20231120 Gopāṣṭamī Festival Address

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: I am trying to remember how I was trying to plough the land with the bulls. Śrīla Prabhupāda sent some people to plough with the bulls. I don’t remember if he told me, but somehow, I was doing it. I mean, I used to ride a horse, with stirrups, they had reins. If you want to turn, pull the rein the direction you want to go. They are just controlled by voice commands. So if you want them to go right there is a Bengali call language – “Da, da, da, da!” If you want to go left say “Ba, ba, ba.” If you want them to turn around say, “Gur, gur, gur, gur!” Apparently in different parts of the world there are different languages for the cows, you have to learn cow language. Elephants know more commands than the cows. They don’t have reins. I realized that bulls are people! And they have their language, and we know that more or less, half of the calves are male, and half are female. So, if you don’t engage the bulls then they would sell them off to the slaughterhouse. We don’t sell bulls, we don’t sell cows. We have to protect them. So we want them to be engaged. In that way, they will be protected.

And if you read about Kṛṣṇa in Vṛndāvana how He takes out the cows, how He takes out the bulls, the cows and bulls are very special. Of course, there was a demon Ariṣṭāsura, who attacked the gopīs and gopas in the form of a bull. So Kṛṣṇa liberated him. But Rādhārāṇī, she was joking with Kṛṣṇa, “Now You are contaminated, You killed a male cow, don’t come near us! You have to go to all the holy places and purify Yourself.” So Kṛṣṇa said, “You think I will go all over the world to all the holy places? I will call them here!” So then He called all the holy places and they filled up Śyāma-kuṇḍa. Then He told Rādhārāṇī, “Let Me cut a canal between Śyāma-kuṇḍa to Your kuṇḍa.” Rādhārāṇī had Her sakhīs created Rādhā-kuṇḍa but there was no water. Then the personified holy places came and prayed to Rādhārāṇī. Rādhārāṇī asked, “What do you want?” They said, “We also want to be in Your kuṇḍa.” And Lalitā told Rādhārāṇī, “It is alright.” So then, all the holy waters came from Śyāma-kuṇḍa to Rādhā-kuṇḍa. So even a bull was the cause of Rādhā-kuṇḍa.

In Vṛndāvana, the cows, bulls, they are very important. So, in the beginning we did not have any tractors, we only used bulls for ploughing. There are some things, what you call, smoothing the land by a device called moyi. So like that we want to use the bulls and we can get an idea from our Cow Ministry. And we use the bulls for pulling people, for ploughing. I saw sometimes they use the bull to separate the husk from the grain. The bulls are very important, and we want to protect our bulls. So here in Mayapur, we are living in a holy place. And there we would like to see the cow has life and we want to see bulls taking the people all around the Master Plan. We don’t want machines; we want live bulls. Hare Kṛṣṇa!