What is prasadam?

"Yamadutas are ... They are very intelligent. If you keep it falsely, they can catch you. They are not foolish persons that you can cheat them. No, it is not possible. You must be actually Vaisnava; then you are excused. Otherwise not. You cannot cheat. So they are being trained up to become actually Vaisnavas, not a pseudo Vaisnava, simply for earning livelihood. No. That is not our proposition. And those who are earning livelihood by presenting himself as false Vaisnava, their condition is more condemned. My Guru Maharaja used to say that "Instead of earning your livelihood by presenting yourself as a Vaianava, better you become a sweeper in the street and earn your livelihood. Don't cheat." That was the order of my Guru Maharaja. "It is better to become a sweeper in the street than to become a false Vaisnava." That is real philosophy."-Srila Prabhupada

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PADA: Dear Gaurahari prabhu, First of all, we never said you are wrong or anyone else is wrong, we said shastra has the proper standard and that is the right path, plain and simple. Either we accept or we do not.

I also never said our Prabhupada people are up to the standard of pure devotional service? Many ritviks have serious problems following. What I said is, they worship that standard of purity, they may or may not come to that standard. The Christians also worship Jesus, they may not be up to his standard, but at least their worship is bona fide. 

As for worship of persons in the modes of nature, worship of conditioned souls, that is the problem right there, if we worship the person who is under the influence of the modes of nature, we stay within the modes ourselves. "You become what you worship," that is the most basic teaching of the Gita. Anyway, you failed to address the first basic point I mentioned -- of the process of offering bhogha to Krishna and offering service to Krishna. 

Shastra says this has to be done via media the pure devotee. Srila Prabhupada told me personally the process of arcana, if the offering is impure, if the worship up the line of acharyas is not done correctly, then Krishna does not accept the bhogha, it remains bhogha. So our devotees are eating prasadam, whereas people who offer bhogha to the persons you describe as being in the modes of nature, their offerings remains bhogha, that is what Srila Prabhupada says. 

If there is a defect in the offering process, Krishna does not accept. So if people are eating bhogha by offering bhogha to persons still on the material platform, they are staying in the modes of nature and they cannot be liberated. In any case what people do in ISKCON is their business, I am totally free and independent of ISKCON. If they want to eat bhogha, they can, its their choice. 

However, no one can be liberated by eating bhogha, this is impossible. One has to eat prasadam, or else one is only eating ONLY sin, this is stated in the shastra in many places. So this is a basic point, which I asked the GBC in 1978 and never got an answer, "Why are they making people eat bhogha"? I am not making my own path, this is the path, either you eat bhogha or you eat prasadam, its really that simple. This is not about debate and arguing, its about a basic point. So far the GBC has never answered me in 35 years, and as we see, the people they are offering bhogha to are sometimes in serious maya, so the bhogha takes on the qualities of the person it is offered to, that means people are eating contaminated products, that means, they cannot be liberated, whereas we want people to be liberated. ys pd

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PADA: Thanks but this is really not "my" conclusion, one cannot offer bhogha to conditioned souls, its just the rule of the Vedas. There are simply no examples in this idea in the Vedas, i.e. where we find any actual Vaishnavas making bhogha offerings to conditioned souls, this is simply not -- ever -- done by any bona fide devotees, ever. There are actually no examples of this idea from any of the books of Srila Prabhupada anywhere. I know, because I have asked for any examples of this from shastra for the past 35 years, and no one has found even one example. Its not done. Then again, even the Christians say grace to Jesus, not to their conditioned soul co-Christians. Even the Christians understand that offerings to conditioned souls is not the process to make an offering or to make a connection to the pure, namely God. This is not Puranjana's conclusion, it is the conclusion of billions of people from their study of shastra. ys pd