Pita Dasji's story - Page 2

Jagat · 08-15-2001, 02:44 AM

More experiences in Houston temple

Houston temple also had many nice festivals and we would hold them in the vacant lot on the side of the temple. The temple had acquired this huge pandal tent from India and hundreds of people would attend.

One year a group of devotee came and we put on the Ramayan play, which was very well done, indeed, really well done. I went to many places in the Indian community inviting everyone to please attend the Ramayan and many persons did come.

I even went to the Sikh Gurudwar and they were very surprised that I had come and that we were having Ramayan play. "You will have Ram Lila," they told me. "If it is true, every Sikh would want to come.” And they did.

I stayed at the Gurudwar for bhajans and prasad. In India we would often stay at the Sikh Gurudwars and the ladies would make chapattis for us. We would give them the flour and after a few moments a huge stack of fresh hot chapattis would appear.

With each festival I would print a small invitation with a picture of Lord Rama or Lord Krishna if it was Janmashtami time and mail them out to all the Indian members of the community, about five hundred or so flyers. It took a long while to do. I was doing this on the floor of the prasadam room while Tripurari and his book distributors, who were in town, were taking some prasad.

Tripurari just gave me this sneer like, what a worthless waste of time you are. He was only into book distribution at the time and that was it. Dealing with the Indian community wasn’t what he saw as important.

There was this nice life member named Prem who would always come about looking for me to tell his problems, of which he had a lot. His father was the former head of defense of India, he said, and his sister was to be married to a man from another family, also from high in the Indian government. The day of the wedding, the groom took his new wife into the temple of Goddess Durga and killed her in front of the deity. It was headline news for weeks, he told me. It was then that Prem left India and came to America

Prem would also come and tell me that an important person was in town and you should go to see him. The person was Swami Satchitanand not the yoga teacher known in America but the philosopher and big mayavadi preacher who lived in Bombay. His Divine Grace had taken many morning walks with him and also met him several times in Bombay. There are many tapes of their discussions in the archives. This Swamiji was also a top adviser to Indira Gandhi as she accepted him to be her guru. He was in Houston for heart by-pass surgery and so I accepted and went with one devotee Gopal Acharya prabhu to meet him and bring His Holiness garlands and prasad from Shree Shree Nitai Chaitanya Chandra.

He was just recovering and was able to walk a bit and stand up which he was when we came to the door of his room. “Maharaja,” I said, “We have come to see you because we heard that you are here in Houston and have just had such a serious surgery. We know you had a very nice friendship with Srila Prabhupada and have heard all of the discussion you had together over tape (actually these discussion were very heated debates, not friendly conversations). He was just overwhelmed that we had cared enough to come and visit him. He was all alone a stranger in a strange land and he just praised Srila Prabhupada to us of how he did such wonderful work in America and he told us, "You were previously all mad after drugs and now you are mad after Krishna.
Much better Krishna, so much better."

I knew this had been the right action, to have visited him, and I had Prem to thank for it. Krishna is sending us service all the time this time I was able to grasp some.
Then after a few weeks he told me His Holiness the Dalai Lama is also coming please go see him. I said, "No, no interest. He's an atheist. We have no business with him."

But I should have gone. That was one I didn't grasp. Prem though did but it was only as he passed by a friendly pranams.

There was a small office on the ground floor of the temple and we used this to speak privately with people when they wanted I became like the man there on call all the time. And we always had prasad to offer all the guests a full meal if they liked.
One young couple would visit for lunch everyday and gradually they both became full time devotees and are still there today: Pandava Vijaya and his very charming and sweet wife Sakuntala.

Hridayananda Maharaja would visit often and we would usually find him at the university giving some talk and go to meet him and bring him to the temple.
The GBC leader asked one day, "What does Hridayananda Maharaja eat when he comes here?"

"Oh just temple prasad like all of us."

"Really? He only eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches everywhere else. He says the peanut is the dal, the bread is the chapatti, and the jelly is the chutney. It’s best he isn’t encouraged to come so much."

This was a new policy: there were to be no gurus in the temple when he wasn’t around. I don’t remember Hridayananda coming back after that.

In Houston I also helped Mukunda Datta with the deities and for a period was doing almost all of their service. Shree Shree Nitai Chaitanya Chandra are about four feet tall and have golden metal bodies. In the morning bathing them it was especially sweet, as we would make a paste of gopichandan clay and lemon juice to polish them. Appling the clay to their transcendental bodies was one of the sweetest memories of that time.
I learned all the prayers for waking their Lordships offering them their articles of worship and the morning puja procures.

I learned different mudras for beginning the worship and the proper purifications one performs in their worship and I preformed all of their aratis and cooked many of their offerings in between seeing guests coming to the temple.

We also met with all the new age people in Houston at the time. Elizabeth Claire Prophet was preaching in Houston in those days. Now she has a big following. We went and hear her speak and saw that she was teaching prayers to Shiva and Christ all mixed together. I felt she had some influences from Yogananda's Self Realization Fellowship group, which she seemed to be copying. All of her teachings were based on the authority of the ascended masters and very vague.

