| Home | “[Lord Sri Krsna] wanted to show the world who the real devotees are, and who are the self-motivated rascals!” |
Between 1969 and 1973, I sometimes recorded Srila Prabhupada’s temple room classes / lectures in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Vrindaban (near Moundsville, West Virginia). Those recordings are among the ones now being distributed by the Bhaktivedanta Archives (Sandy Ridge, North Carolina) on cassette tapes, CDs and MP3 CD-ROMs. At the beginning of every class, Srila Prabhupada, while sitting on the vyasasana, would listen to his books being read out loud. I never once heard him object in any way to the way in which his books had been edited to differ from “his original words!” He obviously didn’t want “his original words” to be published. He wanted “his original words” to be changed in exactly the way that the ISKCON Press / BBT editors had changed them, and that’s that!
More than half of the thousands of Srila Prabhupada’s recorded classes / lectures / conversations have been published as MP3 files. Perfect digital copies, with no loss of quality whatsoever, can now be made ad infinitum by anyone in the world. Anyone in the world who follows along in the changed versions of the books while listening to Srila Prabhupada’s original books being read in his presence will immediately notice that the books have been changed! What are they going to think? Who, but a completely self-motivated idiot would not be concerned about these discrepancies / inconsistencies in our preaching mission?
Who, but a self-motivated idiot, could fall for: “We are changing the books so that they are closer to Prabhupada’s original words?” Srila Prabhupada doesn’t want them “closer to his original words.” He wants them, except for obvious typographical errors, to be exactly the way they were when they were originally published! Is this not completely obvious to anyone who is not a self-motivated fool!
Everybody is blaming Jayadvaita Svami (JAS), but he is not the only culprit. In 1996, I gave a presentation to the BBTI (Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International) trustees at Harikesa Svami’s headquarters near Stockholm, Sweden. The purpose of the presentation was to introduce the trustees to the gurukula (school) books that myself, my wife, and my oldest son had been publishing in Hillsborough, North Carolina. When I asked Harikesa (HKS) for permission to give the presentation, I got the distinct impression that his decision was final, and that the other BBTI trustees, including JAS, were simply his “yes-men.” A couple of years after that, HKS unexpectedly left ISKCON and the BBTI. Did this create a “power vacuum” that JAS was able to take advantage of? Did the other BBTI trustees switch from being HKS’s to being JAS’s yes-men? In any case, JAS would not have been able to do what he did without the approval of the BBTI trustees and the members of the GBC (ISKCON’s Governing Body Commission). All of the members of the BBTI/GBC, including JAS, are culpable, and they are never going to live it down!
Lord Sri Krsna is the Paramesvara, the Supreme Controller. So why did He allow Srila Prabhupada’s books to be changed? Krsna is very tricky. He is expert at tricking the foolish men, who are pretending to be gurus, to reveal themselves to be the unqualified, self-motivated rascals that they actually are! He wanted to make it perfectly clear what completely unqualified, self-motivated idiots the members of the BBTI/GBC guru club actually are! He wanted to show the world who the real devotees are, and who are the self-motivated rascals!
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