
SPIRITUAL STRATEGIES FOR THE AGE OF IRON

The freezing wind blasting off the river becomes merciless when funneled
between the wals of the city's chartered canyons. The wind hurtles a birdshot
of cinder and sleet; it sends trash skimming over the icy pavement and lifts it
in sudden dizzying spirals high up the face of the blank, impassive towers.
A dull unending roar, as though the buildings moaned under a drugged sleep,
fills the chasms. This most densely crowded city of America is also its most
desolate waste, and nothing seems more inhospitable to man than the world where
everything is man-made. This is New York, in the grip of an iron winter, in the
middle of an iron age.

We see now a figure making its way along the bottom of one of the empty
iron-rimmed abysses. Leaning forward into the wind, a cane in his left hand, he
moves steadfastly on. Look at him closely: the saffron robes of an Indian
mendicant priest flap below his overcoat, and his forehead bears the parallel
clay lines of the devotee of Krsna. His face has an expression both indomitable
and serene, as though he were not really walking this bitter wasteland, and
indeed he appears so out of place here that a magnolia tree in full fragrant
bloom on these hard and frigid streets would seem no less incongruous. This is
Srila Prabhupada in the winter of 1966. He is alone; he has no money; and he is
seventy years old. His small figure is dwarfed by the towers in icy reserve,
whose stern, impervious faces turn all human effort on the streets below into
tableaux of defeat. But Srila Prabhupada's effort is not merely human, and the
seed he brings with him from another world does indeed incredibly, miraculously
take root in this barren and uninviting soil and flourish. Soon hundreds of
saffron-robed devotees will blossom out into these streets, their American
faces marked with the twin clay lines, and the sound of the Hare Krsna MANTRA
will echo and re-echo against the hard high walls.

We should remind ourselves that what we see is not all there is; we never know
what unseen presences hover over some lonely and modest endeavor, nor what
invisible efforts cooperate to bring great results from meager beginnings. We
believe that in nature no effect exceeds its cause; why should it be different
in other affairs? CHANCE or LUCK are merely words to cover our ignorance.

Behind Srila Prabhupada's appearance on the alien Manhattan streets stand five
millennia of planning and effort. The story of it opens one sunrise fifty
centuries ago in the Himalayas, where the sage Krsna-Dvaipayana Vyasa sits in
trance on the bank of the Sarasvati. In his meditation, Vyasa sees a future of
unrelieved horror unfold before him. He sees Kali-yuga, the age of iron, begin
and bring with it universal deterioration. The decay is so deep-rooted that
matter itself diminishes in potency, and all our food progressively decreases
in quality as well as quantity. Vyasa sees the effects of chronic malnutrition
on generation after generation; he watches it gradually diminish their span of
life along with their brain power; no one can escape the progressive drop in
intelligence and ability to remember.

The harassment of hard times upon an increasingly witless populace hastens its
moral and spiritual decline. People begin to slaughter animals for food; they
become more and more enslaved by drugs; they lose all sexual restraint. These
habits further their physical and mental deterioration. Vyasa watches them sink
deeper and deeper into sensuality and ignorance. Families break up, and women
and children are abandoned. Increasingly degraded generations, conceived
accidentally in lust and growing up wild, swarm over the earth. Leadership
falls into the hands of unprincipled criminals who use their power to loot the
people. The world teems with ideologues, mystagogues, fanatics, and spiritual
bunko artists who win huge followings among a people dazed by social and moral
anarchy. Unspeakable depravities and atrocities flourish under a rhetoric of
high ideals.

Vyasa sees horror piled upon horror; he sees the end of everything human; he
sees the gathering darkness engulf the world.

This is Vyasa's prophetic vision on the eve of Kali-yuga, five thousand years
ago. It spurs him into action. For Vyasa's appearance on the brink of this
temporal decline is not fortuituous. Vyasa is an AVATARA, the empowered
literary incarnation of God, sent by Krsna specifically to prepare the
knowledge of Vedic civilization for transmission through the coming millennia
of darkness.