One older lady who was a regular visitor took me and asked me what are they talking about? They don’t have a clear conception because they have the wrong authorities.
I felt thankful studying Bhagavad Gita and Srimad Bhagavatam and to be connected to Srila Prabhupada and their Lordships.

Surabhi Swami came from India and joined our zone for a time, which I was surprised to see. I went to Austin and saw him there. The temple had opened this very nice restaurant. I asked Surabhi why he had come, remembering that his last words to the GBC were not so sweet. He told me, "I thought of who was the person I disliked the most of all my godbrothers and it was him. So I decided to come and understand why and deal with it. Maybe I can change my feelings about him."

After about a year’s time I remember seeing that our leader was also the GBC for China and Hong Kong jointly with Guru Kripa Swami, so I asked him what are you planning to do in China and Hong Kong and his statement was "absolutely nothing.” He gave me a look like he didn’t want to discuss it further.

Janardan had built him very nice rooms in the temple and he was very angry at first. "You did this without telling me? Spending so much money!" He soon liked them very much, though. He would hold his darshans in these rooms, but would complain, "Now if I want to stop talking, I can’t. It isn’t easy to get the people out when I want to stop. They would always corner Srila Prabhupada like this!"

He had his own view of Srila Prabhupada and it wasn’t the view I had. Over the years I just had to get away from him as he would always try to present his perception of Srila Prabhupada to me as the only one. I found his purport of Srila Prabhupada to be a very sour one.

"There are two versions of Srila Prabhupada," He would tell me. "The one within his books and the one I saw before me. The Srila Prabhupada within the books was a more less strict Prabhupada and the one I knew was very hard, very strict.” I would think, “On you, maybe. His Divine Grace was not hard on every one.”

Of course, I didn’t say anything aloud, as one was never able to disagree with this leader. If one had some thing to say to him, it had to be sent in a letter, to which he would always reply. Verbally, it was impossible and that’s the way he wanted it. In writing, he was very nice but in person he was hard and strict just as his perception of Srila Prabhupada had been. This was my perception of him.

"Keep them sleep-deprived; it makes them humble," was another one of his lines.
If some one challenged him, he would respect him, praise him to others, and then have him thrown out some way or other. After Surabhi left his zone, he told me that one day this person told him, "I am expert at seeing a person’s weakness and psychologically breaking that person down, bit by bit." Surabhi answered, "But the problem is, after you break them down you don’t know how to put them back together again!"

We thought then Maharaja is so strict we must be good to please him and Srila Prabhupada. Then he said to reduce the cost in the zone there should be no more flying back and forth to Houston and Dallas we were to only drive. It was a 20$ flight then. The next time he came to Houston, he had brought a mobile home for himself to travel back and forth in, not a ordinary one either, a top of the line version called a Bart which the devotees called the Mahabharata.

He then kept changing his name. I want all the devotees to call me Goswami Maharaj. That lasted six months and after that it was “Srila Goswami” for another six months and then after that it was Srila Gurudeva, which I’m sure he’s still using.

He had a photo made of himself in Jaipur on a lawn He and Bhagavan who did the same thing and from this photo he had printed hundreds of posters with his new name under it. It was to be his official guru poster.

One very well-known British devotee who had been away from temple life for a few years had come to Houston. It’s best not to mention his name. It seemed that Janardan didn’t have anything to give this person to do at the time as so he was given the same service as I was engaged in. He had been in England and was one of the first devotees there at the time. And he told me stories of meeting John Lennon and how puffed up a person he was. He was an egomaniac. He was also friends with Laxmi Shankar the sister of Ravi Shankar and he was calling her asking her to come to Houston to sing and offer the money to the temple which would be a very good help for our small place. I tried to assist him but it wasn’t working out so well so I requested Janardan to be sent up to St Louis temple after some time.

Janardan left the temple and went west before I left and without him there it wasn’t the same mood any more so I was happy to move on. After 1980, about April, I remember we did return and Ill tell that part as it comes up. What I am telling is just as I remember the time passing this is what I observed

More experiences in St Louis temple

The time that I arrived in St Louis temple I remember very well as it was 1980 we saw the new year in there. I was engaged in cooking with Chota Hari Das. I would also drive many hours alone into Kansas and Nebraska bringing books to the sankirtan devotees on the road.

We learned to cook all kinds of milk sweets as then Their Lordships Nitai Gaura Nataraja were of many, many different kinds: srea, amrita, rubbery, srikan, burfy, sandesh, rasagula, gulub daily. These milk sweets took a very long time to prepare. Chota Hari Das prabhu was expert at all of them but as time went along he taught them to me also.

