Please accept my blessings. I beg to acknowledge receipt of your most recent undated, letter.

I am glad you have received my letter and mailed it to Swami Cinmayananda; so we shall see if they are able to help us so that we may enter Jagannatha Puri Temple with our disciples.

Regarding your philosophical question, if the Bhagavad gita is part of Mahabharata which is considered smrti, how can we claim Bhagavad gita to be GITOPANISAD, or one of the Upanisads which are sruti? Actually because the Gita is spoken by the Supreme Personality of Godhead it is sruti. But people take it as smrti because it is part of the Mahabharata. We take it as sruti as far as we are concerned. The purport of sruti is to make one advanced in understanding the Absolute Truth. Here the Absolute Truth is explaining personally, therefore the Gita should be taken as sruti. But they take it as smrti because it is part of the Smriti (Mahabharata). In one sense it is both sruti and smrti.

Please yourself and Mahamsa Swami work in full cooperation with Karandhara Prabhu who is leaving Paris today for Bombay. You may send him regular reports as he is taking over from Tamala Krsna Maharaja, as GBC of India.