by Swami BV Suddhadvaiti

Preaching in Armenia

After the wonderful festival with Srila Gurudeva near Moscow, I flew to Erevan, Armenia on the 13^th of August. The Armenians are quite tolerant people. They’ve been persecuted along the centuries, so they don’t like to give people a hard time. After the genocide by the Turks in 1915, who took away most of the territory of Armenia, including the Mount Ararat where it is said that Noah’s Ark landed on after the Flood, came the Communist Regime; Stalin wanted to finish Armenia. He “gave” part of it to Azerbaijan and some to Georgia, leaving only a small 8% of their original land to Armenians…

When I presented my passport at the immigration control, the lady very kindly told me, “Oh! You must have forgotten to take a visa. Just buy one at this next counter.” And the visa-issuing officer, when I couldn’t give an address, told me just to write ‘Hotel Erevan”…

Our Gokulcandra prabhu had just flown the day before from Moscow and welcomed me with a couple of local devotees, Govardhana dasa and Bhakta Arsen, who was to be my translator. He told me proudly that Erevan is the oldest city in the world. We passed by the American Embassy, the “longest building in the world”, where the locals say the Americans have the Bomb…

Armenia is quite poor. We drove on one road where there were only gambling casinos for tourists on 2 kilometers…

I left Moscow under the rain, and the heat here was fierce: 42° Celsius. Gokulcandra went to buy a big watermelon. One senior lady told me how she was surprised of the small size of the watermelons in Navadvipa in comparison with the huge local ones…

The pioneer of our sanga here was Sripad Padmanabha Maharaja who visited ten years ago before taking sannyasa. Then Sripad Damodara Maharaja came two years ago, and Sripad Sadhu Maharaja during last winter. There’s about 40 devotees. They’re very eager for sadhusanga as their feeble income hardly allows them to go to India.

They had rented an old house for one week to have our programs. Around twelve of them came that first evening. As it was the disappearance day of Vamsidas Babaji Maharaja, I spoke a bit about him. Babaji Maharaja was asked, “How can we attain God? I want to find Him.” He simply replied “Cry!” That reminded me of Srila Gour Govinda Maharaja, who used to say that nobody ever got mercy without crying for it and that’s why he had opened a ‘crying school’ in Bhubaneswara…

“What should we do, Babaji Maharaja?” “Worship Nitai and you’ll get Gaura. Your unhappiness will go away and you’ll begin to feel real joy.”

I told the story of a South Indian sannyasi who had come to Nabadvipa, where Babaji Maharaja was living under a tree in a tent. He was advised to go and take his darshan. When the sannyasi saw Gour Nitai Deities, each in a cloth bag hanging from the roof of the tent, he inquired who They were, as the two Saviors of Nadia are little known in South India. He was answered, “The One on the right is the chief of the dacoits of Nabadvipa, and the One on the left is His right hand man.” Unaccustomed to Babaji Maharaja’s unconventional way to teach, the sannyasi mumbled something, paid obeisances and left…

Babaji Maharaja used to cook in different pots for the two Lords. Once, these cooking pots were stolen. The next day, Lord Gauranga’s pot surfaced again. Babaji Maharaja started to cook for Him, but he told Sri Nityananda Prabhu, “If You want to eat, You’d better bring back Your pot!”…

“How can we become free from the demands of the senses?”

Babaji Maharaja replied, quoting the words of Takura Narottama in Prema bhakti Candrika, “suniya govinda-rab apani palabe sab, simha-rabe jatha kariya-gan :They’ll all flee at the sound of Govinda’s name, just as the deer flee at the sound of the lion’s roar.”

“If there’s no happiness in this world, then?” “There’s no joy here, unless you worship Gour Nitai. That’s our eternal world, while this world of yours is an illusion. Happiness in this world is like the laughing or crying of a dreaming baby. Happiness and distress are twins…”

After the genocide, many Armenians fled to America and Europe. A lot of them went to France, where the Armenian diaspora is still quite important. Later, many came back, so French words are commonly used. Everyone says “merci” for “thank you”. A senior lady devotee, (whose daughter lives in Germany and received diksa from Gurudeva in an airport) was telling me “merci, merci” at the end of that first program. This morning, she came with a beautiful Tulasi plant to bless our gatherings…

I was repeating the words of Srila Prabhupada comparing our vain attempts to enjoy separately from Krishna to a hand which would try to enjoy food directly without giving it to the mouth. A devotee asked, “If someone chants one lakh a day but doesn’t do any seva at all, is that like this hand?” I then explained that chanting was also seva and that it was all depending on his consciousness, and that the test was whether he was becoming proud as a result or if he was developing the qualities of the trnad api sunicena verse…

The owner of the house, an old lady, came and we shared some fruit prasadam. I gave her a garland; she was beaming, “Is it really for me? Can I keep it?” This morning, her daughter came and asked many questions about yoga, bhakti, reincarnation…

I spent a couple of hours last night sorting the hundreds of pictures I had taken during the festival, to mail to as many devotees I could get the email from, a picture of them with Gurudeva when they received harinam or diksa or approached him to give him a donation. For most of them, this will be the only picture of them with their guru they’ll ever have. I remember doing the same in January in Brazil during Gurudeva’s Vyasapuja, and the gratefulness expressed by the devotees I mailed pictures to. While I was asking devotees their email address during the Moscow festival and I was telling them why, sheer joy in disbelief and humble gratefulness was illuminating many a face…

Armenians love to sing and we had some nice kirtans. Gurudeva blessed two new devotees with harinama and gave diksa to another four. We had a fire-yajna in the garden and the owner came with her daughters and grand daughter and the little three-years old was eagerly throwing grains in the fire: Svaha!