The leader came to the temple New Year’s Day and the devotees all had this fear that a world war would come sooner or latter. He spoke about this to us about this when he came Its 1980 the war will come soon we must be prepared. There was this big kirtan when he arrived and we were all chanting his name as if he was His Divine Grace himself to assist in the continuing the movement into the future as if the departure of His Divine Grace hadn't slowed us down in the slightest.

In the temple there was Dasarathsuta who was president and Gopijanavallabha who was to arrive with Surabhi Swami Maha Mantra Prabhu was also there from the old Radha Damodar Party; we had been new bhaktas together. Maha Mantra was our pujari always hardly sleeping he would fall asleep as he made the Lords Offering.
"Hey Maha, wake up." "He fell asleep again we would hear often. Then Maha dropped Lord Nitai today during the bathing!

Maha was the kind of a prabhu who had this baby face and he would fold his hands and hang his head low sorry Maharaja. Maha Mantra was very pure he had no sensual desires it seemed he has always remained brahmachari still I have heard he is engaged in India today I last saw him in Bombay temple.

The GBC leader and guru had the top floor of the temple for his quarters and there was this very nice brahmachari Gatpuka tending to the small Radha Damodara diets that the leader had found on Juhu beach. Gatpuka was also on our Radha Damodar TSKP and we were also new bhaktas together.

The deities he was taking care which the leader had found were just over two inches high. He was doing this in the leaders’ room. One day we heard that Gatpuka had also dropped Radharani day during Their worship and he was just gone. I mean this person just disappeared. We never saw him again. When I mentioned to the leader what had happened to Gatpuka, he would just grumble he was a fool. What happened to him and how he left we never knew.

Then this very strange philosophy was presented to us at morning class. I was within the temple kitchen making the milk sweets like every day and we were listening to the class over the loud speakers in the kitchen. Gopijanavallabha Swami was speaking.
The class went something like this:

"We all are thinking that we have some kind of relationship with Srila Prabhupada but how much actually time did we ever spend with His Divine Grace? As we really haven’t had any association directly with Srila Prabhupada, we really cannot say we have any relationship with him. This relationship is all in our imagination. Only those devotees that have spent time with Srila Prabhupada have real relationships. Here, the person who had spent the most time with Srila Prabhupada, even becoming his last secretary, is our leader. He is therefore the only one of us that has the relationship. If we want to have a relationship with Srila Prabhupada, it can only be made through the relationship we have with him.”

This class was of course a lot more detailed. It went on for forty minutes or so, but this was the subject. As I was listening to this lecture, I turned to Chota and said, “This is really bogus, really off. What kind of nonsense is this? As if the relationship to the Spiritual Master had to be physical? If this were true, then Srila Prabhupada also had no relationship with his Guru Maharaj.” As we all knew Srila Prabhupada personally only met Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati a few brief times. We were quite surprised to hear Gopijanavallabha speaking like this. Just another class, I thought, and I didn’t think much of it. My mind was on the milk sweets we were preparing.

We were still in the kitchen through prasad and as the temple geared more into their daily schedule Then Gopijanavallabha came into the kitchen. I noticed he had shaved his head very closely and had left razor marks on his scalp. He then took a van from the back parking lot behind the temple, which we could see from the kitchen windows.

Maharaja didn’t come back after that class. Most of knew what he did. After a few days, our leader told us this person wouldn’t have blooped; he must be dead. And that’s what had happened. He was found in a lake it was winter and he had shot himself. There was no inquiry from ISKCON. No one asked anyone any questions and I seem to be the only one that still remembers what happened then. It is never spoken of?

Gopi and Surabhi had been traveling together by that time. There were sales going with these records, which was a pure scam to make money and Gopi was put into leading this with Surabhi. It was said that he was waking up late and was in Maya, so he did this to himself. That was the full explanation from the older devotees about him. Now telling this story, one wonders why anyone would stay in such a situation.

First, ISKCON is Srila Prabhupada, His Divine Grace’s, body. Somehow we had to make it work.

Second, we were penniless and surrendered to making it work.

Thirdly, we depended on Krishna to intervene and help us.

Fourthly, we were still overlooking what Gopijanavallabha had been speaking about that morning, which had actually been the leaders demands. It hadn’t sunk in yet. We didn’t understand that it was the new policy.

In the next few months in Chicago, he would be sent away from his zone and asked to stay in Shree Dham Mayapur as he was also saying the same things to all of his godbrothers even his guru godbrothers.
He was the acharya whom had the relationship with Srila Prabhupada and everyone else were to follow him.

By this time I had been transferred to the Chicago temple and we helped all the older devotees coming in get places and rooms to stay in the new temple there. It was a big powwow with all the big gun devotees as they were called then. H.H. Satsvarupa, Bhavananda, Jayapataka Swami, Kirtanananda, Bhagavan and a few others.

Their meetings were all very closed, but when I brought them prasad they had finished up and were having kirtan with arms upraised. They vowed to make ISKCON the way it was when Srila Prabhupada had first begun it. They concluded that that leader could not initiate any more. Bhagavan took over his zone and the leader left. This only lasted a few weeks, though, and he and I were soon back in Houston again.

