I had the extremely good fortune to meet him in 1980. A set of unusual circumstances made it so that a couple of days after arriving in Kolkata on my first trip to India I was guided to Śree Caitanya Gauḍīya Maṭha at 35 Satish Mukherjee Road. I say guided for good reason because I feel Their Lordships Śrī Śrī Rādhā Nayananātha took me there in order to meet Śrīla Gurudeva or it could be said (I am not sure which is the correct way to looking at it) that Śrīla Gurudeva took me, guided me to meet Their Lordships Śrī Śrī Rādhā Nayananātha. So, I am forever indebted to both these parties for taking me for this auspicious event in my life. 

And when I met Śrīla Gurudeva, I was led by a brahmacārī disciple of his by the name of Sudhāmā who I had met on the streets of Kolkata only a couple of days after having arrived there. He took me to meet Śrīla Gurudeva and he led me into a room which was at that time filled with senior Vaiṣṇava sannyāsīs; maybe there was a meeting going on. I was quite young at that time and I was certainly not very experienced or knowledgeable in Vaiṣṇava etiquette or even generally in transcendentalism. And I have to say entering that room that my first feeling was that I felt quite intimidated; I felt some trepidation. I realized that I was in the company of very stalwart, senior Vaiṣṇavas. I had the first glimpse of Śrīla Gurudeva and he was sitting at one end of the room,  on a mat and he motioned to me to come over. A mat was brought and I sat to the left of him. I was utterly tongue tied. I felt intimidated, not by Śrīla Gurudeva, but by the circumstances. 

At the same time, however, I felt that a desire of mine that drove me to go to India was being fulfilled right there and then. When I was planning my trip to India for the first time, I was thinking that because I had been initiated in the West by another great sādhu, Śrīla AC Bhaktivedānta Svāmī Prabhupāda, and he had left and joined the eternal lila of Śrī Śrī Rādhā Kṛṣṇa, I was thinking I need to find somebody or to follow on with that sort of instruction and that just generally that I wanted to hang on to and maintain and further what I had already gotten from my dīkṣā guru. So, even though we had not yet spoken, sitting there beside Śrīla Gurudeva, I knew that this was my desire was being fulfilled; that in fact, I was in the presence of a great sādhu. And unfortunately, I said something very stupid. As I had been brought to the temple by Sudhāmā Brahmacārī, we were trying to engage in conversation. His English was not great, my Bangla was almost non-existent. So, what I managed to get from him on the journey to the temple was that his Guru was temporarily residing at the maṭha and it was very lucky for me that he was there because normally he was following the sannyāsī custom and was always traveling from place to place, preaching. So, he said, "You are very lucky because he is here right now. Would you like to meet him?" And I said, "Of course, of course." 

So, the only thing I had really gotten out of the conversation was that I had been told that they had twenty-one maṭhas throughout India and so on. So, I was thinking about what to say to Gurudeva while sitting beside him, but I could not think of anything to say. I felt so dumb. And I sort of blurted out regretfully, "Sudhāmā tells me that you are the head of twenty-one maṭhas or temples throughout India. And he just looked at me. And for those of you who have had his contact you must truly empathize with what I am about to say. He smiled at me with that sort of bemused smile; a sort of a mixture of affection and amusement. It is hard to explain. But he looked at me in the eye without any hesitation and spontaneously he looked me in the eye and he said, "I am not the head of anything. I am the servant of twenty-one temples."

And at that moment what can I say? I fell in love with him. I thought I have not met anybody like this person before. There was just some quality of saintliness that was emanating from his person. And I felt humbled by his divine presence. There is nothing else to be said. I was completely humbled. There are no words to describe it really. But anyway I have known him since that time. If I am calculating correctly until he left this world and entered into the eternal pastimes of Śrī Śrī Rādhā Kṛṣṇa, I think I knew him for thirty-seven years or so. And he became not only my main source of instruction in the higher subject matter, that is to say, devotion to Śrī Śrī Rādhā Kṛṣṇa, but he became also like a family member. He initiated pretty much most of my family.

He is not gone, he is still here. As I said at the beginning,  I feel a mixture of reverence towards him as my primary spiritual instructor. But not only that, I began to and I still feel like he is like a family member, like a Grandfather to me. We became so close to him and then later on, this was amplified by the fact that to my surprise, I received a letter that he was going to come to the United States, which is where I was residing at that time, and that he was going to come to our house. Now, who am I? I am nobody. I am not only nobody, but I am extremely low nobody. And for such a person to come to my house was unimaginable, completely unthinkable. But there it was. He had actually written to me, I have a collection of letters, handwritten letters. 

Due to my career, which was rather bohemian, that is to say, I was a musician and had to move about from city to city quite often. He followed me with letters everywhere I went. He wanted to know about my welfare, he would offer instructions to keep me on the path of devotion to Lord Kṛṣṇa. If you look at those letters, the degree of concern and whatever the fact that he wrote those in the way that he did, it is unfathomable. So, to have him now coming to my house was unimaginable. 

I remember seeing him with his entourage coming into the airport in Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. I had the fantastic opportunity to assist him in his US tours and his UK tours and I am very grateful that he allowed me such a service and that he allowed me to do any kind of service at all. And I pray for the dust from his lotus feet on my head and that I may no matter what I am born as in the next life that I should always remember him. And finally, my last words are that I love him.

All the time in the world is not enough to glorify Śrīla Gurudeva.

—Akiñcana Prabhu (UK)

(Excerpted from Zoom meetings held on April 27- 28, 2024)