Swami Padmanabha shares how Bhaktivinoda Thakura’s life and journey is something we can relate to as a sadhaka and draw hope and inspiration to nourish our own progress.

Some of the lessons we can draw from Bhaktivinoda’s values, visions and practices:

• the guru does not need to be a nitya-siddha and even if your guru rejects you, you can still reach perfection.
• being a grihastha speaks against the necessity for asceticism—all perfection can be attained in social position
• trans-institutional commitment - he did not belong to any institution and felt that the life of a tradition is in the commitment to persons, to hearts,, to an ideal
• reformer - because of his love for the Gaudiya tradition, he criticized it strongly, as persons entrusted with leadership are called to do
• alive interaction with modernity—he felt a necessity to find a new language to explain the constant evolution of reality, with “today’s perfection becoming tomorrow’s imperfection”, and to be in sync with the concerns and capabilities of the time, place and circumstance he was in.
• pioneer - in 1896 (the year that Srila Prabhupada was born) Bhaktivinoda Thakura sent McGill University in Montreal his book Lord Chaitanya, His Life and Precepts which they placed int their library. Consider how consuming was the task to explain Gaura-Gadadhara’s heart to someone from a different culture who has not background in Gaudiya Vaisnavism
• Inter-religious theological cross-pollination - the Thakura saw the potential of deepening one’s love for the form of their worshipable Lord by going to another’s place of worship
• allegorical presentation of scripture that created a connection between lila and the life of sadhakas

and much more…

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RADICAL PERSONALISM: Revival Manifesto for Proactive Devotion.