We actually liked that leader personally. He was hard but at the same time could be very gentlemanly with a wry sense of humor. He was very, very good at speaking basic Krishna Consciousness and was able to get completely new people to join the temple almost after the first meeting. No one was as expert at speaking to the Indian people as he was and for these many reasons we saw him as spiritually strong person. He is highly intelligent and can impress so many by his appearance and manners in public.

We were told that many leaders in the GM expected him to be Srila Prabhupada’s successor. He never chanted with the devotees, however, and after some time I was to understand he actually didn’t chant the holy name very much -- a few rounds, very few. He would be sitting at his desk in his room, and when we came in we would see him grab his bead bag and chant for a few moments before he started talking.

When he came back to Houston, it was to be only for a short while as the GBC had ordered him to go to China. He asked me one day, “Are you still interested in doing service in Hong Kong?”

I told him “Ever since I met you, I have always just requested that we have a very close relationship. (as I was thinking he had with Srila Prabhupada.) I would be very interested to go there.” Then he said he wasn’t sure yet. Maybe I could go to Fiji Islands or maybe to Hong Kong. Then he left, for Fiji I think, and he mailed me a letter from there, telling me to grow my hair and prepare to go to Hong Kong. I still have this letter with me.

But it would still be a few months as he would be also going to Taiwan and Korea.
I suggested that to understand the Asian people a bit, we should start free English classes in the temple for the Asian community. I also arranged by placing ads in Korean newspapers in Houston for translators to prepare some small books of Srila Prabhupada to be translated, but he rejected these translators.

There were a few Vietnamese boys visiting the temple then one nice man name Tran
With Tran’s help we had over a hundred persons all sign up for the classes and we were holding English Classes for them each night in the prasad room. When this leader returned he was really surprised that we had gotten so many Asians to come.
They were just there for the English classes and so he told me we must at least get them to chant in kirtan, which to my surprise they all agreed and very happily chanted along.

The Vietnamese people were not so much inclined to these classes and dropped out very quickly, but the Chinese all stayed and they were the ones we were trying to get to know any way so it worked out very well. With the friendships I made in these classes these friends helped us when we set up our temple in Taipei a few years later.
One lady’s husband, Mr Wu Gou Ming, was a police officer in charge of the harbor in Keelong outside of Taipei. One day he came and really helped us when we had a very dangerous situation.

Then one night, this very nice devotee Maha Shakti was visiting the temple and I was putting the deities to rest when I received a phone call. It was from an Indian lady and she told us that her husband was near to death and could we please come to the hospital to see him. Maha Shakti Prabhu agreed to assist me and I took the Tulasi leaves that had been placed on the Lord’s lotus feet and charanamrita water and a garland from their Lordships and a picture of Gopal Krishna with us to the hospital.

When we saw the man, he was in coma and had the look of a man overwhelmed with the strength of the illness and he seemed to be really just about to leave his body.
I wet the dried sandalwood paste on tulasi leaf and placed her on his head as I had seen done for His Divine Grace. Then we placed the garland from the deities around his head and poured the charanamrita water into his mouth and placed Shree Gopal Krishna’s picture over his head. As soon as this was done the nurse ran up to us and said something about infections and told us we must take off the garland.

Oh, I was thinking, this poor man is really cursed. But thankfully she didn’t have us remove the tulasi leaf from his head. The nurse made us cut our visit short and so we left commenting that we had rarely ever seen a person as close to death as he.
After about a week I was again working on the altar when another call came in and wasn’t able to take it. The message was from the same woman who told us that the man had passed away and would we please come to their home for kirtan.

This time Mukunda Datta and I went there and we had kirtan and then I spoke to the family from the second chapter of Bhagavad Gita on how the soul is eternal and we must not lament after the soul leaves the body.

They just sat and listened to me until I had preached to them for at least thirty minutes when they said, “But prabhu, our father isn’t dead yet!”

“What? I was told that he had passed away. I’m so very sorry please forgive me!"
“No. He is still in coma. We have asked you here to pray for him.” There were tears and ladies crying. I wanted to crawl under the floor. It was my life’s most embarassing moment

They then wanted us to eat the food they had prepared and they told us that they were all meat eaters but since their father’s illness the whole family had given up all meat and had vowed never to eat meat again. Knowing that there must be a lot of karma in that food I still took as much as I could for them and so did Mukunda Dutta. They then offered us new cloth and we left.

That night while putting the Lord to rest I looked at them and requested Them, "My dear Lord Nitai Chaitanya Chandra! Your Lordships know what has happened tonight. If You wish, could You please save that man.”

I left Houston a few days later and went to Hong Kong, but I heard from Mukunda Maharaja that the man very shortly recovered completely from his illness. When he awoke, he wanted to eat meat again, but the family forbad him. They told him that it was a miracle he lived and that they would never eat meat again. They then placed Shree Gopal Krishna in their home as the house deity. Mukunda placed it in the ISKCON World Review and sent me the copy in Hong Kong.

