20221101 Addressing Gopāṣṭamī Celebration

mūkaṁ karoti vācālaṁ paṅguṁ laṅghayate girim
yat-kṛpā tam ahaṁ vande śrī-guruṁ dīna-tāraṇam
paramānanda-mādhavam śrī caitanya īśvaram
Harihi oṁ tat sat

Jayapatākā Swami: Govinda! Govinda! Govinda! Kṛṣṇa, on the day of His birth, He was taken in Vṛndāvana. And in Vṛndāvana, He grew up as the son of Yaśodā and Nanda Mahārāja. And therefore, His whole youth was spent as a cow protector. When He was a young boy, He was grazing the calves and then when He got bigger, He was allowed to graze the cows. Is today the day He graduated from grazing calves to cows? I think Gopāṣṭamī is something like that. Anyway, the cows are especially, if they are well protected, the human society advances. We need some animal fat, so that is provided by milk products. We don’t have to kill any animal. We can get the perfect food, the milk of the cow gives us finer, spiritual intelligence to understand that human beings, we are not this body, that we are meant to serve Kṛṣṇa. So, these cows are very important. And we see that in Kṛṣṇa’s pastimes, the cows play an important part. The cows, bulls at the end of this life if they die naturally, in the next birth, they take birth as human beings in the mode of goodness. The tigers take birth as humans in passion and the monkeys take birth as humans in ignorance. So having cows, that means the human society will also benefit in various way. So it is kind of barbaric how they are killing cows today. In India, one of the goals of the constitution was to protect the cows, but they lack the initiative to do it naturally, not nationally. They left it to each state – unfortunately, two states Bengal and Kerala are the two states where cow killing is allowed. Of course, we are fortunate that we have the ISKCON Cow Protection and Agriculture minister is here in Māyāpur. I don’t know if he has been invited to speak. But in Nepal, in our temple in Kathmandu, some sweet talkers came up and said “Oh, can we have some of your bulls? We can use them for ploughing.” The devotees said that they would have to sign that the bulls will not be killed. They said: “sure, sure.” But they apparently smuggled the bulls across Bengal into Bangladesh, and they were slaughtered. So somehow our Cow Protection Minister, he found this out and told us. So I did not know, but as a GBC I was informed. Then, so we have to see, we don’t rely on signing, we don’t give cows away in Māyāpur or anywhere, it is not allowed. Because we cannot really trust the people. For us, cows are very important. We want to protect them, we want to serve them. All glories to the cow!

Can I speak in Bengali a little? The cow is our special goal. It is our responsibility to take care of the cows in every way and protect them. In kṛṣṇa-līlā, He had the pastime of taking protection of the cows. Indra deva when he got angry and had torrential rains pour over Vṛndāvana, then Kṛṣṇa had protected the cows. He lifted the Govardhana hill on one finger and for seven days and nights He held the Govardhana hill and under that all the cows and the vraja-vāsīs took shelter. They have made a model of this Govardhana-līlā and displayed it in our temple here. After that Indra realized his mistake. And one of the names was Govinda which was given by Indra deva. This way Lord Kṛṣṇa got the name Govinda. He protected the cows. Haribol! I spoke in short as there are many speakers who will speak.