Key Note Address
Gaudiya Mission Symposium
March 5-7th. 2010
Bagbazar, Kolkatta

Hanumatpresaka Swami (Prof. Huber Hutchin Robinson)

Mukham karoti vacalam,
  Pangun langhayate girim
Yat kripa tam aham vande,
  Sri Gurun dina tarinam

First let me offer my respectful obeisance to my spiritual master, His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. It is only by his mercy and the mercy of our Brahma-Madhava-Gaudiya Sampradaya that I can hope to say anything to participate in the opening of this wonderful symposium.
Next, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu's Sannyasa let me also offer my respects to the renounced and learned Sannyasis present:
Their Holinesses B. S. Paribrajaka Maharaja and Sannyasi Maharaja, President and Secretary of the Gaudiya Mission, Swami Yuktanandaji of Bharata Sevashrama Sanga and Swami Balabhadra-anandaji of Rama-krishna Mission.

Then our profound and enduring respects to Governor of West Bengal, His Excellency, K. Narayanan. It is only by the strength of good, enlightened government that any cultural program of reformation can take effect.

Then we must give special mention to Prof. Samaresh Bandyopadhyay, who for us, has been a central pillar in all the development of this symposium.

We are also blessed with the presence of Prof. Ramaranjan Mukhopadhyay, Hon. Just. Kalyanjyoti Sengupta and so many other august personalities as audience and well wishers that we cannot properly honor them.
Thank you for your participation in this event.

I don't think I need to comment in great depth on the difficult and dangerous situation that exists in the modern world. Nuclear weapons are proliferating. Armed conflict is going on all over the world. People have to struggle for shelter and clean water, what to speak of education in any higher cultural values in life.

kalau doser nidhe rajan
 asti hi eko mahan gunad
kirtanyad eva Krsnasya
 muktosanga param vrajet.
SB xxx

This age of Kali is an ocean of faults, but there is one great advantage, just by chanting the holy name of Krsna, one can get free from all these troubles and go to the supreme destination.

Thus, this Symposium has been nicely organized to illuminate the position of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, his direct disciples and subsequent Acharyas such as Srila Saccidananda Bhakti-vinode Thakura, as givers of these Holy Names.

Lord Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, the great apostle of love of God and the father of congregational chanting of the Holy Name of the Lord, advented Himself in Bengal, city of Navadvipa, at Sridhama Mayapura, on the Phalguna Purnima, February, 1486. In his younger years he displayed many extraordinary pastimes as an infant, youthful scholar and preacher of Sri Krsna Sankirtana.
While in this married postion, however, several classes of men could not appreciate His teachings of the principles of Bhagavad-gita and Srimad Bhagavatam. Therefore the merciful Lord decided to adopt the renounced order of life, Sannyasa, since at that time all classes of people naturally paid their respects to a Sannyasi. Thus, even if they only paid their obeisances to Him considering Him to be an ordinary Sannyasi their material distresses would diminish and eventually they would be liberated.
Suddha-bhakti, the activity of the soul proper, can develope only in a liberated condition.

brahma bhuta prasannatma
  na socati na kanksati
sama bhutesu sarvesu
 mad bhakti labhate param

Thus the Holy Names give both liberation and something even greater, a reawakening of our dormant Krsna prema.

nitya-siddha krsna prema, sadhya kabu naya,
 sravanadi suddha citta, karaye uddhaya.

Prosecuting his Sannyasa dharma very scrictly He traveled all over India for six years, meeting with such great scholars and Acharyas as Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya, Prakasananda Sarasvati, Ramananda Rai and others. He also innaugurated the mass movement of Harinama Sankirtana. After that for 18 years he stay at Jagannatha Puri and demonstrated the internal development of Krsna Prema to a level only comparable with that manifest by Srimati Radharani and the most elevated of Krsna's friends in Vrndavana.

Although widely renown as a scholar he left us only eight verses known as the Siksa-astaka, but he instructed his followers to write and widely distribute Bhagavata dharma and the glories of the the Holy Names.
This task was taken up by his followers, headed immediately by Srila Rupa Goswami, and later by such great Acharyas as Narottama Das Thakura, Srinivasa Thakura, Baladeva vidya bhusana, Bhaktivinode Thakura and Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Prabhupada.
To this day this effort continues and the purpose of this symposium is to highlight these institutions, literatures and programs so that people may take advantage of them and get relief from the terrible enviroment in this age of Kali.

