The Deliverance of Gopīnātha Paṭṭanāyaka

According to the opinion of some historians, Prahlāda Mahārāja was born in Tretā-yuga in the city of Multan, in the state of Punjab. He was born of Hiraṇyakaśipu, a king of the dynasty of Kaśyapa. Prahlāda Mahārāja was a great devotee of Lord Viṣṇu, but his father was very much against Viṣṇu. Because the father and son thus differed in their consciousness, the demon father inflicted all kinds of bodily pain upon Prahlāda. When this torture became intolerable, the Supreme Lord appeared as Nṛsiṁhadeva and killed the great demon Hiraṇyakaśipu.

Bali Mahārāja was the grandson of Prahlāda Mahārāja. The son of Prahlāda Mahārāja was Virocana, and his son was known as Bali. Appearing as Vāmana and begging Bali Mahārāja for three feet of land, the Lord took possession of the entire three worlds. Thus Bali Mahārāja became a great devotee of Lord Vāmana. Bali Mahārāja had one hundred sons, of whom Mahārāja Bāṇa was the eldest and most famous.

Vyāsadeva was the son of the great sage Parāśara. Other names for him are Sātyavateya and Kṛṣṇa-dvaipāyana Bādarāyaṇa Muni. As one of the authorities on the Vedas, he divided the original Veda, for convenience, into four divisions — Sāma, Yajur, Ṛg and Atharva. He is the author of eighteen Purāṇas as well as the theosophical thesis Brahma-sūtra and its natural commentary, Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam. He belongs to the Brahma-sampradāya and is a direct disciple of Nārada Muni.

Śukadeva Gosvāmī is the son of Vyāsadeva. He was a brahmacārī fully conscious of Brahman realization, but later he became a great devotee of Lord Kṛṣṇa. He narrated Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam to Mahārāja Parīkṣit.

The cāṅga was a device for killing a condemned person. It consisted of a raised platform on which the condemned was made to stand. Underneath the platform, there were stationary upright swords. The condemned man would be pushed down onto the swords, and in this way he would die. For some reason, Gopīnātha Paṭṭanāyaka had been condemned to death and had therefore been raised upon the cāṅga.

The Supreme Personality of Godhead will certainly protect a devotee who does something sinful accidentally. As the Lord says in the Bhagavad-gītā (9.30-31):

“Even if one commits the most abominable actions, if he is engaged in devotional service he is to be considered saintly because he is properly situated in his determination. He quickly becomes righteous and attains lasting peace. O son of Kuntī, declare it boldly that My devotee never perishes.” However, if a devotee or so-called devotee purposefully commits sinful activities continually in the hope that Kṛṣṇa will give him protection, Kṛṣṇa will not protect him. Therefore Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu said, kāli ke rākhibe, yadi nā dibe rāja-dhana?: “Jagannātha has saved Gopīnātha Paṭṭanāyaka from being killed by the King today, but if he commits the same offense again, who will give him protection?” Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu thus warns all such foolish devotees that Jagannātha will not protect them if they continue to commit offenses.

Becoming a devotee of the Lord to serve material purposes is a great mistake. Many people become showbottle devotees for material profits. Indeed, materialistic persons sometimes take to professional devotional service and keep Viṣṇu, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, as a means of livelihood. None of this, however, is approved. In the book known as Sapta-śatī, as mentioned by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura, one can discover how a person worshiping the goddess Durgā begs her for different varieties of material profit. Such activities are very popular among people in general, but they are the attempts of foolish, blind people (sei jñāna-andha).

A materialist does not actually know why one should become a devotee. A devotee’s only concern is to satisfy the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Pure devotional service is defined by Śrīla Rūpa Gosvāmī:

One should be completely free from all material desires and should serve Kṛṣṇa simply to please Him. When people become interested in their own sense gratification (bhukti-mukti-siddhi-kāmī), some of them desire to enjoy the material world to the fullest extent, some of them desire to be liberated and merge into the existence of Brahman, and others want to perform magic through mystic power and thus become incarnations of God. These are all against the principles of devotional service. One must be free from all material desires. The desire of the impersonalist to merge into the existence of Brahman is also material because such an impersonalist wants to gratify his senses by merging into the existence of Kṛṣṇa instead of serving His lotus feet. Even if such a person merges into the Brahman effulgence, he falls down again into material existence. As stated in Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam (10.2.32):

Because Māyāvādī philosophers have no information regarding the transcendental service of the Lord, even after attaining liberation from material activities and merging into the Brahman effulgence, they must come down again to this material world.

Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura comments that there are many materialistic persons who become preachers, gurus, religionists or philosophers only for the sake of maintaining a high standard of living and sense gratification for themselves and their families. Sometimes they adopt the dress of a sannyāsī or preacher. They train some of their family members as lawyers and continually seek help from a high court to acquire riches on the plea of maintaining temples. Although such persons may call themselves preachers, live in Vṛndāvana or Navadvīpa, and also print many religious books, it is all for the same purpose, namely to earn a living to maintain their wives and children. They may also professionally recite the Bhāgavatam or other scriptures, worship the Deity in the temple and initiate disciples. Making a show of devotional paraphernalia, they may also collect money from the public and use it to cure the disease of some family member or near relative. Sometimes they become bābājīs or collect money on the plea of worshiping the poor, whom they call daridra-nārāyaṇa, or for social and political upliftment. Thus they spread a network of business schemes to collect money for sense gratification by cheating people in general, who have no knowledge of pure devotional service. Such cheaters cannot understand that by offering devotional service to the Supreme Personality of Godhead, one can be elevated to a position of eternal servitude to the Lord, which is even greater than the position of Brahmā and other demigods. Unfortunately, fools have no understanding of the perpetual pleasure of devotional service.

This is a verse from Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam (10.14.8).

When the King heard the details of Gopīnātha Paṭṭanāyaka’s unfortunate condemnation, he was induced to excuse his debt, in particular because he felt that Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu was very sorry about this incident. The Lord did not like the idea that the money forfeited to Gopīnātha Paṭṭanāyaka was indirectly a contribution to Him. Therefore He immediately protested.

The kauḍi is like an American cent or Japanese yen. In the old medium of exchange, the first unit of currency was a small conchshell called a kauḍi. Four kauḍis made one gaṇḍā, twenty gaṇḍās made one paṇa, and sixteen paṇas made one kāhana. Gopīnātha Paṭṭanāyaka owed the government 200,000 kāhanas. The King absolved him of this debt, reappointed him to his post and doubled his salary.