Nama Om Visnu-padaya Krsna-presthaya bhu-tale
srimate bhaktivedanta swamin iti namine

Namas te Sarasvate Deve Gaura-vani-pracarine
nirvisesa-sunyavadi-pascatya-desa-tarine.

Dear Srila Prabhupada,

I offer my sincere obeisances at your feet. You magnanimously bestowed on us Krishna consciousness with a ‘lifetime warranty.’ Just as during your manifest presence on earth, so now after your external disappearance, you continue to make Krishna consciousness work for a burgeoning global community of Vaishnavas.

You are the perpetual reference point of purity, determination, fearlessness, and devotion to Krishna. History will inevitably throw up varieties of lesser persons claiming to know and embody ‘the way.’ It is you Prabhupada that save the innocent from such lesser leaders, As Krishna says in the Gita 3.21, people in general follow ‘srestha’, the best, most excellent, most distinguished person among them. Had Krishna not sent and revealed you as truly the best person, many one-eyed gurus would have ruled the blind valley of the modern world.

We continue our lifelong task of finding the most appropriate balance between the twin historical imperatives of preservation and adaptation. We must preserve intact all that is essential in our supreme tradition. Yet a movement may lose itself not only through deviation, but also through fatal attrition, caused by a failure to include relevance among the items to be preserved.

Only you, Prabhupada, can bless us with the keen intelligence to properly balance preservation and adaptation. Only you can perfectly teach us to correctly discern the basic, the fundamental, the unchangeable, from the variable, protean, adaptable detail. We must earn your blessings by our genuine, earnest dedication to our own emancipation, and to that of the world. We must also balance attention to self, with attention to other souls. As Krishna teaches us in the Gita, and the Bhagavatam, in a world full of tensions, paradoxes, and competing just claims, we must find reasonable balance in all things.

On the holy day of your divine appearance, along with our expressions of gratitude, we congratulate you on your sublime descent to this world, your inimitable glorious deeds, and your immaculate departure. Kindly empower us more than ever to do your work in this baffled world.

Your eternal servant,
Hridayananda das Goswami
August 29, 2013