Without such an undertaking, the erosion of human intelligence by the force of
time would insure that all future generations would be completely cut off from
their own cultural heritage and the matchless spiritual attainment of their
forebears. Once the iron age began, they would not even realize that at one
time the whole world had been governed by a single, supremely enlightened
civilization: the Vedic culture.

In that Vedic culture, everything was organized to further self-realization.
Self-realization marks the ultimate development of human potential, in which
a person knows himself directly as an eternal spiritual being, infrangibly bound
to the supreme spiritual being, and without intrinsic relation to a temporarily
inhabited material body. By cultivating self-realization, the Vedic
civilization brought off this unparalleled achievement: it was able to
eliminate completely the evils of birth, old age, disease, and death, securing
for its members an eternal existence of knowledge and ever-increasing bliss.
The Vedic culture recognized that not all souls who took human birth after
transmigrating up through the animal forms would be able to make direct
progress toward the supreme goal. Owing to different histories, people are born
with different qualities and abilities. Nevertheless, Vedic culture enabled
everyone to make some advancement, and there were many arrangements for the
gradual elevation of materialistic people. In any case, Vedic culture organized
life so that everyone could satisfy the basic necessities in the simplest and
most sensible way, leaving most of human energy free for the higher task.

Vyasa saw that all this would disappear in Kali-yuga, since the focus of
civilization would shift from self-realization to sense gratification. Yet even
though Kali-yuga could not be stopped, he would be able to mitigate its effects
and keep alive the tradition of spiritual culture, in the way that emissaries
of a higher civilization can preserve their heritage among barbarians, or that
a well-provisioned village can survive a raging winter.

Vyasa was master of all the knowledge of Vedic culture - social, scientific,
economic, political, ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual. This knowledge was
contained in a single comprehensive canon called the VEDA, a word that means,
simply, "knowledge." Until the time of Vyasa, the VEDA was not written, because
writing had been unnecessary. Far from being a sign of intellectual advancement,
the appearance of writing is a testimony of decline, a device seized upon to
compensate for that mental deterioration which includes the loss of the ability
to remember.

It is interesting, by the way, that the Vedic date assigned to the advent of
Kali-yuga (c.3000 B.C.) corresponds closely to the date set by modern
historians for the rise of civilized life, an event signaled by the appearance
of literacy and the emergence of complex urban societies. All that historians
recognize as recorded human history is, in fact, only human history in
Kali-yuga. The academic historians' ignorance of the earlier and incalculably
higher Vedic civilization is what we have to expect from people suffering from
the mental retardation imposed by the times. We see symptoms of this
intellectual degradation of modern thinkers in their avowal that sense
perception is the only source of knowledge and in their obliviousness to the
dependence of knowledge upon goodness. Inverted values warp their ideas, such
as the conviction that human progress resides in the proliferation of complex
urban societies and increasingly sophisticated technology. They are unaware
that simple living is the best basis for high thinking, and that a truly
advanced civilization minimizes exploitation of nature and social complexity.
They do not know that the real standard of progress is the caliber of people
society produces. If we pursue material advancement at the expense of
self-realization, measuring our standard of living only by the gratification of
our senses, then we will only get a spiritually and morally debilitated people
in control of an intricate and powerful technology - a terrifying combination
that leads to horrors on a scale we are just beginning to experience.

To give us access to an alternative, Vyasa divided the VEDA into four and wrote
it down. Yet he knew that we would still be unable to understand the VEDAS, and
so he composed a number of supplementary works in which he spelled out the
intentions of Vedic thought explicitly.

