Hari Sauri Recalls Srila Prabhupada Reuniting with Kaliya, New Vrindaban’s First Cow – June 28th, 1976
Srila Prabhupada meets Kaliya on the path to the New Vrindaban farmhouse.
Hari Sauri Recalls Srila Prabhupada Reuniting with Kaliya, New Vrindaban’s First Cow.
Hari Sauri’s diary: New Vrindaban, West Virginia 06-28-1976
This morning Kirtanananda Maharaja arrived in his pickup to drive Srila Prabhupada up to the original New Vrindaban farm where the community first started. Srila Prabhupada sat in the cab while devotees scrambled up into the back or ran up the trail after it. It was a long and bumpy drive up the dirt road, and afterward Srila Prabhupada complained about heart strain.
He had Kirtanananda stop some distance from the house and walked the rest of the way, accompanied by twenty or thirty devotees. The sun was just rising over the distant hills, its rays gently diffusing through the light morning mist. Prabhupada walked steadily up the track, preceeded by one of New Vrindaban’s four-legged residents, a large black cow.
At the house the rest of the devotees, including the gurukula children, lined up along the pathway to greet him. Prabhupada looked obviously content to return to the original house in which he had stayed in 1969 when he first came to New Vrindaban. Now it serves as the brahmacari asrama and the residence of the beautiful brass forms of Sri Sri Radha-Vrndavananatha. After his darsana of the Deities, Prabhupada gave class there at the house on Srimad-Bhagavatam 7.6.14.
Srila Prabhupada takes darshan of Sri Radha Vrindabannatha at the original New Vrindaban farmhouse, 1976.
His talk lasted only about fifteen minutes. The verse described how a man who is too attached to family life cannot understand that by such activities he is wasting his time. Indeed, he does not develop a distaste for material existence even though he undergoes three kinds of suffering.
Srila Prabhupada explained there are two classes of men, the bhogi, who is always trying to enjoy his mind and senses, and the yogi, who tries to give up his entanglement. Among the yogis, that person who engages in devotional service to Krsna is the best. He said that by yoga, one achieves siddhi, perfection.
As an example of yogic siddhi he cited something he had heard in his school days. “In my childhood there was my teacher. He said that he had his guru, a yogi. So he told me that his spiritual master, yogi, he inquired from his disciple, ‘What do you want to eat?’ So he said that ‘We want to eat some pomegranate from Kabul.’ So he said, ‘Yes, you can get it. Go into the room and you’ll find.’ So they found a bunch of pomegranate just fresh taken from the tree. This is called prapti-siddhi.” Of course, he told us, this kind of siddhi is material. It is not for the devotee, who alone can attain perfect satisfaction by surrender to Krsna.
At the conclusion of class Srila Prabhupada returned in the truck to the house for breakfast and a short rest.
