The day has come!
Udayananda: During the 1976 festival in Vrindavan, there was a whole schedule one day that started at mangal arotik and went all the way until midnight at a pandal program celebrating the Appearance of Lord Ram and attended by over twenty thousand people. It was very impressive. For me the day started blissfully as I got to go on a morning walk with Srila Prabhupada. Prabhupada walked for a very long time preaching vigorously. At the beginning of the walk I was at the rear of the devotees, but after about an hour I finally ended up right next to Srila Prabhupada. At this point Prabhupada had to pass water so he turned and handed me his cane. I took his cane and Prabhupada was handed a bottle of water to wash his hands. He went down into a little gully and did what nature called. In the meantime, I put the cane in my left hand and put my right hand in my japa bag to chant my rounds. When Prabhupada returned, he reached for his cane and like a fool I started to hand it to him with my left hand. Prabhupada said, “Left hand?” Immediately I thought, “Oh, I am an idiot, aren’t I?” So I put it in my right hand and handed it to Srila Prabhupada. Prabhupada said, “Always right hand.”
Immediately after the hour and a half walk, Prabhupada spent the rest of the afternoon with dignitaries who had come from New Delhi, such as the governor and state representatives. I was hanging outside Prabhupada’s room listening and was amazed at how he was like a lion amongst lambs preaching vigorously. Then without rest, Prabhupada went to Mathura to give a lecture at the pandal program to the twenty thousand or so people. Prabhupada started the lecture by saying, “Because there are so many people here to hear Krishna’s pastimes, and they may not speak English, I am going to speak in Hindi, and I apologize.” Prabhupada actually said, “I apologize to my English speaking disciples”, as if he ever had to apologize to us.
What amazed me was not only Prabhupada’s humility when he apologized to us, but my realization about the scene I observed while Prabhupada preached about Krishna and Lord Chaitanya. I looked around at the thousands of people there and the contingent of devotees from Africa, England, Australia, America, South America and remembered Bhaktivinode Thakur’s query, “When will Americans and Englishmen and Germans come with their hands raised high and say, ‘Jaya Sachinandana, Gaura Hari?’ When will that day come?” I thought, “The day has come!” I was thinking, “Prabhupada, you did it! You have done this and now you’re preaching to twenty thousand people and you were preaching to all these dignitaries all day long. You’ve done it! You don’t have to do anything else! You’ve done it. You can just rest on your laurels. You don’t need to push! You’ve done it! You’ve done it all!” With Prabhupada’s accomplishment, there was fanfare because he did an amazing, miraculous thing. The fanfare, however, had no affect on him, nor was he interested in that type of glorification. He was just interested in glorifying Krishna.
By the time we got back to Fogel Ashram it was close to midnight. Everyone was completely exhausted. I felt like a zombie and on top of that I had gotten a little sick because I ate some jalebis in the marketplace and came down with a violent case of diarrhea. Every time I laid down to sleep, I had to go back to the restroom. It was really hellish. This went on for quite a while so I thought I might as well just stay up to chant my japa. I went down to the temple and it was close to two o’clock in the morning. I was the only person around except for one devotee who was doing the twenty-four hour kirtan and he was laying on the mridanga barely hitting the drum and just muttering Krishna’s name. I came out the front of the Krishna-Balaram temple and I started to circumambulate. As I came around the back of the temple, I was right next to Srila Prabhupada’s room where I saw a light on. I reflected how Prabhupada had been preaching tirelessly since four o’clock in the morning and now it’s two o’clock in the morning the next day. In his room, he had his dictaphone and I heard him say, “Srila Visvanatha Chakravarti Thakur says in his explanation of the Gita…” Prabhupada was translating the Bhagavatam. I’m thinking, “Why? You’ve already done it all. You’ve done everything. You’ve done this big festival, there’s no one around seeing you do this.”
But he was there translating the Bhagavatam, and he was doing it for us. I got to witness Srila Prabhupada’s tireless pursuit of giving Krishna consciousness to this planet, to this world, to this universe. And that’s why he’s the spiritual master of the universe.