The day after celebrations for one of our biggest festivals of the year, Krishna Janmastami (August 26th), we will be celebrating one of the most important festivals for us as Hare Krishnas – Srila Prabhupada’s Vyasa Puja on Tuesday, August 27th, 2024.
The Vyasa Puja festival is always held the day after Janmastami and the festival honours the appearance of our spiritual master His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada – Founder Acharya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
This year the program will begin at 11:00am with an abhisheka of Srila Prabhupada (bathing ceremony of a small Deity of Srila Prabhupada) and will continue with the arati, flower offerings, and (pushpanjali). Selected devotees and groups will be reading pre-written offerings to Srila Prabhupada. While everyone is invited to participate in the program we will likely not be able to accommodate everyone reading offerings. We will once again encourage everyone to write their own offering for the Toronto Vyasa Puja Book.
Traditionally, Vyasa Puja “offerings” are made by devotees who write and present personal messages to the spiritual master. The Governing Body Commission (GBC) for ISKCON has stated that every devotee in ISKCON should write an offering to Srila Prabhupada on Vyasa Puja.
We want to encourage all devotees in our community to write a personal letter, in the form of an offering to Srila Prabhupada for this year’s festival. In the past these were required to be submitted on special pagers with a pre-printed letterhead; to streamline the process this has been eliminated. Offerings can be submitted on any 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper by 12pm on August 27th and can be handwritten or printed. Should you wish to download the letterhead you can do so HERE for an image file and HERE for a Word document (please note that this is optional).