During the subsequent sessions focusing on Lord Caitanya, Srila Rupa Goswami and Bhaktivinode Thakura we will be blessed, enlightened, enlivened, delighted and empowered with information of how this work is actually going on. I will leave it to the distinguished and accomplished participants to reveal to us in detail this work in it's many fold aspects. We have already mentioned a summary of Lord Caitanya's mercy to the scholars, kings and people in general. In their turn his direct followers such as the six goswamis headed by Srila Rupa Goswami left us an enormous heritage of literature. Among them we find such phenomenal works as Rupa Goswami's Upadesamrta, Bhakti-rasa-amrta sindhu, and the two dramas Vidagdha and Lalita Madhava and Srila Jiva Goswami's Sat-sandharbhas. Srila Jiva Goswami himself wrote over 400,000 verses in various profound works, which of course comes to a bulk four times the size of the Mahabharat.
Then later Srila Bhaktivinode Thakura offered such profound service that he can only be compared to Sri Rupa, Sanatana, Bhatta Raghunatha, Sri Jiva, Gopal Bhatta and Dasa Raghunatha, and thus he has been termed the Seventh Goswami.
He was father of a large family, highly placed Magistrate with judicial powers just beneath the British Govenor of Orissa, fully responsible authority of the management of the Puri Temple under the British Raja, and a tireless preacher of Bhagavata Dharma.
His pen never ceased, and his commentaries on Srimad Bhagavatam, his heart enchanting songs, and expert management have saved innumerable people from the all devouring mouth of Maya to this day.
To conclude let us mention some of the very specific results of our own humble mission in participating in this cultural revolution started by Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu 500 years ago. It is such a vast ocean that we can only describe a little bit of what is happening directly around us and we will sit enthralled to hear the descriptions of others as they describe the mercy bestowed upon them.
Of course, we are members of our spiritual master's mission, ISKCON, and I don't think it necessary to mention it's good work in great detail. Most participants here probably have some idea of the wonderful success that it has had in distributing Bhagavata dharma. Let me just mention a few things that are actually occuring precisely at the present moment, on our door-step so to speak.
Since January this year we have been traveling in India, through Delhi, Vrndavan, Manipur, Kolkatta and Mayapura. In Manipura we had the chance to witness such a dance festival that we cannot think that it can be surpassed any place in the world. Renown artists such as Ramlil Ibrahm and others joined to perform for only the cost of their transport to try to eradicate the violence and confusion in Manipura state. Audiences were held spell bound night after night after night, for four days, as such vibrant traditions as Katha-kali, Bharata-natyam, Kathak and of course Manipuri Rasa-lila, played themselves out under the stars in the foothills of the Himalayas in front of the incomparable Manimandir. In the world famous Sridhama Mayapura campus a dream of years and years of Lord Nitya-ananda, Srila Bhaktivinode Thakura, Srila A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami and his sincere disciples such as Ambarisa Das, grandson of Henry Ford, become intensely, physically real, as the first of dozens of 20-meter long steel and cement pylons began to be pounded into the ground. They will form the frame for the foundation of the colossal Temple of Understanding predicted by Lord Nityananda himself, hundreds of years ago. The dream is that people from all over the world will to see the cosmology of the Bhagavatam and hear the sound of Sri Krsna sankirtana being performed in the mood of pure ecstatic love on the banks of the Ganga.
During these humble travels we were fortunately accompanied by young devotees barely in their 20s from South America who have felt the current of Lord Caitanya's mercy even in this current age and take up the unimaginable austerity of approaching the sometimes even insane souls of this Kali yuga to give them the mercy of the Bhagavata dharma. Typically one of them was traveling with us in India after the ISKCON annual book distribution marathon that is spread throughout the entire world during the month of December. Going person to person, door to door, making no distinction of manerly of unmanerly, rich or poor, he was able to distribute individually over 8,000 books in the one month.
Construction of Temples, festivals, distribution of literature and finally academic endeavor. One of our young students, Ravi Gupta, who from his infancy grew up in this Gaudiya Vaisanva tradition in the West, realized all of this regular education at home with his brother and then went directly to Boise State University in Idaho in the USA. Then continued his studies at Oxford University becoming one of the youngest scholars to every graduate from the renown institution with his doctorate in Sanskrit and Theology. Continuing to struggle in the academic world he has now secured a position as a tenured track professor at the oldest university in the United States, William and Mary College, and along with a fellow student, Sriman Krsna Ksetra he is now editing a book for Rutledge Press on current thinking on the Bhagavata Purana with enthusiastic participation from esteemed scholars around the world.

We always remember the words of our spiritual master, Srila A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, as he concluded one enormous pandal program in Bombay:
The magic will not be done by me, nor you, nor any living being. The magic will be done by Krsna when we become pure devotees of Krsna.

Also finishing with these words we want to again thank the participants, speakers and of course, over and over again the organizers of this wonderful event, the Gaudiya Mission, for something that should have intense impact on the world for a long time to come.
Thank You.