In this Vyasa was aided by Sri Krsna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead,
Himself. Acting in tandem with Vyasa's effort, Krsna had descended personally
onto this planet and, as a member of the royal order, had played a significant
role in recent political events. Vyasa took advantage of Krsna's activities and
chronicled those times in a vast epic narrative called the MAHABHARATA. In this
sprawling dynastic tale of love, ambition, intrigue, and war, of fidelity and
treachery, heroism and cowardice, transcendence and ignominy, Vyasa imparted
Vedic thought in a way even unphilosophical people would find engrossing.
Krsna's presence surcharged history with transcendental significance. Moreover,
in the middle of this sweeping narrative, like a jewel placed in a gorgeous
setting, Vyasa set the BHAGAVAD-GITA, Krsna's discourse to Arjuna before the
climactic battle at Kuruksetra.

In a laconic seven hundred verses, Krsna gives Arjuna what He calls "the most
confidential knowledge" of the VEDAS. Like Vyasa, Krsna Himself is preparing
Vedic knowledge for Kali-yuga. This entails taking the highest knowledge of the
VEDAS, so sublime and pure that, as Krsna says, even great souls rarely attain
it, and laying it out explicitly, openly available to everyone. So that there
would be no question about the validity of this daring exposition, Krsna, the
highest possible authority, delivers it Himself.

You may question why the most advanced knowledge in the VEDAS is "confidential."
If it is so important for us to know it, then why is it hidden in the first
place? The answer is that knowledge is available only to those qualified to
apprehend it. Education is progressive, and higher knowledge can be approached
only by graduates from the lower. In particular, the qualification necessary to
comprehend the mysteries concerning the ultimate source of everything is purity.
Only those whose senses are under complete control and who are free from all
material desires have the requisite purity to understand and directly perceive
the Absolute Truth. Because people are characterized by a variety of material
desires, the VEDAS offer many religious paths (called DHARMAS). These are
gradated so that people in different statuses of material contamination can
ascend step by step to higher states of purity and correspondingly higher
disclosures of the divine.

In the GITA Krsna systematically surveys the major Vedic DHARMAS and shows how
each directs a person toward the ultimate conclusion, that "most confidential
of all knowledge." Krsna analyzes the performance of sacrifices and the worship
of demigods; He discusses the YOGAS of work, meditation, and knowledge. In each
case, Krsna shows how it leads to the "most secret of all secrets," pure loving
devotional service to God. "Always think of Me and become My devotee. Worship
Me and offer your homage unto Me." This, Krsna says, is "the most confidential
part of knowledge." Since all the Vedic DHARMAS lead to this one 'supreme
secret," Krsna can offer us this final instruction: "Just abandon all varieties
of DHARMAS and surrender to Me." In other words, we need not bother with any of
the different paths; we can at once come to their common goal, surrender to
Krsna.

But if this supreme end is so difficult to reach, requiring the ultimate in
purity, how is Krsna able to offer it directly to everyone? The answer is
simple. Krsna says that if one begins devotional service, He will personally
purify the devotee. "To those who are constantly devoted and who worship Me
with love," Krsna says, "I give the understanding by which they can come to
Me." A person can circumvent all the Vedic DHARMAS and come directly to Krsna
because Krsna will kindly help him. This is an extremely important point. As
Kali-yuga progresses, all the DHARMAS become increasingly difficult to pursue.
Our intelligence, our memory, and our stamina have all decreased, but Krsna is
willing to compensate for all our infirmities by His personal effort. By
opening up through divine kindness direct devotional service, the BHAGAVAD-GITA
in effect renders every other Vedic DHARMA obsolete.

Vyasa made this message the centerpiece of the MAHABHARATA. Vyasa also expanded
upon the Vedic teachings in eighteen PURANAS, and he compiled an outline of the
philosophical conclusions of the VEDAS in the VEDANTA-SUTRA, a collection of
extremely compressed, aphoristic utterances; later thinkers would present their
understandings of Vedic thought in the form of commentaries on these SUTRAS.

After Vyasa completed his immense labor, he was surprised to find himself
dissatisfied. As he reviewed his efforts to discover what deficiency could be
at the root of his discontent, his GURU, Narada Muni, arrived at his ASRAMA.
Vyasa placed the matter before Narada.

