Pariprashnena — Q&A Archive

While I was in Poland at the Woodstock festival a devotee told me of a dream he had. Prabhupada came to him and said, "Tell the sankirtan devotees that by this activity of book distribution I personally will take them back home, back to Godhead." ys Vijaya das

This one is a bit longer but very special.

I heard one devotee gave a book to a politician and he looked at the BG cover, he said, very nice and died on the spot.

In AU I was doing street sk and I met a lady. As soon as she saw the book, she started crying and said: I have them all. She is a very dear disciple of Srila Prabhupada and she was so happy to see SP books distribution in her town.

I know one. One Mataji was living in India, worshiping Lord Shiva in a very isolated place so their parents sent a cousin of her to tell her to come back home. He went to India and he got a Prabhupadas book in the airport and when he arrived he talked to her but she didnt want to come back. He told her he got a book in the airport and gave it to her and left.

After reading that book she started having doubts about what she was doing and left to know more about Krsna.
Today she is preaching and still distributing books because she knows better than anyone the power of Srila Prabhupadas books.

I was looking for a place to tell this story but it is a little mundane, still it is a kind of sankirtana story. Funny, when I joined they said it is sad when all you have to tell is old sankirtana stories.
Anyway when I first became a devotee I was still in the Marines and I moved to the San Diego temple. At that time the devotees used to go to the rest stop in the middle of my old base, Camp Pendleton, California, to sell cookies and canned sodas offered to Krishna to motorists. I told my sankirtana leader that this is the base I was AWOL from, absent without authorised leave, because they were stalling on giving me my discharge. But he said Krishna will protect you. The temple authorities all figured it out.
So first I met someone from my old company and he was surprised to see me there but I told him I had just gotten out of the Marines, which is what my sankirtana leader told me to say if I ever saw any of the old Marines who knew me. He looked like he didnt believe me. About a week or two later my platoon leader, an officer, came right up and stared into my face, then walked into the bathroom. Just then my van leader came up and I told him what had happened and he quickly took my place at the table and told me to go wait in the back of the sankirtana van and hide. About five minutes later he pulled open the door and told me the Lueitenant had come out of the bathroom and saw him and started saying, "Where is he? Where is he?" and walked all around looking for me in car windows and then finally drove away really angry.
After that when I got back they no longer sent me to Camp Pendleton and that is when they sent me to rest stops further north of there in California to keep me from being caught. Eventually I did get caught however in Arizona before there was a temple there. My van leader and myself had gotten out of our van in our dhotis and kurtas at a mall next to a bank and the bank manager called the police and told them there were two men in their pajamas in the parking lot! I guess that must have been against the law there.