13--I've got 500 children

Prabhupada: ...five hundred children [laughter], and they're happy. I haven't gotten to spend anything for them. I'm not happy?

Guest: If you say so.

Prabhupada: "If you say so," you don't say, then you have no intelligence.

Guest: [laughs]

Prabhupada: If I have got five hundred children, happy children, instead of three or four children, I'm not happy?

Guest: Having children doesn't...

Prabhupada: No, I have given you a concrete example, just try to understand.

Guest: No. You are saying that, "Having children," doesn't...

Prabhupada: No, no, I... because you can understand in that way, having this material way of life, therefore I am saying. I have got many other platform of happiness but just to make you understand that when I was maintaining five children I was not happy. There were so many problems, family maintenance, but I have got my family of hundred, five hundred children but I have no problem. So how can you say that I am not happy?

I am just giving you a contrast. If one man is, I mean to say, faced with so many problems for maintaining a family. It is said it is difficult to maintain a family than to maintain an empire. So family maintenance is very difficult job especially in this way, in this present age. So I am still in family, but I have no responsibilities, still my children are faithful and I love them, they love me. So it's a very happy family. The family is there, they treat me as my..., as their father, I treat them as my children, the relationship is there. The love..., complete love is there, so complete happiness is there. I am giving you a concrete example. People create family for becoming happy but instead of being happy they become unhappy in the material conception of family life. But in comparison to their material conception of family life you come to the spiritual conception of family life then you become happy; immediately.

Yes?

Guest 2: [indistinct] I don't know if [indistinct] are your children all, now all now grown up?

Prabhupada: They're... grown up, what do you mean?

Guest2: [indistinct] are they Hindu or [indistinct]

Prabhupada: Oh my children?

Guest 2: Not, not, not your spiritual children right here, children of the flesh, are they?

Prabhupada: Yes.

Guest2: Little or big?

Prabhupada: No, they're grown-up, they have, I have got my grand-children. [laughter] They are married, my grand-daughter is married the other day, I heard news. So they are now grown-up. Perhaps my grand-daughter has got child. So I am old enough and my childrens are old enough. I left my home at the age of sixty years. Yes. When I was sixty years old, fifty-eight, yes, then I left my home. Otherwise up to fifty-eight years I was regular family man. [End]