Speech by His Holiness Jayapataka Swami, Mayapur Dhama
Speech by His Holiness Jayapataka Swami
Book distribution awards ceremony
Sri Dhama Mayapur March 9th 2001
Book distribution, as we have heard from the speakers tonight, is very dear to Srila Prabhupada. Normally we have this ceremony on this night, but since the past 2 years our festival's orientation has changed so that the last 5 days are more oriented towards preaching to the visitors and the more international ISKCON aspect of the festival is the period right before the Parikrama. So probably we could have had a lot more speakers tonight.
Navina Nirada Prabhu, our minister for book distribution, asked me to help out since I am the minister of congregational preaching and we work together nowadays quite a bit. I am trying to pull this together but am facing a lot of obstacles. But I am very grateful to the all the speakers who came tonight and to all the devotees because this is such an important service and I feel that we need to give a lot more focus on the preaching and to appreciating the sacrifice that the preachers are doing around the world. And amongst all the preachers, those who are dropping the time- bombs of spiritual potency into the hands of unsuspecting conditioned souls are the book distributors.
We heard so many Sankirtana pastimes how a book goes from one hand to the next to the next to the next and in various ways reaches people. Srila Prabhupada knew that if the books could go out, sooner or later somebody would read them, and if anybody reads his books they can become awakened. Of course, we like to systematically encourage people to read the books immediately for the effect to be also immediate. I am very encouraged here in Mayapur with Bhakti Purusottama Swami's program where anybody who buys a Bhagavad Gita is given a free membership in the Bhagavad Gita club. And anybody who buys a set of Bhagavatams is enrolled into the Bhagavatam club. I don't know the exact name for it, but they have a formal name for it. And once a year, for 3 days in the Spring when the guesthouse is fairly open, they invite people to come and have seminars for a 4-day weekend on Bhagavad Gita and a similar one another time on the Srimad Bhagavatam. And I was quite amazed that they would get 4 to 5 hundred people coming, even 7 hundred people coming on some years to each of these programs to systematically study Srila Prabhupada's books from morning to night for 8 hours. And they really go into it very deeply. For me, this is just an example of how important it is that we take the distribution of Srila Prabhupada's books seriously and encourage people to actually study and read the books. These people are not members of the congregation as such, but by reading Srila Prabhupada's books they automatically become members of the congregation of members of the temple.
Book distribution is something that every devotee should do. I won't say that at one point in their spiritual life they should do it; at one point they should intensively do it ideally; but actually throughout our entire life we should always remain as a book distributor. It should be our habit to carry a book or a few books with us every day so that whenever we meet somebody who is interested in the subject matter of Krsna consciousness, we can give them an appropriate Krsna conscious literature so that they can read it. Just like today when our honored guests the Druzes have come, in Srila Prabhupada's Samadhi we started to discuss different topics. Very soon 45 minutes had passed by and we hadn't even dented the surface of these topics. So to actually explain Krsna consciousness in any depth takes a long time. But if somebody gets a book, it's like you are giving them, depending on which book you give them, 100 hours, 1000 hours, how many hours of preaching! They can open the book and read them. I know one of my disciples told me that the way he came to Krsna consciousness was that he was drunk and he bought a Bhagavad Gita from a devotee in Canada and later on, when he opened up his breafcase and saw the Bhagavad Gita, he couldn't remember how he had gotten it; his memory was fuzzy. He opened it up and started reading it and he become so purified by reading the Bhagavad Gita that he looked in the back of the book and saw the address list and said, "wao, here in Toronto there is a temple." So he went to the temple and that day happened to be Nityananda Trayodasi. When he got there there was a huge festival and kirtana going on and that was it for him. After that he became a devotee, and somehow or other by the will of Krsna he became my disciple. So like that, we give the books out to people, and later it is like a seed that comes to fruit.
So I want to encourage everybody, the congregation members, not only for the Christmas marathon, but somehow or other that they should distribute books always, to their work collegues, to their neighbors, to their friends. You can keep a book in your purse when you go to the grocery store and maybe you'll meet somebody that will say, "Oh, are you a Hare Krsna?" So anybody you meet, have a book to give them.
We calculated that say we have about 500 thousand to a million active congregational members. If everybody would distribute a book a day, then that would be 365 million books in a year. Right now we have done about 450 million books cumulative in the whole existence of ISKCON. Practically speaking we could practically double it in one year if everybody distributed a book a day. And I feel guilty because I don't do it all the time. Sometimes someone pointed out that even on our latest Santipur program here in Navadvip we forgot to bring our book table. So I am not saying that I am holier than thou, but I am just saying in self confession that I am realizing that there are so many opportunities where we have failed to present Srila Prabhupada's books and we should take advantage of every opportunity and not let one single opportunity slip through our fingers.
So tonight we are talking about those devotees who have taken these opportunities and they have distributed a tremendous amount of Srila Prabhupada's books and we are here because we are grateful for that. We are very grateful for that. Srila Prabhupada gave me an order that I have to distribute 10 000 maha big books through my Sankirtana party every month as well as 100 000 small books. So now the Mayapur parties and other parties who are helping me to fulfill that debt; if you add the cumulative interest that that would get from the 25 years ago that Srila Prabhupada ordered that, I can't even imagine what number it has to be, but at least to some degree I am very grateful for the devotees that are helping me fulfill Srila Prabhupada's instruction. So we wanted to be here to express that to everybody tonight.
We do have a few technical problems. Since the minister was not here, it took us a few days to download the scores because of the bad telephone lines. Finally when we got the scores, a day before yesterday, we have been trying to design a new form for the Sankirtana award because all the existing forms in the BBT have been lost in the last flood. So they came up with a new attractive form. But maybe we are missing some; I don't know if we have all of them. Whatever we have ready we will give out and if there is anything that is not ready yet, then we will give it tomorrow. We are very happy that we can at least have this program tonight. The Pujaris have given special Maha-prasadam from the Deities for the 1st, 2nd and third price and in our humble way we are trying to give our appreciation to these devotees.
What we want is that all the devotees present should make a prayer for all the Sankirtana book distributors that they can be very successful in continuing on distributing Srila Prabhupada's books and in their Krsna consciousness they can achieve all success. Hare Krsna.
The master of ceremonies then stated the following figures to the audience:
651 793 maha big books.
464 852 big books
440 340 medium books
891 993 small books
2 327 531 magazines
5 851 sets
4 776 483 literatures for the year 2000.
437 711 794 literatures worldwide since 1965
Patita Pavana Jagat Guru Srila Prabhupada ki jay! Book distribution ki Jay!!
