Advaita Acharya outlived Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. He had been fifty-two when the Lord was born and was therefore about a hundred when the Lord's manifest pastimes concluded at Puri in 1534, and the traditional accounts hold that He remained for some years afterwards at Shantipura. The exact date of His disappearance is not fixed with any confidence in the sources; the biographers, who are precise about His birth, become vague at the other end of His life, and the honest position is that we do not know.
The last years are recorded chiefly through their effect on other people. He was by then the senior surviving figure of the original circle — Mahaprabhu gone, the Nabadwip generation thinning — and the Vaishnavas of Bengal looked to Shantipura accordingly. Devotees came to Him for direction. He continued to teach the Bhagavatam, which He had been doing since before any of them were born. The picture the sources give is of a very old man discharging, for a second time, the office he had held before the Lord ever appeared: the Vaishnava authority of the district, explaining the Bhagavatam to whoever came.
His samadhi is at Shantipura, together with the family Deities, and the site remains a place of pilgrimage in the Nadia circuit — visited on the same journeys that take pilgrims to Mayapur, Nabadwip and Ekachakra. The Deities of Advaita Acharya and Sita Thakurani installed there are among the objects Bengali Vaishnavas travel to see.
Gaudiya theology's summary of His life rests on the tension it never resolves. On its own premises Advaita Acharya is Maha-Vishnu, the material cause of the cosmic manifestation, the being by whose agency innumerable universes are produced and maintained. He is not a great devotee of the Lord; He is the Lord, under a name that means precisely that He is not different. And what He is remembered for, across five centuries of Bengali devotional literature, is that He wanted a master, went to considerable lengths to obtain one, and having obtained one spent the remainder of a very long life telling everybody within reach that they were servants of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.
Two things are conventionally taken from Him. The first is the proposition established by the prayers that brought the Lord down: that one devotee, sufficiently serious, can alter the spiritual condition of an age. The tradition offers this without qualification and means it literally.
The second is subtler and belongs to the manner rather than the achievement. Advaita Acharya had every conceivable ground for precedence — age, learning, spiritual rank, and the specific claim of having summoned the Lord in the first place — and He declined all of it, insistently, for fifty years, in favour of a position He plainly regarded as better. Krishnadasa Kaviraja's observation on the point is the one the tradition keeps returning to: that love for Krishna has this single peculiar effect of imbuing superiors, equals and inferiors alike with the spirit of service, and that there is no joy anywhere comparable to what is tasted in it. Advaita Acharya is the demonstration. He is the one member of the Panca-tattva whose whole biography is an argument that being a servant is the best available thing to be.