Gauracandra · 09-16-2001, 03:40 AM

Jagat,

Any further additions to this narrative? I was finding it very interesting.

Gauracandra

amanpeter · 09-16-2001, 06:27 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Gauracandra:
Jagat,

Any further additions to this narrative? I was finding it very interesting.

Gauracandra

Yes, where is our friend Pita das???

Pita das · 09-19-2001, 09:26 AM

Hare Krishna Prabhujis
Im here my mother is close to death at the moment so my mind is on other things right now Ill continue as soon as I can understand how to enter again into the Dharma Mela

valaya · 09-19-2001, 10:56 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Pita das:
Hare Krishna Prabhujis
Im here my mother is close to death at the moment so my mind is on other things right now Ill continue as soon as I can understand how to enter again into the Dharma Mela

Haribol Pita das prabhu! Sorry to hear about your mother's health. Hope the international situation is not causing you problems. Please be careful, it will probably get much worse. For entry to Dharma-mela, Email Jahnava@aabc.com and She'll send you a password with instructions. valaya

Gauracandra · 09-19-2001, 04:14 PM

Pita,

I'm sorry to hear about your mother's health but it is good that you are there helping her. I'm wishing you the best and all strength. Take care.

Gauracandra

09-19-2001, 04:20 PM

Pita prabhuji,

Dandavat pranams. All Glories to Srila Prabhupada! Please forgive my macabre humor.

Godspeed.

bb

Pita das · 01-21-2002, 03:13 AM

Arriveing in Hong Kong
One day when our GBC leader was on a quick visit to Houston temple he asked me."Do you still want to go to Hong Kong?"
I had asked him before what was he doing there as he was co GBC with Guru Kripa and he had told me then "Nothing" sence he had been exciled from Houston for the long term then and Bhagavan was the acting GBC he had been ordered to make only Eastern Asia his home and Figi Islands.
He said he wasnt sure if I would be sent to HK or Figi but within afew weeks I recieved a letter for me to start collecting for my ticket to HK.
His new zone was all of China Hong Kong Philipines Taiwan and Korea.
Hamsadutta was also still in the Philippines as GBC but like him was also censured by the main GBC body that was late 1980 .
When I arrived in Hong Kong I was thinking as I flew in over the endless mildewed houseing estates that it was alot like I had imagzined it would be, mass humanity crushed together.
I was meet by my godbrother Ramasuran Prabhu who had been with us on the Indian BBT libary party and also in Houston temple.
The airport was a makesift one at best in tho days the main and only runway was on reclaimed land jetting into the harbour and the building airport small and only partially air conditioned ,in to that waiting room The frist blast of the hot ,humid, noisy and very strangly odered aromas that is Hong Kong hit me.
Very jet lagged and very thankful to be met at the airport by a familar face we made way out to the temple "uuuump ho man tin guy" Ram told the taxi driver in the local lanuage which mean 5 Ho Man Tin street "UMMM Goy "for thank you.
Then in front of this light green apartment house we stopped and Ram annouched "were here"
I think it was on the 8th floor where the temple had two apartments.
One was the temple and ashram and one was the offices of Jitarati Prabhu a Canadian devottee that had been in HK for a very long time even then.
Jitarati was an importer and exporter of jewerly clasps most to the Philippines where he single handedly surported both missions HK and the two temples in the Philippines with the profits from his business.
Opon entering the same living room of the temple apartment there was a full sized Vasyasana with Hamsaduttas picture opon it and a small chest of drawers with a small murti of Srila Prabhupada .
At Srila Prabhupadas Lotus feet were these very highly fragrant ginger flowers which gave off a frangance simular to gardinas but even stronger.
The altar was a poster of Pancha Tattva behind a curtian with a wooden self beneath
for holding the arotik trays and vases of flowers.
The temple apartment was a 3 room flat with a small kicthen and one and a half bathrooms with the half never being used as iits distance from the Lords kicthen was only a matter of feet.
That became the storage room.
One room was for the GBC leader and one was the brahmacari ashram both were 10x10 feet no more and an even smaller room was the temple office.
The one bathroom was shared by all
Here it is Ram told me, home.
Back Home Back to Godhead by was of Hong Kong???!!!!