Narada praised Vyasa's brilliant work, but then told him that his labor was
still incomplete. In the MAHABHARATA and the PURANAS, Narada said, Vyasa had
not sufficiently described the glories of the Supreme Personality of Godhead,
Krsna. In faithfully transcribing the Vedic teachings, Vyasa had dutifully set
forth all those materially motivated DHARMAS, those teachings which allow
restricted sense gratification for people who cannot come directly to the
highest level of realization. In Kali-yuga such DHARMAS will become especially
dangerous, Narada warned, because people will seize upon such activities in the
name of religion," Narada said, "and will hardly care for prohibitions."

Narada wanted Vyasa to describe more completely the transcendental qualities
and activities of Krsna because, he said, by hearing them people would be able
to relish their extraordinary spiritual flavor; people's natural attraction to
the Lord would be revived, and as a matter of course they would lose their
taste for mundane pleasures. Narada counseled Vyasa about the spiritual potency
of words that glorify Krsna: when spoken in pure devotion, those words enter
into the hearts of the listeners and destroy almost completely the impurities
of passion and ignorance.

With Narada's blessings, Vyasa then completed his masterpiece, the "ripened
fruit of the tree of Vedic knowledge," SRIMAD BHAGAVATAM. The BHAGAVATAM picks
up where the GITA leaves off, for Vyasa explicitly states that it is intended
for those who have already abandoned materially motivated DHARMAS. Here Vyasa
discloses the inviolable mysteries of the personal life of the Supreme Lord,
Krsna, His eternal loving affairs with His most confidential and intimate
devotees. Here we have spiritual life revealed at its most intense and
personal, at the absolute summit of love of God.

We see from the cooperative efforts of Krsna and Vyasa at the beginning of
Kali-yuga that there was a move to make the esoteric knowledge of the VEDAS,
the highest truths concerning the nature of God and our relations to Him, open
and potentially available to everyone. This unprecedented disclosure had its
dangers, and neither Krsna nor Vyasa could circumvent the stricture that these
confidential truths could be understood only by those utterly pure in heart. In
spite of the degradation of Kali-yuga, the requirement for purity must stand;
what they did was make available a correspondingly more powerful process of
purification - in that Krsna offers personally to help anyone sincerely engaged
in devotional service, and in the BHAGAVATAM Vyasa offers the most potent of
all purifying processes - the chanting and hearing of the glories of Krsna
Himself.

Vyasa and Krsna completed their activity, and with the disappearance of Krsna
from the earth, Kali-yuga set firmly in. The ensuing degeneration was so
strong, however, that in a short time it threatened to destroy all Vyasa's
efforts to preserve Vedic culture. The words of Narada - "they will hardly care
for your prohibitions" - proved horribly accurate. A particular perversion
arose which was so dangerous that Krsna had to take emergency measures. This is
what happened:

A few thousand years after the onset of Kali-yuga, the followers of the VEDAS -
now restricted geographically to India - began more and more to slaughter
animals for food. Meat-eating is so polluting to human consciousness that
indulgence in it makes any sort of spiritual realization virtually impossible.
Therefore, the VEDAS had always instructed against it. At the same time, it was
recognized that some people, in spite of all prohibitions, will eat flesh
anyway. Accordingly, for them the VEDAS enjoin that if someone wants to eat
flesh, he may sacrifice a goat (no other animal) on the night of the dark moon
(no other time) to the Goddess Kali. The sacrificer, furthermore, must whisper
into the goat's ear a MANTRA that says, "I am killnig you now, but in my next
life you will have the opportunity to kill me." By sanctioning meat-eating in
this way, the Vedic culture at least kept it under control: only a goat, only
once a month, and only in the unpleasant consciousness of its karmic price -
all very discouraging conditions.

However, as the BRAHMANAS, the Vedic priests, in Kali-yuga became degraded,
they began to proliferate animal sacrifices - to meet popular demand - by
explaining away or ignoring the restrictions. Temples were transmogrified into
slaughterhouses, and killing as an organized daily business flourished. If
anyone objected to this unprecedented evil, the priests would reply that it
was, after all, sanctioned in the VEDAS.

