(Śrīla Bhakti-Hrīdaya Bon Goṣvāmī Mahārāj delivered this lecture at 21 Cromwell Road, London, S.W. 7, on September 28, 1933. Sir Bhupendra Nātha Mitra, K.C.S.I., K.C.I.E., the High Commissioner for India, presided.)
Mr. Chairman and friends,
I was looking forward with earnest eagerness to meeting you all this evening on this happy occasion of the Vijaya. How immensely pleasing it looks having countrymen joyfully gathering, so many Indians together tonight in that one place! We all have come far away from our country, away from our parents, brothers and sisters, friends and relatives, and would have surely felt very sharply the separation if we had sat alone in our respective rooms in some corner of this vast city of London. Thanks for the convenience of this happy gathering of these few hundreds Indians in this Hall. Need I say, therefore, how very much encouraged we are to have you in our midst tonight on this Vijaya day!
I have been asked by my friends here to say a few words about Vijaya. I greet you all, Mr. Chairman and friends — first of all I accept my most sincere and respectful greetings of Vijaya; and may we all offer our hearts’ homage to the Supreme Lord of all of us!
Friends, most of you are young students and are in the prime of life with high hopes of noble achievements when you enter the world. With high ideals you have, I am sure, come here.
I do wish that you all may prove yourselves worthy of our ancient and glorious homeland. Let us not be carried away with misdirecting lies which do discredit to our country. But we must be careful not to be mistakenly taken with our human birth—that beacon-star of life must not be allowed to cause us to drift away from our ultimate goal.
The Vijaya-daśamī is an all-India memorable day of the year, held to be sacred by the people of all the provinces. As you know, in Bengālī it is celebrated on the fourth or the last day of the most important worship of the goddess Durgā. On such a day, when the image of Durgā is consigned to the Gaṅgā waters, what a new and lively atmosphere! With what alacrity the children wear their new and gorgeous clothes, and the women atmosphere of Bengal becomes as if very closely knit for a time and all friendly feeling of love and reverence is quickened in the embraces among relatives, friends and near ones, literate and illiterate, rich and poor, and even the dearest foes (!) meet with a smile. Our happy festival is over, but the pathetic side of this joyous report: happy festival every year leaves an impression only in the air; it evaporates within a few hours, such as Durgā is consigned every year in the Gaṅgā.
This auspicious ceremony in fact refers to the Oṣṭādaśa-śakti, the Supreme Lord. In the Chāṇḍī and in other scriptures of the Hindus she is termed Mahā-māyā.
As Māyā and we always inseparably associate with the substance, and there is no conception of the substance precedes the existence of the potency, and yet the existence of the substance is independent of the potency and remains the same, with the intervention of time and space. In the realm of the Godhead Himself, who has innumerable potencies, the potency that draws us towards the service and love of Godhead is known as Yoga-māyā, while the potency that deludes us and takes us away from Him and entangles us in this world of saṁsāra or mṛtyu-loka or Durga, is known as Mahā-māyā or Durgā.
When we make no misuse of our free will by denying ourselves the service of Godhead, she allures us into this world of discord, differences, strife, jealousy etc. But the same deluding potency comes to our aid, helps us as our mother and helps us in our forward march towards the blissful and harmonious kingdom of the Supreme Lord.
In Southern India, the ceremony is observed as a religious rite and accounts our mightiest spiritual Master who flourished in the middle of the 11th century and was born at Uḍupī on the Malabar coast. Early in life, still a tender boy, Śrī Mādhava renounced the world and took the ecclesiastical order. Pantheism had already dominated the minds of the people and Śrī Rāmānuja was fighting the battle with his sharp weapons of the Doctrine of Distinctive Monotheism. But Śrī Mādhava preached his unchallengeable philosophy of pure “Dualism” on the fundamental basis of the loving service of the Transcendental Personality of Godhead which is the normal function of every awakened soul. He pointed out that there are eternal five-fold distinctions in the spiritual relativity; i. e. eternal difference between God and soul between God and matter, between soul and matter, between soul and soul and lastly between matter and matter. Śrī Mādhva is said to have been an incarnation of Bhīma of the time of the Mahābhārata and Śrī Bajranga ji of the period of Rāmāyaṇa. So, as this “Vijayā” day is the birthday of Śrī Mādhva the people of Southern India in particular observe this day with great reverence.
Many of you are aware of the great festivities that are celebrated in Northern India on this day — more particularly in the United provinces of Agra and Oudh. Śrī Rāma, who is worshipped by all Hindus as the Ethical Incarnation of Viṣṇu was the king of Oudh ruling his subjects with parental affection. He was the Divinity manifest on the mundane plane in order to crush atheism and immoralities and to establish pure theism based on spotless ethical principles. Everyone present here knows of the great fight Śrī Rāma had with Rāvaṇa, the arch friend of atheism and voluptuous luxury. Śrī Rāma killed Rāvaṇa along with all his offshoots and conquered Laṅkā or Ceylon. The vanquishing of Rāvaṇa by Śrī Rāma marked the complete victory of theism over atheism and the subjugation of Laṅkā to Ayodhya marked the glorious victory of unalloyed devotion over the veritable hotbed of mundane piety, opulence, passion and self-annihilating salvation. When Śrī Rāma returned to Oudh after conquering Ceylon, the devotees of Śrī Rāma celebrated the victory of their Lord very pompously on this day. Henceforth, this day has been known to be the “Vijayā-day”, i.e. the day of the victory.
Friends, our life is a series of forgetfulness. We have forgotten ourselves and our Supreme Lord. The greatest folly of our life is that we do not know what we are. Irreligion and hypocrisy have dominated over religion and righteousness. The Hindus know how Yudhishṭhira was persecuted by Duryodhana—you know how tremendously Jesus Christ had to suffer at the hands of the non-believers. But it has been seen in all ages that when the firmament of religion is over-clouded by the concocted imaginations of the fallen souls, when truth is persecuted and tyrannized by hypocrisy and falsehood, then either God Himself or one of His beloved devotees may come to this world in order to establish true religion, to deliver those who seek shelter at His feet, and to punish the wrongdoers for their ultimate good. Very unhappily, the ruthless hand of time has again obliterated everything from our perspective. Again, we have forgotten our real nature as well as the loving aspect of the Godhead. Would it be too much to say that the world may ere long recognize some spiritual teacher who may help us all onward in the non-deluding path of positive assurance of the Divine Love of the Godhead, which, once received, can never cease.
We know we have but one God to worship—our common Lord, Who is All-Love, and we are all His eternal loving children. What a pity that we have forgotten Him under the influence of His deluding power—the executrix of this mundane plane! Let us turn our back, friends, to her; let us forsake this unnatural mood of lording it over the phenomena, which are no better than will-o’-the-wisp. God is the sole proprietor, and we are His properties—He is the Whole, and we are His separated parts. We are His discrete potencies, inseparably connected but not identical with Him. When we forget this truth, we are at once hurled down to this vortex of illusion and pose ourselves as enjoyers of this world. This eccentricity is the root cause of all our sufferings in this relative plane of triple attributes.
We should shake off all polluting thoughts of perverted egoism. Let us hope to surrender ourselves to the Supreme Lord and His grace. May we embrace one another tonight out of eternal loving relationship, all of us being children of the common Divine Attractor, and let not our tonight’s Vijaya greetings end in a formal, temporary, and selfish way.
Thanks, Mr. Chairman, and my friends, for your patiently audiencing me. Again, I beg to offer my sincere greetings and best wishes.