After some time I made it over to the other apartment saw one very meek thin and heavly specticaled chinese fellow siiting behind a desk and this was Sriman Yasomati Suta Prabhu ,Srila Prabhupadas Chinese translator threw Yaso the Chinese would hear Srila Prabhupadas discribtions of Lord Chaitanyas Advent.
Hare Krishna Yaso greeted me ,with All Glories to Srila Parbhupada and please acceapt my humble obeisances ,all spoken in his very good English with heavy HK Cantonese accents
I was very pleased to met Yaso and he was very happy something was finally going to happen in HK for our movement.
Yaso had almost finished the trnslation of the Bhagavat Gita" As It is" and this was almost ready to be sent for the printing.
Yaso had been working alone on the Gita for afew years he told me while still working a job as accountant.
I assured him that very soon the BBT would be able to engage him full time and he hoped it was to be true.
All Yaso ever seemed to want was to be lefted alone to translate and a little money to send to his son.
There was absoultly nothing to do but become accustomed to this very uncomfortable close and exterely loud enviroment.
Together tho Ram, Yaso and I followed our useual ISKCON program of Mongal arotika at here tho it began at 5 am and chanting our rounds ,Srimate Bhagavatum class and Guru pujas .
We were informed to have another Vasyasana made for the leading GBC to be placed next to Hamsaduttas one and Im not sure if in those days if there were 3 guru pujas or 2 or if they were all done at the same time????
One travelling devottee once sang a song "3 gurus carana padma" when he came and saw our crazy set up. But thats was the was it was, what can I say.?that living room was no more that 10 feet by 15 feet.With the vasyasanas taking up at least a third of the room.
There was one other devottee in Hong Kong then named Tota Gopinath who lived in his office which brought oil paintings and supplied Hamsaduttas temples Tota tho only visited the temple sometimes to pay respects to Hamsaduttas shrine on his vasyasana and one other Chinese Devottee from mainland China Jagat Guru a former red guard
Jagat Gurus story was a very colorful one
he had join in the Great Prolitarian Cultural Revoultion as one of the Red Guards of Chairman Mao when he was about 14 years old.
He told me that for ten years in Guangzhou (a large southern city capital of Guandong Provience north of Hk by about 60 miles)he never saw a street light without a body hanging from it, upsidedown with a sign attached to it and a stick under it ,the sign saying "beat this person because he is the enemy of the people"
"After about an hour the people would all die anyway no matter if they were beaten or not".Jagat Guru would say noncalantly.
In those days I always carried a gun and it was my ticket for what ever I wanted.If some one would ask me to pay for something I would pull my gun and say here my money want it?
Many times my friends would come to my house and tell me come with us tonight because we are going to this christian chruch burn it down and stuggle the priests
and i would go.
Then they came and said they wanted to do the same to the Buddhists temples but this I would refuse.
I would never harm a Buddhist temple and so Jagat Guru lead his life for 10 years but as the Cultural Revoution began to turn against even the Red Guards he fled China for HK.
"My older brother and I decided to try to swim to Macau "( a portaguese colony then) off the cost of China just below HK.
Jagat Gurus brother after a short time gave up and swam back but he had no choice but to continue on.
Maybe this is a five to ten mile swim?
"As I swam the fog became thick and I didnt know where I was swimming to?"
"Out to sea ,back to China????"
"so I stopped and from my childhood I remenbered a Daoist Mantra my Mother would chant when I was a child I chanted this mantra and when a short time the fog lifted and I saw it was just a short swims away to Macau."
"When I got to Macau I saw this monk walking about and it was Hamsadutta and I asked him to become my Guru and here I amn
Im so sorry about my life before Prabhu
I have nightmare every night still" he would say.
Jagad Guru Prabhu soon started to work with Jitarati in his office and I have no doubt hes still with him today.
Everytime I see Jitrati I ask him hows Jagat Guru and he always says the same.
Jagat Gurus brother latter also became a devottee and has helped in the changeing of the tradition Chinese character Traditions which are used in Hong Kong Taiwan and Singapore Malaysia into the simplified Chinese Character used inside China

