"Let Me Go With You" #
The meal was over and Kurma had finished his prayer of gratitude, described in full on Hospitality at Kurma-kshetra, when he made a request of his own. He begged Mahaprabhu to let him give up his household and go with Him, saying — in Krishnadasa Kaviraja's phrasing — that he could no longer tolerate the waves of misery caused by materialistic life. It is the same impulse that had already moved other householders on this tour to want to abandon everything at the sight of the Lord, and it was met, as it usually was on this journey, with a refusal.
Stay Home, Chant, and Preach #
Mahaprabhu's answer was direct: never suggest such a thing again, He told Kurma; better to remain at home and chant the holy name of Krishna without interruption. The reasoning behind this refusal was practical as much as spiritual. In the conditions of this age, a person who abandons family life suddenly, without real training in renunciation, rarely gains anything by it and often loses what he already had. Mahaprabhu had already made a version of this same argument once before on this journey, when He let Nityananda Prabhu talk Him out of travelling entirely alone — the fuller story of that earlier argument is told on the South India tour page. Here the logic ran the other way: it was Kurma, not the Lord, being told that renunciation was not the answer.
Whomever You Meet, Tell Him What Krishna Said #
What Mahaprabhu offered Kurma instead is the verse for which this entire episode is remembered. Its sense, translated plainly, is this: instruct everyone you meet in the teaching Krishna Himself gives in the *Bhagavad-gita* and the *Srimad-Bhagavatam*; by doing only that, under the Lord's own order, become a guru and help liberate this whole land. There is no requirement here to master scripture, take formal disciples, or leave one's occupation — only to repeat, faithfully and without alteration, what has already been taught. Krishnadasa Kaviraja does not treat this as special pleading for one cooperative brahmana; a few verses later he states plainly that this was the Lord's method at every house where He accepted a meal on the entire tour, which is why the instruction functions, on this site, as the through-line of the whole journey rather than a private word to one man.
Bhaktisiddhanta's Reading: No Excuse for False Pride #
Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura addressed this exact verse at length in his own Bengali commentary, the *Anubhashya*, and his reading sharpens what is easy to miss in the plain instruction. He read it as directed at devotees who mistake external renunciation, or a certain kind of self-important humility about "mere" preaching, for real spiritual advancement — people who imagine that only grand institutional service, of the kind performed by Rupa Goswami, Sanatana Goswami, Jiva Goswami or Raghunatha Dasa Goswami in their books, or the wide following gathered by teachers like Madhvacharya or Narottama Dasa Thakura, counts as real spiritual work. Bhaktisiddhanta's point, as reported in later Gaudiya writing on this instruction, was the opposite: remaining a householder and simply repeating Krishna's own words to one's neighbors is not a lesser path requiring apology, and looking down on it is itself the kind of false pride the instruction was meant to correct.
The Promise of the Lord's Company #
Mahaprabhu did not leave Kurma with only an order; He left him with a promise. If Kurma followed this instruction, the Lord told him, the waves of his householder life would never again overwhelm him the way they had before — and, more than that, he would have the Lord's company again, whether or not they ever met again in person. For a man being told he could not follow the Lord on the road, it was, in its own way, an answer to the very anxiety that had made him ask to leave home in the first place. What became of Kurma after this promise, and what the instruction itself went on to mean four centuries later, is the subject of The Instruction That Outlived the Man.