His Relationship with Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu

The relationship between Advaita Acharya and Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is the most peculiar in the whole of Gaudiya Vaishnava literature, and the biographers make no attempt to tidy it. Advaita was fifty-two years older. He was a disciple of Madhavendra Puri, in whose line the Lord Himself had taken initiation through Ishvara Puri, which placed Him in the position of a senior godbrother of Mahaprabhu's own guru. He was the most respected Vaishnava in the region before Mahaprabhu was born. And He had, by His own prayers, brought Him.

Krishnadasa Kaviraja records how the Lord handled this. Considering Advaita Acharya to be a disciple of Madhavendra Puri, Mahaprabhu obeyed Him and offered Him the respect due to a spiritual master. Advaita Acharya, for His part, regarded Mahaprabhu as His master and Himself as His servant, forgot Himself entirely in the joy of that conception, and went about instructing everyone He met that they too were servants of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. The Chaitanya-charitamrita describes Him reflecting that the Lord considers Him a spiritual master while He feels Himself to be only a servant — and settles the paradox by observing that this is simply what love for Krishna does. It gives superiors, equals and inferiors alike the spirit of service.

The most famous episode between them arises directly out of this arrangement. Advaita Acharya wanted the Lord to reveal Himself, and He worked out how to force the issue. He began teaching an interpretation of the Bhagavad-gita that He did not Himself hold — reading it in the impersonal, liberationist terms that He had spent His life opposing — and He did so publicly, knowing what the effect would be. Mahaprabhu, hearing that Advaita Acharya of all people was propagating Mayavada, came to Him in fury and chastised Him, and in that display of divine anger revealed exactly what Advaita Acharya had been trying to make Him reveal. The accounts describe Advaita Acharya as delighted, and as explaining afterwards that this had been the whole object of the exercise.

It is characteristic of the tradition's treatment of Him that this is not read as deception but as a species of devotional strategy available only to someone of His standing. Vaishnava commentators note that a devotee in an ordinary position could not have done it and would have been wrong to try; the point of the story is not that provoking the Lord is a technique but that Advaita Acharya's intimacy was such that He knew precisely which lever to pull.

The other great episode belongs to the aftermath of Mahaprabhu's sannyasa. When the Lord took the renounced order at Katwa at the age of twenty-four, His intention was to go to Vrindavana, and He set out. Nityananda Prabhu, judging that the devotees of Nabadwip and above all Sachi Devi could not simply be abandoned, arranged matters so that the Lord — travelling for three days through Radha-desha in a state of near-continuous ecstasy — was brought instead to the western side of Shantipura and induced to believe that the Ganges was the Yamuna. While He was worshipping the river, Advaita Prabhu arrived by boat, told Him to bathe, and took Him home.

What followed at Advaita Acharya's house is among the most tender passages in the Chaitanya-charitamrita. Word went to Nabadwip, and the devotees came, and Sachi Devi came, and for some days the Lord — now shaven-headed and in the cloth of a sannyasi, no longer anyone's son or husband in the eyes of society — stayed under the roof of the man who had called Him into the world. Sachi Devi cooked for Him and for Nityananda Prabhu. There was joking at the meal. It was, in effect, the household's last few days with Him before He left for Puri, and it happened at Shantipura because Advaita Acharya's house was the one place where such a thing could be arranged.

The theological point the tradition extracts from all this is worth stating, because it is easy to miss under the affection. Advaita Acharya is, on Gaudiya premises, the Supreme Lord — Maha-Vishnu, the material cause of creation, the maker of innumerable universes. What He wanted, having established that, was to be a servant. The Chaitanya-charitamrita observes that even the goddess of fortune, who resides on Krishna's chest, prays for the joy of the servitorship that Advaita Acharya was tasting, and that Brahma, Siva, Narada and the rest are pleased in the same sentiment. He is the tradition's demonstration that servitorship is not a lower position reluctantly accepted by those unfit for anything better, but the thing that even God, given the choice, elects to have.