Gauracandra · 01-21-2002, 06:21 PM

Its good to see you posting your journal again. I know I've looked forward to the next installments.

Gauracandra

Pita das · 01-22-2002, 05:56 AM

After some time Our GBC leader arrived in HK basically he is good assoication haveing so much time with Srila Prabhupada he was often relating tales of his time with His Divine Grace this we all apreicated so much.
In HK he was also very expert at understanding how to go and get our society reregestered as a tax free religious instution.This he did at once.
Then one day he asked us to print a fyer which we handed out to the mass hores of people flowing on all the streets of HK with 3 question on it.
1) Why if I want to be happy I can not always be?
2) Why do I have to acceapt suffering?
3) How can I always be free to enjoy my life fully?
for answers to these question please come to 5 homantin street 8fl apt A
Im not actually sure if these were the actual questions but they were certianly alone these lines.
To our great surprise this small action started the Chinese comming to the temple.
So many came in fact that we soon started a lunch program and many young men and ladies would come each day some latter becomming devottees.
This lunch program has now turned into a regular preaching tool of HK temple still today they are doing.
For drawing in new people our GBC leader was expert his draw back has always been maintianing long term relationships this he has many draw backs with.
The frist young boy to join the temple was
to be named Hauman.
His mother was very opposed to him taking to vegetarian diet and visiting us so much.
So she went to see a fortune teller for advice
As soon as she entered the fortune tellers shop they told her .Your son wants to be a monk!In his last life he was a beggar and crippled on the streets.
If you stop him his next life he will also be a beggar and cripple.
Bang from that moment on she had no oppostion and actually cooked for him compeltly vegetarian meals until he moved into the temple full time.
As Hamsadutta was also in the general of the Philippines he came one day for a short visit.
When one personally meets Hamsadutta they have to like him he is a very carismatic magnetic personality to say the least.
When he came a group of his men came with him and as he lefted they stayed on.
It seemed they were there to compelte with us at getting the new men from our lunch programs to take iniation from Hamdadutta.
As petty as it seems now that was thier program.
It didnt last long tho as Hamsudutta left HK to go to Mayapur and hear from His Divine Grace Srila Sridhar Maharaja who at that time was assiting and giving advice to the whole GBC body.
Srila Sridhar Maharaja told the GBC that what Srila Prabhupada had put in place namely allowing Hamsdutta to iniate disclips they could not change and so he was reinstated.
When our leader heard this news he also ran to Mayapur for the same purpose thus returning to Hong Kong with his whole USA zone back saying that Srila Sidhar Maharaja was the greatest living Vasihnava on the planet.
Our men that he is giving Sanyasas to are bonified sanyasasis he said and our Society has to learn to understand how to accomendate this.
As he lefted for Mayapur just before he asked me to go with him to the printers.
Bhagavat Gita in Chinese was about to go to press.
I had no idea of why I was asked to accompany him and they talks he had with the printer I wasnt really paying much attention to.
As he was leaving tho he told me I had to oversee the printing?
Which we did and on the appearence day of Srila Bhaktisiddanta Sarawati Prabhupada I spent the entire day watching the Gita pages roll off the press.
I was only told that if I wasnt there they would speed up the presses and the printing would suffer so I would set and watch and some times check the pages to see the regestration was clear in the clor work of the printing.
Our next goal was how to get the Bhagavat Gita into China which the printer told us he could help with but into those days it was almost impossible.

Jagat · 01-22-2002, 10:21 AM

Arriving in Hong Kong

One day, when our GBC leader was on a quick visit to Houston temple, he asked me, “Do you still want to go to Hong Kong?"

I had previously asked him what he was doing there, as he had been made co-GBC of Hong Kong with Guru Kripa. He had then told me "Nothing." In the meantime, however, he had been exiled from Houston, where Bhagavan was now the acting GBC, and ordered to make his home exclusively in eastern Asia and the Fiji Islands. He told me he wasn’t sure if I would be sent to Hong Kong or Fiji, but within a few weeks I received a letter telling me to start collecting for a ticket to Hong Kong.

Our GBC leader’s new zone was all of China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan and Korea. Hamsaduta was also still in the Philippines as GBC, but he too had been censured by the main GBC body. That was late 1980.

When I arrived in Hong Kong, as I flew in over the endless mildewed housing estates, I was thinking that it was a lot like I had imagined it would be, a mass of humanity crushed together. The airport was a makeshift one at best in those days. The main and only runway was on reclaimed land jutting out into the harbor and the airport building was small and only partially air-conditioned. As I walked into that waiting room, I was hit by the first blast of the hot, humid, noisy and very strongly odored Hong Kong air.

I was met by at the airport my godbrother Ramasuran Prabhu, who had been with us on the Indian BBT library party and also in Houston temple. Being very jet lagged, I was thankful to see a familiar face. Ram told the taxi driver "uuuump ho man tin guy" in the local language, which mean 5 Ho Man Tin Street, and "ummm goy" for thank you. We made way to the temple, stopping in front of a light green apartment house, and Ram announced, "We’re here."

I think it was on the 8th floor where the temple had two apartments. One was the temple and ashram, the other contained the offices of Jitarati Prabhu, a Canadian devotee who had already been in Hong Kong for a very long time. Jitarati was an importer and exporter of jewellery clasps, mostly to the Philippines. With the profits from his business he single-handedly supported both missions, the one in Hong Kong and the two temples in the Philippines.

Upon entering the living room of the temple apartment, I saw a full sized Vyasasan with Hamsaduta's picture on it and a small chest of drawers with a small murti of Srila Prabhupada. At Srila Prabhupada’s lotus feet were these very highly fragrant ginger flowers, which gave off a fragrance, similar to gardenias, but even stronger. The altar was a poster of the Pancha Tattva behind a curtain with a wooden shelf beneath it to hold the arati trays and vases of flowers.

The temple apartment was a three room flat with a small kitchen and one and a half bathrooms, with the half never being used as its distance from the Lord’s kitchen was only a matter of feet. It was thus used as a storage room. One room was for the GBC leader and another was the brahmachari ashram. Both of these were 10x10 feet, no more. The temple office was in an even smaller room. The one bathroom was shared by all.

“Here it is,” Ram told me, “home. Back to home, back to Godhead by way of Hong Kong!”

After some time, I made it over to the other apartment where I saw one very meek, thin and heavily spectacled Chinese fellow sitting behind a desk. This was Sriman Yasomati Suta Prabhu, Srila Prabhupada’s Chinese translator. Through Yaso, the Chinese people would hear Srila Prabhupada’s descriptions of Lord Chaitanya’s advent.

