Thu 28 Mar – The maha offering
A sight to behold. These are the words to describe the beautiful, and delicious, assortment of offerings made to Kadamba Kanana Swami.
More than 108 different dishes, too many to name them all. And from just reading you would get super greedy, wanting to eat them all. But the mercy is to give the mercy away, so the many offerings were gone in an instant. Rasgulla’s, Gulab jamun’s, rasa malai and abundant fruits. Lemon rice, yellow rice, flower rice and sweet rice. The list goes on and on and on. And after this mercy, it was time again for the evening bhajans.
Fri 29 Mar – Vrindakund and Ter Kadamba
Going on any parikrama is an adventure. Or, as Jayapataka swami calls it, on safari. First there were no buses. Then there were three, at a ‘stone throw away’ and finally the fourth bus appeared. Before we knew it we were on our way to the first stop, Vrindakund. After a dusty ride through the villages we disembarked and found ourselves at the beautiful Vrindakund. We were greeting with a lovely breakfast and our master of ceremonies, Padmanabha, guided us through the schedule of the day. Bhajans, more bhajans and almost a harinam by Jayananda swami. Jayadvaita swami gave a short but powerful talk with some interesting questions at the end.
And before we got to digest the philosophy we headed off to Ter Kadamba.
A forest of Kadamba trees, or was it just one tree? The whole ‘temple’ looked like one huge Kadamba tree supported by many columns. And in the middle was a small building with a mural, but against the trunk of the massive tree stood Krishna and Balarama, playfully. The local? babaji made a special ‘show’ for us where he related pastimes of Krishna and Balarama. We couldn’t understand half of his words but the show was great. At one point he dressed up as a gopi with a pot made of clay on his head. And he magically made sweet rice appear and distributed it. We had a good laugh, and the babaji was the talk of the town afterwards in the bus.
After the brief visit we headed back to Vrindavan where the evening bhajans were waiting for us. It was a good (hot) day.
Photos by Uddhava