Therefore, to stop the animal-killing, Krsna descended as Lord Buddha (c. 500
B.C.). Because the VEDAS were being perversely used to justify the slaughter,
Krsna, as Lord Buddha, denied the authority of the VEDAS - the same VEDAS He
had so carefully arranged and explicated to save the people in Kali-yuga. But
it was an emergency; there was no alternative. Lord Buddha rejected the VEDAS
and preached the ethic of AHIMSA, of noninjury to all living beings.

The Buddha also taught that our material existence is suffering, that our
material desires cause our suffering, and that by extirpating these desires we
can attain NIRVANA, release from material existence. Lord Buddha refused to
deal with any question concerning God, the soul, life after salvation, and so
on. When asked about such things, he would reply, "The Tathagata [the Buddha]
is free from all theories." Later, some of his followers spread the doctrines
of SUNYA, voidism, and ANATMA, no soul, but these were mundane interpretations
of the Buddha's silence on transcendental topics. The simple fact is that
Buddha had denied the VEDAS, yet he remained faithful to them by refusing to
make "theories," that is, to discuss God or the soul independently of the Vedic
teachings; so he said nothing.

Their consciousnes polluted by meat-eating, the people had become atheists. But
Lord Buddha, who never said anything about God, won their devotion. Thus Krsna
tricked the atheists into worshiping Him in His incarnation as the Buddha.

Lord Buddha's mission was successful. All of India eventually took up his
teachings, and animal slaughter ceased. Lord Buddha exemplifies the
transcendental cleverness of Krsna. Yet while Lord Buddha's success averted the
immediate danger, it left India without respect for the VEDAS and in the grip
of a philosophy that denied God and the soul.

The Buddha's palliative was incomplete; it was only a first step toward
a complete Vedic restoration. Krsna's next move was to send an incarnation of
Lord Siva to execute the second step. This was Sripada Sankaracarya, who
appeared in A.D.788. In a life of only thirty-two years, Sankara drove the
Buddhists out of India and reestablished the authority of the VEDAS. A member
of the renounced order, a SANNYASI, Sankara was a thinker of immense power, and
he dedicated his formidable ability to persuading the followers of Buddhism to
accept the VEDAS. To do this effectively, Sankara had to make the transition
between the two easy, so he devised a philosophy called ADVAITA-VEDANTA, or
absolute non-dualism, a kind of crypto-Buddhism that he ingeniously expounded
in Vedic language and supported with Vedic texts. Sankara denied the Buddhist
doctrine of no soul or self and reestablished the Vedic truth of the ATMA, the
individual soul. However, Sankara asserted the identity of ATMA and Brahman as
an undifferentiated spiritual reality without any qualities, varieties, or
relations. Obviously, there is no cognitive difference between "void" and
"Brahman" without qualities or distinctions. Sankara's Brahman is an
intellectual clone of the Buddhist "void." Thus, Sankara eased the way for
acceptance of the VEDAS.

Sankara's philosophy of impersonal oneness has some basis in the VEDAS. For
neophyte spiritualists, whose residual material contamination prevents them
from understanding the transcendental nature of Krsna, the VEDAS gave
instruction for salvation by merging into the impersonal Brahman, Krsna's
spiritual effulgence. Associated with those instructions are texts that
emphasize the qualitative oneness of ATMA and Brahman. The VEDAS contain other,
equally important texts that say that the ATMAS are numerically distinct and
quantitatively different from the supreme ATMA, Krsna, but Sankara stressed the
oneness. He presented transcendent reality in an abstract form and so made the
VEDAS palatable to the Buddhists.

Sankara restored Vedic culture; he founded monasteries, organized the
brahminical community, and reestablished the worship of Vedic deities. The
Vedas were recognized again, although necessarily in a distorted fashion.

