Vaishnava Culture

His Divine Grace Om Vishnupad
Srila Bhakti Nirmal Acharya Maharaj
Evening class at Nrisingha Palli
1 September 2018, part 2

If you live in a house, you must think yourself what you are eating. If you do not offer food to the Lord, how will you conquer the prapancha?

You have five diseases—that is written in the scriptures, I have told you about it before. How will you cure these five diseases that you have? If you go to a pharmacy or a hospital, you can cure cancer, you can cure other diseases, but you cannot cure these material diseases with that kind of medicine. You must remove these five diseases from your heart, and for that you must take pure medicine, you must take proper medicine. What is the medicine?

The medicine is in front of you, but somebody take it, somebody does not. Most people do not take it, that is why they cannot remove these diseases from their hearts. "Prasada-seva karite haya, sakala prapancha-jaya (প্রসাদ-সেবা করিতে হয় সকল প্রপঞ্চ জয়): by honouring the Lord's prasad all material faults are removed." [Srila Bhaktivinod Thakur]

If you think you are hungry and buy something and eat it, that is not prasad. First you must buy something and offer it to Gurudev, offer it to the Deities, then you can take it, otherwise the scriptures say that if you eat something without offering it to the Deities and Gurudev first, you are eating stool. That is Vaishnav culture.

What is the difference? What have you taken initiation for? Outside people who are not devotees (not initiated) also chant the Holy Name, but they take outside food, eat at random—they cook for themselves or their wife or mother cooks for them and they eat that, but devotees should not do that.

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