Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #31 – Rubies, Diamonds, Rings, and Pearls
Dhanurdhara Swami July 28th, 2025
“Rubies, diamonds, rings, and pearls
Just to attract fools to the spiritual world
Dashing, handsome, and carefree
Bhavānanda Goswami”
Those days were wild!
Śrīla Prabhupāda had just left this world. Devotees, barely thirty years old, practically none with even ten years in the Hare Krishna Movement, had taken up the service of succeeding him. They were lavished with worship and opulence by their followers. I personally believe most were very sincere, but how was it possible for such young people, relatively inexperienced in Krishna consciousness, to digest the opulence and adoration that was bestowed upon them? It wasn’t. Except for very rare exceptions, they failed.
It was 1978, at Śrīla Prabhupda’s first disappearance festival. Haṁsadūta Swami, one of those devotees, made his homage to Śrīla Prabhupāda. He came with his guitar and strummed a folk song glorifying the new “ācāryas’’ with a stanza he composed for each. It seemed out of place, but I guess he saw it as a kind of offering to Śrīla Prabhupāda to tout the attainment of his followers. The above stanza dedicated to Bhavānanda particularly stuck in my mind. As a leader at the time, I found him very personal and empowering. He was, however, awash with cash from his new followers. His strategy to spread Krishna consciousness seemed to have as much to do with his attachments as his mood of service. He would attract people to the path of bhakti by making Krishna consciousness as luxurious as possible, including his own lifestyle. Unfortunately, like most in his situation, the opulence and worship eventually dragged him down from his position.
At around the same time, we especially became concerned with another one of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s “successors” who was buying huge castles in Europe. In the one the castles I visited, his vyāsāsana, the guru’s traditional seat of authority, was over five feet high!
A group of us went to Śrīla Nārāyaṇa Mahārāja to express our concern:
“If he is attached to sitting on a big seat, will he fall?”
I loved his answer.
“He is already fallen!”
And soon he did.
Personal opulence therefore is usually seen as an obstacle in Krishna consciousness. It is often described as a fever, the outward symptom of an inner disease.
“The material covering of the pure spirit soul is an external feature, as much as fever is an external feature of the unhealthy body. The general process is to decrease the degree of the fever and not to aggravate it by maltreatment.” Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.8.26 purport
Conversely, material impoverishment is lauded on the path of bhakti.
“Sometimes it is seen that spiritually advanced persons become materially impoverished. This is no discouragement. On the other hand, such impoverishment is a good sign as much as the falling of temperature is a good sign.” Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.8.26 purport, continued
But does material opulence have to be a sign, or an external feature, of an unhealthy consciousness?
No. In fact, it could also be a sign of the opposite.
I am studying Bṛhad-bhāgavatāmṛta every day with a friend. We noticed that as Gopa-kumāra ascends to higher and higher planets, not only does the spiritual attainment of its residents substantially increase, but so does their standard of material happiness and opulence. We reconciled the two ideas as follows:
“Bhakti means to offer the best to Śrī Krishna. Therefore, while Śrī Krishna is often reluctant to lavish his devotees with opulence, he also may benedict them with opulence if they can offer it to Krishna in a mood of pure devotion. Śrīmatī Radhika is the perfect example of this. She is mahābhāva-svarūpā, the form (svarūpā) of the highest devotion (mahābhāva). Everything about her svarūpā therefore, from her beauty to her talents, is the best or most excellent as a pure offering of the highest devotion for the pleasure of Śrī Krishna.”
I recently heard that my Godbrother Ambarish dasa is in critical condition. We should all offer our prayers for him. He is a scion of the Ford family, the great grandson of Henry Ford. I am mentioning him here because he is a good example of Śrī Krishna trusting his devotee with His opulence. A substantial part of his wealth has therefore been used to serve Krishna in various ways. Years ago, he purchased the Fisher Mansion for ISKCON Detroit. Presently he serves as the chairman and financial backbone of the TOVP (the Temple of the Vedic Planetarium). Rather than becoming proud, however, he has always remained very humble.
Let me finish this post with a memory from one of my early visits to an ISKCON temple, an example that neatly illustrates this fine line between becoming distracted by and appropriately using opulence in the service of Śrī Krishna.
During lunch in 1971 at the Brooklyn ISKCON temple, I heard a class over the loudspeaker in which the teacher quoted Śrīla Prabhupāda:
“We can take over the world in eighteen days if all my devotees became Krishna conscious.”
I thought to myself, “If Krishna ever gave us that level of power, if He gave us the world, the fever of material life would certainly overcome us.” But as Śrīla Prabhupāda indicated, it doesn’t have to be that way. Perhaps we can mature and then sing a different tune:
Rubies, diamonds, rings, and pearls.
Just to serve Krishna in the material world!
- Monday Morning Greetings
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