Buddhism is an advancement over gross materialism, and impersonal monism over
Buddhism; but the personal theism of the VEDAS, as set out by Vyasa and Krsna,
had yet to be restored. After Sankara, that work began. As people returned to
Vedic study in earnest, many began to recognize the differencies in Sankara's
monistic interpretation. Several powerful teachers arose - most notably
Ramanuja (1017-1137) and Madhva (1239-1319) - whose cogent commentaries on the
VEDANTA-SUTRA and the BHAGAVAD-GITA seriously challenged the Sankara hegemony
and gained theism a wide following. But the impersonalists retained civic
control.

Then about five hundred years ago Krsna descended once again, this time to
complete the restoration of Vedic culture. This is Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu. Sri
Caitanya is Krsna in the guise of His own devotee, teaching by His example the
supreme form of worship. Caitanya's mission has two sides. On the one, He even
more fully disclosed the nature of the highest love between Krsna and His most
intimate devotees, and Caitanya was continually merged in the ecstasy of that
love. On the other side, Caitanya accompanied this revelation with
a correspondingly more powerful means of God realization - the chanting of the
Hare Krsna MAHA-MANTRA. This MANTRA is part of the original VEDAS, but because
it was chanted by Sri Caitanya, its power increased multifold, and Caitanya
taught His followers the practices by which the power of the MANTRA could work
unimpeded.

With Caitanya, the trend of delivering progressively more open disclosures of
the Vedic secrets along with a correspondingly more powerful means to realize
them reached its culmination. A more potent means of deliverance naturally
entails the spiritual enfranchisement of greater numbers of people. Krsna had
already declared in the GITA that people traditionally excluded from spiritual
realization - women, merchants, and laborers - could by taking shelter of Him
approach the Supreme destination. And in the BHAGAVATAM Vyasa had asserted that
even members of carnivorous and aboriginal communities - completely beyond the
pale of spiritual culture - could be purified by the association of a pure
devotee of Krsna. Sri Caitanya demonstrated in practice that this is so. As the
most merciful of all AVATARAS, Caitanya initiated a spiritual democracy, and by
the power of His chanting He turned people of vile habits into pure devotees.
The BRAHMANAS claimed exclusive right to spiritual knowledge, but Caitanya
showed that the potency of devotional service could elevate even the most
baseborn to the brahminical platform. Caitanya recognized everyone as
a candidate for devotional service, and He wanted His movement of congregational
chanting to spread over the globe. "One day," He said, "My names will be
chanted in every town and village in the world."

Caitanya also delivered the most comprehensive understanding of Vedic theism.
He confronted, in person, the two greatest impersonalists of His time -
Prakasananda Sarasvati and Sarvabhauma Bhattacarya - and presented such
a powerful theistic exposition of the VEDANTA-SUTRA that both acknowledged
devotion to Krsna to be the goal of the Vedas, and they danced and chanted with
Caitanya.

All the work of Krsna, Vyasa, Buddha, and Sankara to establish Vedic culture in
Kali-yuga reaches its fulfillment in the appearance of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu.
In the original VEDAS, the KALI-SANTARANA UPANISAD had disclosed, "One cannot
find a method of religion more sublime in the Kali-yuga than the chanting of
Hare Krsna." And looking forward to the coming of Caitanya, Vyasa had recorded
in the BHAGAVATAM: "In the Age of Kali, intelligent persons perform
congregational chanting to worship the incarnation who constantly sings the
name of Krsna. Although His complexion is not blackish, He is Krsna Himself. He
is accompanied by His associates, servants, weapons [i.e, the Hare Krsna
MANTRA], and confidential companions." Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, then, is the
long-awaited deliverer of the means of spiritual realization for this age.

Ten spiritual masters in succession have passed Sri Caitanya's teachings down
to Srila Prabhupada, and it is only appropriate that we should find him, in the
winter of 1966, far from his native India on the wind-racked streets of New
York, center of the global technological civilization, heartland of Kali-yuga.
It is the best place for him to carry the seed of Vedic culture. It is here
that the work of Krsna, Vyasa, Buddha, Sankara, and Caitanya, in the care of
their empowered servant Prabhupada, flowers and bears fruit.