The Church of Armenia was established in the 3^rd Century. Armenia was the first nation in the world to embrace Christianity as its state religion. They have very old, beautiful churches. Bhakta Arsen told me that archeological diggings found three Vedic temples of Krishna from the pre-Christian era, and that Armenia was the center of Vedic culture in the area…

An American-born Armenian came to Armenia and opened an Evangelical Church, of which his son is the present minister. Bhakta Arsen arranged for a program there. We first met and talked with the minister and he invited us to have dinner and talk with his senior preachers a couple of days after that. He said that in this way maybe they could learn something about our “religion”. I mentioned that we didn’t see bhakti as a separate religion but as the common denominator in all of them: love and service to God.

It was the last evening program with the devotees, and when we left some were in tears, begging me to come back to Armenia and spend more time. Malati didi, the Georgian wife of our Indian Akhilesh prabhu, who had come to get her Indian visa and help with translation, accompanied us.

At the Church, the minister had two guests from Switzerland who were sharing their faith. When we arrived, the minister announced that I was a hindu monk from France, and that I would present the beliefs of the Vedic culture; he invited his parishioners to come and ask questions. We went down with him to the “family restaurant” he had just opened next to the Church. We sat down, started to chat, seeing how we were both preachers; His wife and two of his daughters asked questions. Everything was fine until the two Swiss came. As I was speaking, one of them started to cut me, “no, no, no, no” and argue, “Can you see the spirit?” I told him that yes but I was not interested in an argument. This was supposed to be a meeting on Vedic culture not a religious debate. I kept on talking to the ladies. He was agitated and became more and more aggressive. I thought, “OMG I don’t want to argue with this guy!” He asked “Who is your God?” I answered, “There’s only one God. We call Him Krishna, others call Him Yaveh, Jehovah, Allah” “No, No, no!” “You call Him God the father” “No, my God is Jesus and he has nothing to do with your God” I told him he would be very surprised the day he would see Krishna and Jesus together, and that he would realize then what a fool he was. “Why are you so narrow? Open your heart and your mind. Why so much fanaticism? Then you have the Muslims who say,’ only Allah, only Mohammad’, and then with people like you we have wars.” He kept on barking. I told him I didn’t want to speak with him, and turned again to the ladies. He then told them it was a waste of time to listen to me. I told him he was entitled to his opinions and that we could politely agree that we disagree. “One last thing”, he said, “Are you interested in God or in spirituality?” I asked him to define what he meant by spirituality and he said that there were two levels of the spiritual world, one with the spirit of God and the other one with the spirit of the Devil, that the fight between good and evil was not going inside of us but on that other level. “Do you know which spirit is moving you?” “Yes, the spirit of God.” “No, there’s no spirit of God in you.” “That’s your opinion. The people I just left were begging me to stay as they felt inspired.” “Inspired for what?” “To develop their love for God” “Your Krishna is a poor fake.” I was not sure I had heard properly. I asked him what he would do and feel if someone blasphemed Jesus. He said, “Nothing, He’s big enough to take care of Himself. It’s between him and that person, nothing to do with me.” He added “Krishna is a demon.” I got up immediately and told the minister I was very sorry by the turn of the events but that I wouldn’t remain one moment more, that I wouldn’t tolerate blasphemy and that if I didn’t leave I was supposed to cut the tongue of that blasphemer. Malati was chastising the two Swiss, saying it was a shame and a disgrace to see such Christians, that she was more Christian than them. I was about to break a bottle and push it in that rascal’s mouth, but I remembered that many years ago the Police raided the Iskcon temple with a group of Christians, broke everything, beat up the devotees, and took them to jail…The minister was very sorry and apologized profusely. He took us up to the gate.

In the taxi I was lamenting that I had left loving devotees for that. I was angry at myself not to have reacted more strongly. I spent half of the night fighting with this rascal in dreams…

The next morning we left for Vanasdur, another city three hours away. We stopped on the way to visit an old Church on a peninsula on the beautiful Sevan lake, one of the largest of the area with the Baikal lake in Siberia. We took the Armenian Silk Road through forests and mountains…Bhakta Arsen, who had come to translate, left with our driver back to Erevan and I had to give class for the first time in Russian, with the help of Jiva dasa a young devotee who speaks a bit of English. Our host, Shyama prabhu, was the first devotee in Armenia. As the temple president of the Iskcon temple raided by the Police in Erevan he spent three years in jail, including one year in Baku, Azerbaidjan, of sad fame. There was only meat and vegetables together, and bread, on the menu, so he only ate bread all that time, losing part of his eyesight. He chants one lakh a day, is a great cook and was very humble. He asked nice questions about Srila Gour Govinda Maharaja…  One lady, Syamala didi, who lives in a neighboring village and keeps a few cows, told an extraordinary story: One day, after a festival, she gave some prasadam to her neighbor, who asked her for the first time about her “beliefs”. When she spoke of reincarnation, the lady told her she strongly believed in it and explained her why: She had lost a seven years old son, and was bitterly lamenting, visiting his tomb every day. One night, less than a year after his death, as she had been to cry again on his tomb on that day, she had a dream in which she saw her son and he told her, “Mother, why do you lament? Don’t cry anymore. I am with you now.” She found out shortly after that she was pregnant. She had a boy again, who always reminded her of her first dead son. Eighteen years later, she took her second son to the cemetery for the first time. When he saw the picture of the dead son, he exclaimed, “But that’s me there!”

I left the next morning with Malati didi for Georgia in a Marchudka, a taxi minibus, packed with travelers. A young Armenian lady of the age of my last daughter, Sumukhi dasi, asked me a lot of questions and I preached to her part of the way. She had an ancient name, Nairi which, as a devotee had explained to me earlier, is the name of the previous inhabitants of Armenia, the Airy, or Aryans…