By the middle of the 1480s Advaita Acharya had reached a conclusion that the Vaishnava biographers report without softening: that the situation was beyond ordinary remedy. He had spent decades teaching devotional service in Bengal and had made converts, but the general condition of the age seemed to Him to be deteriorating rather than improving. People were religious in the sense of performing ritual correctly and disputing philosophy skilfully; almost nobody loved God. He judged that no amount of preaching by a teacher, however qualified, was going to reverse this, and that nothing short of Krishna's own personal intervention would serve.
The action He took follows from that judgement with a certain logic. If the Lord alone can fix this, then the Lord must be made to come. Advaita Acharya therefore set out, quite deliberately, to compel a descent.
The method was worship, sustained past the point where ordinary worship stops. Vaishnava accounts describe Him at Shantipura offering Ganges water and tulasi leaves to a salagrama-sila, and calling out — loudly, continuously, over a long period — for Krishna to appear. The tradition's understanding of why this worked turns on a technical point of devotional practice rather than on volume: Krishna is said to be bound by the offering of tulasi and Ganges water made by a pure devotee in a mood of genuine distress for the world, and to be unable to refuse it indefinitely. The biographers present the outcome as a kind of transaction that the Lord could not honourably decline.
The intensity is what the accounts dwell on. This was not a devotional exercise undertaken in hope. Advaita Acharya is described as roaring, as weeping, as continuing for so long and with such force that the sound was heard at a distance, and as making it clear that He did not intend to stop. The mood is closer to a demand than a petition, and Bengali Vaishnavas have never been embarrassed by that; it is precisely the boldness of it that they admire.
Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu appeared at Sridhama Mayapur on the full-moon evening of Phalguna in February 1486. The tradition regards this as the direct answer, and it is on this basis, rather than on His being a great teacher or a great scholar or an incarnation of Maha-Vishnu, that Advaita Acharya is counted among the five features of the Lord's own descent. Krishnadasa Kaviraja puts the matter in a single line: it was through Advaita Acharya that Lord Chaitanya spread the sankirtana movement, and through Him that He delivered the world.
There is a detail in the sequence that Bengali devotional literature returns to with pleasure. Advaita Acharya was living at Shantipura, some distance from Nabadwip, and did not immediately know what had happened. The Lord He had summoned was born, grew into a boy, became a celebrated logician, married, and was for some years the most argumentative young pandit in Nadia — while the elderly man who had called Him down went on with his Bhagavatam classes at Shantipura, waiting. It was only after Nimai's return from Gaya, when the transformation became unmistakable, that the two came together and the purpose of the whole arrangement became apparent to everyone involved.
Gaudiya theology draws a specific and rather bracing proposition from this episode, and it is the reason the page matters beyond its narrative interest. The claim is that the appeal of a single devotee — not a mass movement, not an institution, not a favourable turn in history, but one person, praying seriously enough and for long enough — is sufficient to move the Supreme Lord to act. Advaita Acharya is the tradition's standing evidence for it. The corollary, which Vaishnava teachers make explicitly, is that the same route remains open, and that the reason it is not taken more often is not that it has been closed but that almost nobody is willing to pray like that.
There is also a sober reading of the same story that the tradition does not suppress. Advaita Acharya's distress was at a religious culture that was outwardly flourishing — well attended, well funded, learned, correct in its observances — and inwardly hollow. That diagnosis was not obvious to His contemporaries, most of whom would have said that religion in Nadia was in excellent health. It took a man of unusual seriousness to look at a thriving establishment and conclude that the essential thing had gone out of it, and the tradition preserves his judgement as a warning to every generation that succeeds him.