The Vānaprastha Adventure, Installment 37
Vānaprastha life ends either with sannyāsa or with death. When one is free from attachment, especially to sex, one can accept sannyāsa.1 By accepting sannyāsa we can follow in the footsteps of Śrīla Prabhupāda and previous ācāryas, fix ourselves firmly in devotional service to the lotus feet of Kṛṣṇa, and with determination cross beyond the insurmountable ocean of material nescience.2 And sannyāsa especially serves as a platform for increased preaching.3
Accepting sannyāsa
Traditionally, one might take sannyāsa all of a sudden, as did Śrīdhara Svāmī and Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu. Or else sannyāsa might be the final point of a gradual but evident process. While Kadamba Kānana Swami, for example, was the temple president of ISKCON’s Kṛṣṇa-Balarāma temple in Vṛndāvana, he was a householder. But after some time he began living separately from his wife. They would spend some time together every day, but gradually, once she was used to the distance, he made the time less and less. After a while they no longer met every day, and after some more time the meetings became rare, though he and his wife would exchange notes. Eventually even the notes stopped. And finally—sannyāsa.
To give another example: Every year my friend Atul Kṛṣṇa Dāsa (a vānaprastha as of this writing) used to invite Kadamba Kānana Swami and me to his flat in Māyāpur for a sumptuous lunch cooked by his wife. Then one year he invited us again but told us, “I’m no longer living there. My wife lives there, and I live down the road.” In this way, a process.
Accepting death
If we don’t get as far as sannyāsa but the time comes when the body can no longer support a useful life, we can give that body up, and finally must.4
We’ve talked about our biology’s telling us what to do. At a certain stage that biology says, “Retire. Family life is not such a great kick anymore.” And at a certain stage it says, “Life itself is no longer worth the trouble to sustain. Better to get ready to go.”
Śrīla Prabhupāda did that. When his final illness came, he made various attempts to recover his health. Then he came to Vṛndāvana and said, in essence, “I’ve come to Vṛndāvana to leave this world.” And finally he left.
Before Śrīla Prabhupāda’s departure, his disciple Jayānanda Prabhu served till the last and then gave up: “What is the use of carrying on with this useless body?” And so his departure was exemplary.
Similarly, Kadamba Kānana Swami came to Vṛndāvana to accept death, considering it “a change of service.”
Many other examples can be given.
Earlier in our life we can preach, we can do bhajana, we can do so many things. And then at a later stage: “There’s really nothing more I can do. Let me set my affairs in order. Let me give up my last attachments. Let me say my goodbyes. And let me go.”
We have to go. So rather than go kicking and screaming we can surrender. Kṛṣṇa says, kālo ’smi loka kṣaya-kṛt pravṛddhaḥ: “I come as death.”5 So all right: “If you’ve come, I accept your presence, and I’m ready to go.”
In the purport to Bhāgavatam 4.23.13 Śrīla Prabhupāda mentions that when King Pṛthu understood that the end of his life was near “he became very jubilant and proceeded to completely give up his body.” Śrīla Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura says that King Pṛthu was eager: “Let me now give up this body, become a pure spiritual form, go at once to Vaikuṇṭha, and serve the feet of the Lord!”
Fasting unto death
The Bhāgavatam (11.18.11) says that when a vānaprastha is overtaken by old age and with his trembling body can no longer perform his prescribed duties, he should place the sacrificial fire within his heart by meditation, fix his mind on Lord Kṛṣṇa, enter that sacrificial fire, and give up his body.
Today we may not have the meditative power to immolate ourselves like Dhṛtarāṣṭra in an internally conceived sacrificial fire.6 But elsewhere in the Bhāgavatam (7.12.23) we read:
yadākalpaḥ sva-kriyāyāṁ vyādhibhir jarayāthavā
ānvīkṣikyāṁ vā vidyāyāṁ kuryād anaśanādikam
“When because of disease or old age one is unable to perform his prescribed duties for advancement in spiritual consciousness or study of the Vedas, one should practice fasting, not taking any food.” And so one dies.
The Sanskrit term for this process is prāyopaveśa (“fasting unto death”).7 Of course, instead of fasting one may simply let death come in its own time. But as indicated above in the Bhāgavatam, one may expedite the process by fasting.
If one merely gives up eating, doctors say, one may still live for months. But if one gives up eating and drinking one will leave quickly, within days.8 Even in modern Western society doctors and courts have increasingly recognized “voluntarily stopping eating and drinking” (VSED) as a valid personal end-of-life choice.9 In 1977 in Vṛndāvana Śrīla Prabhupāda once said that this is how a gentleman leaves this world—by giving up eating and drinking.10
To accept death in this way is not strange or unreasonable. At a certain point one just thinks, “Enough! There’s no point in trying to extend my life. It’s over. Nothing more can be done. Now let me go.”
One need not pursue every possible treatment and try to fight death to the last. Instead one may think, “Just let me die. But let me die in Kṛṣṇa consciousness.”
Our perfect example is Mahārāja Parīkṣit. Of course, he didn’t give up eating and drinking as a way of hastening death; he was going to die anyway. But he set the example of giving up everything, even eating and drinking, and spending his last days fully absorbed in hearing about Kṛṣṇa.
Afterword for Part One
What about the two devotees Hari Bhakti Dāsa and Rāma Caraṇa Dāsa with whom this book began? Just as I made their circumstances up, I suppose that for symmetry I could make up how these devotees moved forward and retired. But I won’t. Finally what matters is not their fictional life but your real one. If you’re headed toward spiritual retirement (or you’ve already retired), I wish you all success. By the grace of Kṛṣṇa, may you cross beyond anything that might hold you back, may you move forward in full strength, and may you attain perfection in pure devotional service at Lord Kṛṣṇa’s lotus feet.
Notes:
1 See Śrīla Prabhupāda’s arrival address, Mexico City, February 11, 1975.
2 Bhāgavatam 11.23.57.
3 Sannyāsa life “means preaching transcendental knowledge to the society from door to door.” Śrīla Prabhupāda in a radio interview, March 12, 1968, San Francisco.
4 Regarding the two ways to end vānaprastha life—with sannyāsa or with death—see Bhāgavatam 11.18.11‒12.
5 Gītā 11.32.
6 For Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s dying in an internally generated mystic fire, see Bhāgavatam 1.13.57.
7 Bhāgavatam 1.19.7.
8 The usual expectation: between ten and fourteen days, though up to twenty-one days also falls within “the general range of survival” (Hope Wechkin et al. “Clinical Guidelines for Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking.” Journal of Pain and Symptom Management 66, no. 5 (2023): e625–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2023.06.016. p. e627). My mother and her mother years before her both gave up eating and drinking, and both were gone within three days.
9 A book on the clinical, ethical, and legal aspects of this topic is Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: A Compassionate, Widely-Available Option for Hastening Death, Timothy E. Quill et al (editors), Oxford University Press, 2021. In America VSED to hasten death is legally accepted in all fifty states.
10 Bhavānanda Dāsa, personal interview, February 9, 2025, Sydney, Australia.
This is part of a draft
This is an excerpt from a new book I have in the works—The Vānaprastha Adventure, a guide to retirement in spiritual life. The book should be published in early 2026. Meanwhile I’ll be posting my draft here, in installments.
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