Understanding the Behavior of Sri Sankara
[Dear Friends and Devotees, below I’m sharing a beautiful excerpt by Srila Gurudeva, from Volume 21 of the Bhakta Bandhav Anthology, about how to understand the nature and behavior of Sri Sankara. More excerpts will be posted regularly, as we continue in our service of translating, transcribing, and publishing the unabridged discourses of Srila Gurudeva. If you’d like to have the digital files of the unabridged volumes, please consider supporting the mission, at patreon.com/servelove. All the files are available there for our patrons with a 10$ contribution. Hare Krsna!]
Srila Gurudeva: Lord Brahma is saying, “If you want to see any devotee who is very near and dear to Krsna then you can go to Sankara. He is always absorbed in krsna-nama-sankirtana. He is always dancing and weeping. His hair is standing on end with asta-sattvika bhavas. But sometimes, so many contradictory things can be seen in Sankara. Why does he wear a garland of skulls? Sometimes he takes the ashes from the crematorium on his body. Why does he wear poisonous snakes? He eats the leaves of a very poisonous plant. If this poison goes in your heart or eyes you will be at once blind and you will die. He also accepts datura, another poisonous plant. Why is he always naked? Because he is always absorbed in krsna-bhakti, prema-bhakti. He wears all the skulls and the ashes from the crematorium because he is telling us that this physical body will die one day and become ashes. If it is not burned, then what will become of it? It will become the stool of any animal or bird because they will eat the flesh of that dead person. If the body is buried, then so many insects will come and eat his body. This is the destination of this body. Therefore he is wearing these bones and skulls.
“Why is he wearing serpents? They are very poisonous. Because his ista-deva is Maha-Sankarsana, the embodiment of Sesa Naga. To show honor to Sesa Naga, he is wearing these snakes. Why is he wearing a candra, a moon? Because he is the forefather of Krsna. Therefore he wears the moon on his head. He is naked but he has a very beautiful wife, like Uma or Sati. Why? He can digest this. He can control his senses. We cannot do this. Same thing for him. To be naked or be with Uma, he has no lust or anything. If lakhs and lakhs of Uma’s come, no lust can come in him, because he is always full of krsna-prema. But we cannot tolerate, we cannot digest all these things. Even a little bit. If we see a very beautiful lady naked, we cannot check ourselves.
“To show all these things, Sankara did like this. Sankara is a very bona-fide Vaisnava: ‘vaisnavanam yatha sambhuh.’” Brahma is saying, “Siva and Krsna are the same. We should not see any difference in Siva’s name and Krsna’s name, both are the same. Sometimes He becomes Krsna and sometimes He becomes Siva.” However he is just glorifying, knowing that Krsna is not Siva and Siva is not Krsna. Some people have doubts about this. We have no doubt because we hear from the mouth of Siva himself saying, “I am not Krsna.” We should learn all the teachings of Vaisnava siddhanta from them. These are like questions, what Brahma is telling about Sankara. It is like a question and all the questions will be answered by Siva himself. Then some questions will come for Prahlada Maharaja and Prahlada Maharaja will also answer like this and we should try to follow according to our stage.
Thus we can recognize who is a Vaisnava, who is superior, who is less superior, and who is an uttama-adhikari, by understanding all these things. We can discriminate and then properly respect and give some honor to all kinds of Vaisnavas, otherwise we cannot do anything. Otherwise you may think that an uttama-adhikari Vaisnava is a very bogus person and not a devotee. We may also think a bogus devotee, artificially having such mota mota tilaka, big tilaka, and big big kunti mala, one kilo even, is a pure devotee. He will take a mala tulsi, very big, it may even be one mile long [devotees laugh], and we may think he is a pure devotee because he has such a big mala.
His tilaka is so big and when he is walking, he is loudly chanting, “Hare Krsna Hare Krsna!” If there are a lot of devotees, he will speak and dance. Only if there are so many devotees around. If there are no devotees around, he will put down his mala and he will sleep. This is artificial and we should try to know all these things. If you are knowing that he is a Vaisnava but are not properly respecting him, it is an offense. If there is a bad person, a non-devotee and you are respecting him, then it is also an offense against bhakti.
Understand? You are doing upahasa, ridicule of Bhakti-devi. Bhakti knows everything. It is written anywhere that someone once gave tilaka to the forehead of a donkey and everyone was doing pranama to that donkey. They are all donkey’s because they don’t know the difference between a donkey and a devotee. So they are also a donkey. We should know all these things properly.
