Sri Advaita Acharya

Sri Advaita Acharya occupies a position in the Panca-tattva unlike any of the others: He is far older than Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu — by roughly fifty years — and the tradition holds that it was His prayers that brought the Lord down. He is understood to be a combined incarnation of Maha-Vishnu and Sadashiva, and is counted as bhakta-avatara, the Lord descending in the role of a devotee, which is why He is worshipped as a member of the Lord's own descent rather than merely as an associate of it.

He appeared in 1434 in the village of Nabagrama in the Srihatta district of eastern Bengal, as the son of Kuvera Pandita and Nabhadevi, and was given the name Kamalaksha. After His parents' passing He travelled widely on pilgrimage, studied deeply, and eventually settled at Shantipura on the bank of the Ganges in Nadia, where He became the most respected Vaishnava authority in the region. He was known as an uncompromising scholar of the Bhagavatam and the Bhagavad-gita, and He acquired the title Advaita — "non-different" — because He was understood to be non-different from the Supreme Lord, and the title Acharya because He taught bhakti.

The central act of His life, and the one on which His position in the Panca-tattva rests, was His appeal for the Lord to descend. Advaita Acharya looked at the Bengal of his day — outwardly religious, learned in ritual, and in his judgement wholly without devotion — and concluded that nothing short of Krishna's personal intervention would help. Vaishnava accounts describe him worshipping a salagrama-sila with Ganges water and tulasi leaves, calling out with such intensity and for so long that Krishna was obliged to come. The tradition regards Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's appearance at Mayapur in 1486 as the direct answer, and this is the reason Bengali Vaishnavas hold Advaita Acharya in a particular kind of affection: he is the one who asked.

His relations with Mahaprabhu after the Lord's advent were correspondingly unusual, since the elderly Advaita was in years a grandfather to the young Nimai and in devotion His servant. The Chaitanya-charitamrita preserves several episodes in which Advaita Acharya deliberately provoked the Lord — most famously by teaching an interpretation of the Bhagavad-gita that he did not himself hold, in order to make Mahaprabhu manifest divine anger and thereby reveal Himself. When Mahaprabhu accepted sannyasa at Katwa and could not go to Vrindavana, it was to Advaita Acharya's house at Shantipura that He was brought, and it was there that Sachi Devi was able to see her son for a few last days.

His wife was Sita Thakurani, daughter of Nrsimha Bhaduri, who is remembered in her own right: she went to Mayapur when Mahaprabhu was born, bringing gifts for the child, and is honoured throughout Bengal as one of the great women devotees of the tradition. Their household at Shantipura became one of the principal centres of the movement, and several of their sons — Acyutananda in particular — were themselves prominent devotees, though the family also produced the tradition's most painful internal division when other sons departed from their father's line.

Advaita Acharya lived to a considerable age, outliving Mahaprabhu, and his samadhi and the family Deities remain at Shantipura, which is still a place of pilgrimage. In Gaudiya theology he stands for a specific and rather bracing proposition: that the sincere appeal of a single devotee, sustained long enough and meant seriously enough, is sufficient to move the Supreme Lord to act.