In this year 2022, one hundred years since you, Śrīla Prabhupāda, first met your spiritual master, Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Prabhupāda, I offer you my most humble prostrations.

Last year on the occasion of Śrī Vyāsa-pūjā I expressed my appreciation for your greatness in terms of your experience and sharing of “complete knowledge of the Complete Whole, such that you do not experience any form of incompleteness.” Reflecting further on this quality of yours, I now want to express appreciation of your complementary opulence, namely, the many refusals you exhibited to affirm your full faith and attachment to Lord Krishna. Allow me to list briefly a few instances of such transcendent acts of refusal that you have shown, acts of rejecting what would not be favorable for your service to Lord Krishna.

It began early in your life when, as a small boy, you refused to give up your wish to celebrate Jagannātha Rathayātrā, a refusal rewarded by help from a neighbor to enable the event to take place. Some years later, graduating from Scottish Church College, you confidently refused your diploma as a symbolic gesture of non-cooperation with the ruling British imperial power. You were not afraid to speak truth to power in this way, a fearlessness that you would demonstrate repeatedly in later life.

And in later life, as you prepared to embark on your mission to the West, you refused the temptation to remain in Vrindavan to live a peaceful life of nirjana-bhajana, resolving instead to bring Lord Caitanya’s profound message of divine love to the world. When at last you arrived in New York, you also refused to follow the advice to wear “coat-pants-hat”—Western attire to conform to Western style, determined instead to be your authentic self in your traditional dress of a Vaiṣṇava renunciant. In like manner, you refused to take the well-meant advice to name your fledgling missionizing institution the “International Society for God Consciousness,” knowing as you always have, that it is Krishna who is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, identified only vaguely, and even in a sense misleadingly, as “God”.

In so many ways you, Śrīla Prabhupāda, refused to shrink from asserting your mission. Whether it was insisting on disciples following the four “regulative principles of freedom” or giving brāhmaṇa initiation to Western disciples; whether it was calling out Māyāvāda and Prākṛta-Sahajiyā ideas and practices; whether it was fighting for the Juhu land or standing up for your young and inexperienced disciples in India, you always refused to back down; rather, you showed us repeatedly how to “fight the good fight” on behalf of guru and Krishna. When it came to “impossible” achievements like producing and printing your Caitanya-caritāmṛta, you refused to identify with the fools in whose dictionary the word “impossible” is listed.

One could go on and on about the many sorts of transcendental refusal you demonstrated in service to your Lord Krishna, but there is one that I’m particularly fond of remembering today: You refused to accept the caution suggested (and well meant) by Śyāmasundara Prabhu regarding asking George Harrison for a donation to print the Kṛṣṇa Book. Rather, you reassured him that when he meets George and brings up the topic, “Krishna will help.” And sure enough, Krishna did help, by dramatically sending a perfectly timed flash of lightning and thunderclap, just at the moment Śyāmasundara popped the question, causing a short blackout and thereby very viscerally convincing George that he should indeed make the requisite $19,000 donation for this glorious cause.

Thank you, Śrīla Prabhupāda, for showing us, your students and followers, by your sublime example, how to refuse the easy way and the less-than-faithful way in the bracing path of devotional service. Please bless me to continue in your footsteps, learning by your example how to be always ready to refuse whatever is unfavorable to this exalted purpose.

Your aspiring servant,

Krishna Kshetra Swami

Initiation: 1972 July. Paris, France