14
THE SCIENCE OF SELF-REALIZATION
very curious about: can the  Vedas  be taken symbolically as well as literally?
Śrīla Prabhupāda:  No. They must be taken as they are, not symbolically. That is why we are presenting the  Bhagavad-gītā As It Is .
Ms. Nixon:  Are you attempting to revive the ancient Indian caste system in the West? The  Gītā  mentions the caste system . . .
Śrīla Prabhupāda:  Where does the  Bhagavad-gītā  mention the caste system? Kṛṣṇa says,  cātur-varṇyam mayā sṛṣṭam guṇa-karma-vibhāgaśaḥ : “I created four divisions of men according to their quality and work.” [Bg. 4.13] For instance, you can understand that there are engineers as well as medical practitioners in society. Do you say they belong to different castes—that one is in the engineer caste and the other is in the medical caste? No. If a man has qualified himself in medical school, you accept him as a doctor; and if another man has a degree in engineering, you accept him as an engineer. Similarly, the  Bhagavad-gītā  defines four classes of men in society: a class of highly intelligent men, a class of administrators, a class of productive men, and ordinary workers. These divisions are natural. For example, one class of men is very intelligent. But to actually meet the qualifications of first-class men as described in the  Bhagavad-gītā , they need to be trained, just as an intelligent boy requires training in a college to become a qualified doctor. So in the Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement we are training the intelligent men how to control their minds, how to control their senses, how to become truthful, how to become clean internally and externally, how to become wise, how to apply their knowledge in practical life, and how to become God conscious. All these boys [gestures toward seated disciples] have first-class intelligence, and now we are training them to use it properly.
We are not introducing the caste system, in which any rascal born in a  brāhmaṇa  family is automatically a  brāhmaṇa . He may have the habits of a fifth-class man, but he is accepted as first class because of his birth in a  brāhmaṇa  family. We don’t accept that. We recognize a man as first class who is trained as a  brāhmaṇa . It doesn’t matter whether he is Indian, European, or American; lowborn or highborn—it doesn’t matter. Any intelligent man can be trained to adopt first-class habits. We want to stop the nonsensical idea that we are imposing the Indian caste system on our disciples. We are simply picking out men with first-class intelligence and training them how to become first class in every respect.
Ms. Nixon:  How do you feel about women’s liberation?
Śrīla Prabhupāda:  So-called equal rights for women means that the men cheat the women. Suppose a woman and a man meet, they become