Hmmmmmm.....Oh yeah!..BOOK CHANGES!

Dear Jayadvaita Maharaja,

PAMHO, AGTSP!

We have not corresponded directly on the matter of book changes, or editing (or censoring?), and I have a few questions that I am sure you, more than anyone else could answer.

Apart from weird controversies, and at times polarized views on various subjects, I,of course) have always and always will consider you my very dear god brother. This is eternal, and by definition,controversies of these types, are (by their very nature) not eternal.

If you like, why not reply between the lines, with upper case so I can tell that it is you!

1. I admire and applaud your interest in comparing the 1974 texts with other edits and perhaps, (when not re-recorded over by Srila Prabhupada) the original tapes. As I have posted to others, this is as inevitable event as the pursuit of Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadhi papyruses to cast new light on the body of Christian literature....Not only you will do primary research, and undoubtedly print facsimile editions of the pre-edited transcripts over which the eyes of future scholars for thousands of years will pour.

What I do not understand is why you have not pursued this scholarly work in a way unrelated to the primary texts of Srila Prabhupada's personally approved books? If your books will cast light on the published books, then what is the harm?..It is changing the original to make it "more authentic" etc. where the problem begins.

Suppose that Srila Prabhupada made "a lot of mistakes" in his approval of Hayagriva's editing?......Is it our place to change that even if we think it could be better following His transcript or even His tape?

No one goes after a published painting by Picasso, changing this and that to match his original sketch!

If there is bad editing, then why not simply write a commentary in another book designed specifically to amend errors either made or allowed in the book that perhaps "mistakenly" met His approval during His lifetime? That is the approved means of dealing with such a situation, and as an English Literature major at University, I learned this early on.

so, can you kindly explain the unusualness of your approach?

2. When extensive changes have been made to a book, (particularly posthumous changes) the fact that there has been significant alterations from the original copyrighted book is usually blazoned across the cover....NEW AND IMPROVED, WITH MORE AUTHENITC ADHERENCE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITING (OR EDITINGS) THAT HAD SLIPPED BY THE "UNWARY" AUTHOR'S GAZE"!....and similar such inducements to purchase THIS edition rather than some earlier "flawed" edition.....after all, what is the use of making editorial or other changes, if the fact is not fully publicized for all to see, complete with appropriate credit for the person who has re-edited the book?

Now, I suppose that doing that might give the impression of an unsettling discontinuity as every printing seems to have some "new and improved" additions and subtractions to it. Yet, if one observes these unannounced changes from the point of view of the PURCHASER of the book, it is really more unsettling to bump into changes that are not even slightly explained. (vis.) Many universities and colleges no longer feel secure in using the BGAI in class, due to the fact that a student purchasing a new Gita, and a student purchasing a used Gita, may end up in a quandary in class when it is found that there are unexplained differences in the two (or more!) book that give the creepy impression that the author has somehow come back from the "other side" to make these unexplained changes himself. Another example concerns a memorial/cremation service for a second generation boy who had been hit by a train while saving his girlfriend who was in front of it. This boy, Bala Krishna's son (from Saranagati) was to be cremated (a not to be repeated event) with passages of the Gita read "around the room" before the cremation. Unfortunately, no one had checked the passages selected for continuity before the ceremony began, so when mourners began to read, murmurs of protest arose from the pews, as (I suppose) they thought that the reader had "gone off the track" at a VERY inappropriate time of gravity and sorrow.

After the confusing reading, the passages were compared, and it was found that there were about three or four different versions of the same passages, and it became clear that several printings of the same Gita were present, many of them different than the others.

How do you consider that this sort of issue can be solved? Certainly it matters, as scholarship is based on authenticity, and when one is dealing with Scripture, or Shastra, authenticity takes on Ecclesiastical proportions that do not apply to ordinary books, (which are seldom changed without some sort of notice to the reading public, critics, reviewers etc.) Do you have a suggestion as to how to solve this conundrum?

3. How does re-copyrighting the books serve the BBT Trust?....From my limited perspective, it would seem that once copyrighted under the aegis of the BBTI, they (for all practical purposes) cease to BBT books and enter into a "gray area" of being books owned (in some sense) by two owners at once. It would seem, for sure, that as long as the BBT continues to not print the books for which it actually holds copyrights, that the appearance of Iskcon, the beneficiary of the BBT trust, has "outwitted" the Settler of the Trust by using the ruse of "re-editing" to to change the actual ownership of the Trust Assets out of the hands of the Trustees of the Trust and into the hands of the Beneficiary of the Trust....a most irregular relationship between Trust and Beneficiary!....after all, if Srila Prabhupada had intended Iskcon to control His books, then He would have not created a Trust in the first place that was specifically designed (for some divinely inscrutable reason) to keep Iskcon's collective "paws" off of His Legacy of Vani...the Assets of the Trust! (If I were a teenager and someone had left me a fortune in trust, I might be tempted to take lessons from Iskcon as to how to break such a Trust so that I could use the assets left to me as I pleased, rather than under the restrictive terms of the Trust!) Can you clear this up for me?

4. There are those who might take the unkind view that some of the "changes" are in fact nothing more than censorship. In fact, there are those (incomprehensibly STILL in positions of authority within Iskcon) who advocate changing the books to the extent that any comment Srila Prabhupada made that does not conform to Kali Yuga circa 1006, sociological evaluations. Such items as mentions of women, persons of African descent, size of brains,going to the moon, as well as comments about his God brothers should be toned down, eliminated, or replaced with opinions more in keeping with the mood of the current "Vox Populae". A case in point would be Virabahu prabhu's rejoinder when certain changes in the CC had been discovered, where Srila Prabhupada's charges of neglect and envy by his god brothers had been DELETED. Virabahu prabhu's view was that removing such comments was the "right thing to do" as such comments had generated disturbance in the "Vaishnava Community"....Considering that his wife is an initiate of Narayan Maharaja, one could clearly understand WHY he might prefer to see such troublesome passages deleted.

Do you think that the temporary inconvenience of a limited demographical representation of current day society justifies marring a deceased author's books that are meant to last and be in use for the next ten thousand years?...Will not history make a mockery of our efforts to "kiss the collective asses" of today's academic mediocrities instead of our steadfastly accepting that our Author's views are not to be censored?

So, while realizing that your time is limited, and that you travel extensively, I would appreciate some clarification on the issues raised above.

Your eternal servant,

Nara Narayan Vishwakarma das