Should we allow foreign devotees to come to Japan in order to collect funds for their home countrie's temple?
Personally i don't think it is resourceful for devotees to collect funds on the streets in Japan, America or anywhere in these current times.
I am not speaking here about going out on book distribution in one's free time to personally meet souls and hand them a book after preaching to them about the merits of the book.
I am talking about devotees who go out collecting money from the public in order to support themselves and their families or temple and who have no other means of livelihood.
ISKCON is gradually becoming a respected international institution. Such street collecting is not respected in modern industrial societies and is therefore counter productive to attracting the respect and trust of the public in general or the influential intelligencia.
Street collecting undermines the integrity of the institution and the individual devotee as well. The institution can grow up and out safely in a sustainable manor like a sky scraper building as long as it does so within the perimeters of its base of support (aka) its congregation. Individual devotees should work honestly and live according to their means.
"Anyone who is in the material world is certainly possessed of the impure propensity for lording it over material nature, or, in other words, for sense gratification. Such polluted propensities have to be cleared. Without doing so, through prescribed duties, one should never attempt to become a so-called transcendentalist, renouncing work and living at the cost of others.
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