Learn to Play > Lesson 6: The Prabhupada Beat

How Prabhupada taught this beat

There's a tape available from the Bhaktivedanta Archives of Srila Prabhupada giving a mrdanga lesson. On it he teaches what we call the Prabhupada Practice Beat (see Lesson 2) and also the main Prabhupada Beat being discussed in this lesson. We will let you listen to that tape as part of Lesson 16 of this Mrdanga course. But that comes later. That's 10 lessons away.

Why don't I let you listen to it now? Well, I don't want you to become confused, because although Prabhupada is playing the beat, he's not using the Balarama Mrdanga Style of mantras. He has his own style of mantras, and we'll get into that a little later. Okay?

Anyway, Srila Prabhupada describes the mantra for the Prabhupada Beat using traditional Bengali-style mantra components. You will recall from Lesson 2 that in this course we have chosen to use the Balarama Mrdanga Book style of mrdanga mantras. The Balarama Mrdanga Book style mantras is a system of mrdanga mantras that are easy (and consistent) to learn and understand. So the mantra given by Srila Prabhupada for this Prabhupada Beat will sound a little strange for those of you who are not familiar with the traditional Bengali style of mrdanga mantras.

After describing the mantra for this beat as given by Srila Prabhupada, we will then translate it for you into the Balarama Mrdanga Book style of mantras you are familiar with on this course..

So, ready? Here's the mantra as taught by Srila Prabhupada:

tini tini ta tenaka waka de ditya ditya de

Don't worry if you can't understand that! We will translate it for you in this lesson!

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