Sunday, February 21st, 2010

Offense Perception

Mayapur, West Bengal

I wasn't going to tolerate it anymore. Midway through the ceremony (Mangal arati) in honour of our guru, Srila Prabhupada, people were leaving the samadhi temple. Of course, it wasn't totally driven by their rudeness. Most were trying to rush for the arati in the main temple. My calculations tell me that if they attended the entirety of the first event they would still make it on time for the main arati. I still considered it rude for half of the people to leave when our teacher, whom we owe so much indebtedness, was being disrespected.

I had been standing in the back of the samadhi and having watched this pattern day after day I decided to stop and tell the early exiters that it wasn't nice. As I talked briefly to at least a collective 30 or so people they responded quite well. They turned around and went back to their standing space to finish the chant and ceremony to its completion. After the event was over, a mere 15 minutes in length, a young man whom I approached thanked me for the correction.
I considered the offence of early departure an aparad, in sanskrit means offense.

This theme carried over into the evening when a new book was launched on behalf of the deceased Bhakti Tirtha Swami, who had authored it. The main topic was of the offences which we commit in the course of our life. I found the workshop on the book launch well presented by Vraja Lila, one of his students. Incidentally Bhakti Tirtha an Afro American is one of my favorite monk friends. Although passed on I do get inspired when thoughts of him come to mind.

As part of the presentation an excerpt from the book listed the major offenses as follow (as I recollect): offence against the Sacred names, Sacred Places, Guru, saints, etc.

In the list I found no mention of general offenses that can be committed towards the public, average person or even a non-believer. Even if you break the law or make a mistake unknowingly it does offend. I see it as a general trend amongst the bhakti community. We tend to view things from an in-house point of view forgetting that people outside our domain do count as well. We are human and "to err is human."

Our guru, Srila Prabhupada over and over again expected us to illustrate perfect gentlemanly behavior and that means we must include in our examination of offenses the most broad perspective possible. A saint is known within his community, and without his community

10 KM