Advaita Acharya was already an old man when the events for which Bengal remembers Him began. He was born in 1434, in the village of Nabagrama in the Srihatta district of eastern Bengal — the same district from which Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own family came — as the son of Kuvera Pandita and Nabhadevi. His father is described as a man of some standing, and the boy was given the name Kamalaksha, "lotus-eyed." Krishnadasa Kaviraja notes that the name was fitting for one who is a limb of the lotus-eyed Supreme Lord.
The traditional date given for His appearance is the seventh day of the bright fortnight of Magha, and the anniversary is kept across the Gaudiya world as Advaita Saptami. Fixing His birth at 1434 makes Him fifty-two years older than Mahaprabhu, and this age gap governs almost everything peculiar about His position: He was old enough to be the Lord's grandfather, He had spent a lifetime as a respected Vaishnava teacher before the Lord appeared, and the whole of His subsequent conduct consisted of insisting, against the deference of everyone around Him, that He was a servant.
After the passing of His parents, Kamalaksha left home and travelled. The accounts describe extended pilgrimage across India, visiting the holy places and studying, and the impression they give is of a man methodically equipping himself. He acquired a formidable command of the Bhagavatam, the Bhagavad-gita and the Vedanta, and he did so in a period when the study of those texts in Bengal was dominated by interpretations he regarded as fundamentally mistaken. He eventually settled at Shantipura, on the bank of the Ganges in the Nadia district, and it is as the Vaishnava authority of Shantipura that he passed into history.
It was during His travels that He met Madhavendra Puri and accepted him as spiritual master — a fact of considerable consequence, and one that the Chaitanya-charitamrita records plainly. Madhavendra Puri is the figure in whom the Gaudiya tradition locates the first appearance of the mood of intense, personal, emotionally saturated love for Krishna that would afterwards define the whole movement. Advaita Acharya received that mood from him directly. Krishnadasa Kaviraja states that Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, considering Advaita Acharya a disciple of Madhavendra Puri, obeyed Him and respected Him as a spiritual master — which is why the Lord's dealings with this one associate look unlike His dealings with anyone else.
The two names by which He is universally known are both titles rather than the name His parents gave Him, and the reasons are recorded. He is called Advaita — "non-different" — because He is understood to be identical in all respects with the Supreme Lord, not a separate being who serves Him but a direct expansion. He is called Acharya because He had no other occupation than teaching devotional service. The combination, Advaita Acharya, is therefore a two-word summary of the tradition's whole claim about Him: this is God, and He spent His life as a schoolmaster of bhakti.
What that teaching consisted of is worth stating precisely, because it explains the frustration that produced the next chapter of His life. He explained the Bhagavad-gita and the Bhagavatam in terms of devotional service — that is, he read them as being about a person to be loved rather than an impersonal absolute to be merged into. In the Bengal of the late fifteenth century this was a minority position held against the current. The learned world of Nabadwip, sixty miles away, was occupied with logic and with ritual; the philosophical establishment was Mayavadi; and the ordinary religious life of the province, as He assessed it, had become a matter of correct performance emptied of any actual love of God. He taught otherwise for decades, to whoever would listen, and watched it make very little difference.
The Chaitanya-charitamrita is explicit about the theological identity underlying all this. Advaita Acharya is the incarnation of Maha-Vishnu — specifically, in the analysis Krishnadasa Kaviraja sets out, the material cause of the cosmic manifestation, while Vishnu in His efficient aspect glances upon material energy and sets creation in motion. He is described as the creator of millions of universes, and as the principal limb of Narayana, the word "limb" being chosen over "part" deliberately, because it implies a closer intimacy. That is the being who was living quietly at Shantipura in the 1480s, teaching the Bhagavatam to a small circle, and becoming steadily more distressed at the state of the world.
