Attributing our own defects to previous ācāryas and the scriptures

Did Prabhupada use “preaching strategies” or white lies with the goal of making his preaching sweeter to certain audiences?

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Some believe that certain parts of Śrila Prabhupāda’s teachings were just “preaching strategies” or deliberate lies told with the goal of making his preaching sweeter to certain audiences. The list includes points such as Prabhupāda’s insistence that the soul has an eternal relationship with Kṛṣṇa and that such a relationship is simply forgotten when the jīva falls into the material world, giving brāhmana initiation to women or saying that they could eventually also accept disciples, and so on. The list is constantly growing.

This attitude of interpreting instructions from Śrila Prabhupāda and raising doubts about his honesty is dangerously close to the offense of interpreting and minimizing the glories of the holy names (arthavāda).

This point of arthavāda is described in the Caitanya Caritāmṛta (ādi 17.70-74):

“Once Lord Caitanya Mahāprabhu went to the house of Śrīdhara after kīrtana and drank water from his damaged iron pot. Then He bestowed His benediction upon all the devotees according to their desires.
After this incident the Lord blessed Haridāsa Ṭhākura and vanquished the offense of His mother at the home of Advaita Ācārya.
Once when the Lord explained the glories of the holy name to the devotees, some ordinary students who heard Him fashioned their own interpretation.
When a student interpreted the glories of the holy name as a prayer of exaggeration, Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu, greatly unhappy, immediately warned everyone not to see the student’s face henceforward.
Without even removing His garments, Lord Caitanya took a bath in the Ganges with His companions. There He explained the glories of devotional service.”

On his purport to text 17.73, Prabhupāda explains:

“Once when Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu explained the glories of the transcendental potency of the Lord’s holy name, the Hare Kṛṣṇa mahā-mantra, one unfortunate student said that such glorification of the holy name was an exaggeration in the śāstras to induce people to take to it. In this way the student interpreted the glories of the holy name. This is called artha-vāda, and it is one of the ten offenses at the lotus feet of the holy name of the Lord. There are many kinds of offenses, but the offense known as nāma-aparādha, an offense at the lotus feet of the holy name, is extremely dangerous. The Lord therefore warned everyone not to see the face of the offender. The Lord immediately took a bath in the Ganges with all His clothes on to teach everyone to avoid such a nāma-aparādha. The holy name is identical with the Supreme Personality of Godhead. There is no difference between the person God and His holy name. This is the absolute position of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Therefore one who distinguishes between the Lord and His name is called a pāṣaṇḍī, or nonbeliever, an atheistic demon. Glorification of the holy name is glorification of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. One should never attempt to distinguish between the Lord and His name or interpret the glories of the holy name as mere exaggerations.”

The whole spiritual process depends on having faith in it. Only when we have faith can we practice the process with determination. Faith, of course, should be based on factual realization and not mere sentimentalism, but faith must be there.

When one starts analyzing everything using his mind, concluding that the descriptions of the glories of the holy names are exaggerated, the next conclusion will be that the process itself doesn’t work. One will thus be inclined to abandon it and convince others to do the same. This explains why Mahāprabhu reacted so sharply to it.

In this way, just as some claim that the descriptions of the potency of the holy names in the scriptures are deliberately exaggerated in order to convince people to chant, even though the process is not as powerful as claimed, others say that Śrila Prabhupāda cheated his lady disciples by claiming to give them brāhminical initiation or cheated his readers by claiming that the jīva has an eternal relationship with Kṛṣṇa. The two situations are very closely related.

The core point here is that the holy name is non-different from Kṛṣṇa. When one says that the glories of the names are just exaggeration, one is directly doubting both Kṛṣṇa’s potency and the authority of the scripture. Once it is believed that Kṛṣṇa is not all-powerful and that the scriptures have no authority, there is no reason to follow either. Similarly, when one says that Prabhupāda was telling lies, one is undermining his authority. Once the authority is undermined, there is no point in taking any of his instructions seriously. All Prabhupāda’s writings become then just another opinion that will have little practical impact on one’s life.

The particular point about claiming that the glories of the holy names described in the scriptures are exaggerated is also mentioned by Śrila Bhaktivinoda Thākura. Again, we can see the similarity:

“The name of the Lord can destroy all the sins that a sinful person can commit. “All this glorification is very true. Those engaged in karma and jñāna, on hearing this glorification, minimize the meaning in order to maintain their activities. Arthavāda means to believe that the glorification of the name in scriptures is not true, but is praising the results in order to make people believe in the name. Those who commit this offense to the name cannot develop a taste for the name. Having faith in the statements of scripture, you should chant the name of the Lord. One should not associate with a person who commits this offense, arthavāda.”

We can see that the logic behind both kinds of arguments is essentially the same: one projects his own imperfections onto the previous ācāryas or onto śāstra. In practice, this implies that the ācaryas and scriptures are being dishonest, misleading, or merely poetic, rather than straightforwardly describing the spiritual reality.

It is also worth noting that this habit of projection often appears in sahajiyā circles (which are not considered particularly elevated, exactly because they take cheap shortcuts). A common pattern is to project one’s own moral conditioning into Kṛṣṇa’s pastimes, describing the līlās as driven by mundane lust or envy, bringing them down to the level of mundane experiences.

In summary, people tend to project their imperfections on others. Honest people tend to also presume that others are honest (at least until proved wrong). Those who are habituated to crookedness, however, may suspect crookedness everywhere, even in blameless persons or in the statements of śāstra.

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