Talks Excerpt 459. Swamiji says: Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu united all classes and castes in India with God’s name.
From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.
The first act of detachment by the great being, Lord Buddha, was when he left his wife and his little baby. He looked at them and then walked out of the house – never to return as a householder [grihasthi].
Is it an easy task to give up your wife and child at one stroke and walk away? Yes, it is easy if you love God with all your heart and soul. If you love something to that extent then, for that something, even hell is treated indifferently. Society has no importance for one that loves his Chosen Ideal.
At that time there was a pride of learning. Sri Shankaracharya had explained Advaita Vedanta, the principle of non-duality. Pandits on the other hand were preaching their own views – the scriptures of confusion. And this confusion led millions of sincere devotees into misery. The caste system also was strangling the growth of Hinduism.
Then came Chaitanya [Mahaprabhu]. In his pre-monastic life he was a great lecturer in mathematics, Sanskrit and other subjects; yet he abandoned his learning to yearn for the love of Sri Krishna.
Sri Chaitanya taught us one of the greatest lessons in the Kali Yuga: Wife, children, husband and relatives are not eternal; but God, and God alone, is eternal
A man’s caste did not matter to him, provided he took the name of God. When he went into the streets of India, all the castes including the pariahs, the brahmins, the kshatriyas, the vaishyas and shudras became one in the name of God. He sang the Maha Mantra – the mantra that was given by Lord Brahma to Narada to uplift the world. The original order of it was:
Hare Rāma, Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma, Hare Hare |
Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare ||
The change in name chanting-order rationale, is explained HERE. The delightful Pandit Shukla had conducted many rituals and ceremonies at the Ramakrishna Centre of South Africa for our Swami Shivapadananda. When a devotee asked Panditji if it was correct to chant the Maha Mantra starting with Lord Krishna’s name first, his response was: ‘That’s like asking the Ganga to flow upside down.’
When a mantra loses its potency (by men not using it properly) God Himself comes and uplifts the power of that mantra. This happened through Chaitanya. When he sang the Maha Mantra, even the most learned, dry intellectuals would cry and weep and roll on the ground. When he said, ‘Bol Hari Hari Bol, Bol Hari,’ people used to shout, ‘Hari Bol’ in reply. He united the whole of India in this way – not by learning; not by caste; not by money and wealth; but by God’s name alone.
The free-to-read or download, 396-page Flipbook version of Swamiji’s biography is available by clicking HERE. If you’d prefer the PDF version, please click HERE.
These recordings or the excerpts from them, were made from the early 1970s onward, by Mother Radha, a close devotee of Swamiji’s and edited for uploading here by our gurubhai and her son, Brother Tim. Please be mindful that what Swamiji was saying may have been specific to an individual or a group of people with him, at the time.