In The Nectar of Devotionit is stated that if anyone just sees the Rathayatra cart passing and stands up to receive the Lord, he can purge all sinful results from his body. And if anyone follows the Rathayatra cart when the Deities pass in front or from behind, even if he is born of a lowly family, he can achieve opulence equal to that of Visnu (God). Although one may think such statements to be exaggerations, expert devotees who know the intricacies of transcendental science do not doubt them.

The potency of the yearly Rathayatra Festival is inconceivably great. As pictured here, thousands and thousands of people participated in the 1970 Rathayatra Festival, which was celebrated simultaneously in San Francisco and London by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.followers of the Vedas, the oldest scriptures known to man, as the Absolute Truth, the Personality of Godhead. As stated in the Brahma-samhita, “Krsna, who is known as Govinda, is the Supreme Godhead. He has an eternal, blissful spiritual body. He is the origin of all. He has no other origin, and He is the prime cause of all causes.”

In India there are thousands of Krsna temples, and millions of people acknowledge Him to be the original God, the one without a second. Krsna Himself declares in Bhagavad-gita that He is the father of all living entities. So He is nothing like “a Hindu deity,” but He is the source and sustainer of all entities, be they Christian, Hindu, atheist, or lower animals and plants. Moreover, it is