Prabhupada Podcast

Prabhupada Podcast is a feed of recorded talks by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, and its recent entries carry 1968 dates from Montreal and San Francisco. The titles read like archive labels: a kind of talk, a date, a city, and now and then a note that the recording is only partial. Inside, the teaching keeps a steady shape. A Sanskrit verse is recited, its words are glossed one at a time, and the point is then brought down to something a person meets every day. Those turns make the recordings easy to follow. In Srimad Bhagavatam 7.9.13 - August 21, 1968 - Montreal, the claim that everything belongs to God is argued through property: land and cities are worth something only because living beings are in them, and if everyone were dead, nobody would come asking for rent. The same class reaches for the image of finding a hundred dollars that belongs to somebody else. Srimad Bhagavatam 7.9.12-13 - August 20, 1968 - Montreal draws a hard line between devotion and petition, calling prayer that trades offerings for favours business, not love. It names anxiety as the common condition of material life, from President Johnson down, and holds up a small child who feels protected as the picture of freedom from it. The tone is firm. A Bhagavad Gita lecture calls meditation on the void or the impersonal simply troublesome, a waste of time for anyone living in a body, and places the yogi who thinks of Krishna above all others. Phrases repeat for emphasis rather than variety. Warmth sits alongside the firmness. A Montreal lecture tells the room that loving Krishna takes no wealth, beauty or learning, only the decision to do nothing without him, then tells of Bhishma's attempt to make Krishna break a promise, with the exclamation 'Kṛṣṇa is so awesome.' The San Francisco interview is the plainest point of entry. When the interviewer asks what the teaching rests on, the reply is the Bhagavad Gita, and the talk turns to how people mistake the body for the self, whether mourning a son whose body still lies before them or calling themselves American or Indian because of where they happened to be born. Chanting is presented there as open to the greatest scholar and the innocent boy alike, and even, the speaker adds, to dogs that dance along. Then there is the room conversation with devotees going to London. Its excerpts move from correcting a written passage on the seven-fold coverings of the universe to comparing rents of forty-nine cents and a dollar sixty a square foot, the dearer space fortified because it stores furs. Cosmology and floor space end up in the same room. The appeal is hearing the teaching as it was first spoken, digressions and gaps included.