“Hare Krishna!” Yaso greeted me with “All glories to Srila Prabhupada! Please accept my humble obeisances!” all spoken in very good English with a heavy Hong Kong Cantonese accent. I was very pleased to meet Yaso and he was very happy something was finally going to happen for our movement in Hong Kong. Yaso had almost finished the translation of the Bhagavad Gita "As It Is" and it was almost ready to be sent to the printer. Yaso told me that he had been working for a few years alone on the Gita while still working as accountant. I assured him that very soon the BBT would be able to engage him full time and he hoped it was to be true. All Yaso ever seemed to want was to be left alone to translate and to be able to send a little money to his son.

We had no choice but to become accustomed to this very uncomfortably close and extremely loud environment. Ram, Yaso and I followed our usual ISKCON program of Mangala Arati, though here it began at 5 a.m., chanting our rounds, hearing Srimad Bhagavatam class and Guru Puja.

We were told to have another Vyasasan made for our GBC leader to be placed next to Hamsaduta’s. I’m not sure if there were three guru pujas or two in those days, or if they were all done at the same time. One travelling devotee once sang a song, "Three gurus' charana padma" when he came and saw our crazy set up. But that’s was the way it was, what can I say? Our temple room was no bigger than 10 feet by 15 feet, with the vyasasanas taking up at least a third of the room!

There was another devotee in Hong Kong at the time, whose name was Tota Gopinath. He lived in his office and brought oil paintings and supplied Hamsaduta’s temples. Tota only visited the temple occasionally to pay respects to Hamsaduta’s shrine on his Vyasasan.

Another Chinese devotee from mainland China was Jagat Guru Das, a former Red Guard. Jagat Guru’s story was a very colorful one. This is how he told it:

“When I was about fourteen years old, I joined the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the Red Guards of Chairman Mao. For about ten years in Guangzhou (a large southern city capital of Guandong Province north of Hong Kong by about sixty miles), I never saw a street light without a body hanging from it upside down, with a sign attached to it and a stick under it. The sign would read, "Beat this person because he is the enemy of the people" After about an hour these people would die anyway whether they were beaten or not. (Jagat Guru recounted all these grisly details nonchalantly.)

“In those days, I always carried a gun and it was my ticket for whatever I wanted. If anyone asked me to pay for something, I would pull out my gun and say, “Here my money. Want it?”

“Many times my friends came to my house and said, “Come with us tonight because we are going to this Christian church to burn it down and strangle the priests.” I would go with them. Then they came and said they wanted to do the same to the Buddhist temples, but I refused. I would never harm a Buddhist temple.”

Jagat Guru led his life in this way for ten years, but when the Cultural Revolution began to turn against even the Red Guards, he fled China for Hong Kong. His older brother and he decided to try to swim to Macau (then still a Portuguese colony) off the cost of China just below Hong Kong. His brother gave up after a short time and swam back, but Jagat Guru had no choice but to continue on, crossing the body of water that is maybe five to ten mile wide.

"As I swam, the fog became thick and I didn’t know where I was swimming to, out to sea or back to China. I stopped and I remembered a Daoist mantra my mother would chant to me when I was a child. I chanted this mantra and when a short time the fog lifted and I saw that Macau was just a short swim away.

"When I got to Macau I saw a monk walking about. It was Hamsaduta. I asked him to become my Guru and here I am. I am so sorry about my life before I met my Prabhu that I still have nightmares every night."

Jagad Guru Prabhu soon started to work with Jitarati in his office and I have no doubt that he is still with him today. Every time I see Jitarati I ask him how Jagat Guru is doing and he always says, “the same.” Later on, Jagat Guru’s brother also became a devotee and helped in the adoption of Chinese character reform in Hong Kong. [Mainland China started a simplification of the characters used in writing Chinese in 1951. In Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, the traditional characters were still being used. (See http://www.advancelit.com/albase/characters.htm .)]

After some time, our GBC leader arrived in Hong Kong. He was basically good association, due to having spent so much time with Srila Prabhupada. He often related tales of his experiences with His Divine Grace, which we all appreciated so much. In Hong Kong, he was also very expert at understanding how to go and get our society re-registered as a tax-free religious institution, which he did at once.

One day he asked us to print a flyer, which we handed out to the hordes of people flowing on all the streets of Hong Kong. It had three questions on it: 1) Why can’t I always be happy, when that is what I want? 2) Why do I have to accept suffering? 3) How can I always be free to enjoy my life fully? For answers to these questions, please come to 5 Ho Man Tin Street, 8th floor, apt A. I’m not actually sure if these were the actual questions, but they were certainly along these lines.

To our great surprise this small action started the Chinese coming to our temple. So many came, in fact, that we soon started a lunch program and many young men and ladies would come each day, some of whom later became devotees. This lunch progra