Basudeva Vipra

Introduction

Chapter 1

The Embrace at Kurmakshetra

A leper brahmana's collapse on a South Indian road becomes the moment Chaitanya Mahaprabhu turns back to embrace him

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Kurma's House at Kurmakshetra #

Everywhere Chaitanya Mahaprabhu stopped on His tour of South India, He turned His host into a devotee. At Kurmakshetra His host was a brahmana named Kurma. Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura later identified this pilgrimage town as present-day Srikurmam, near Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh. Mahaprabhu spent a day and a night at Kurma's house and accepted alms there. He instructed Kurma in almost the same terms He used at house after house on this journey: chant, follow the teachings of the Bhagavad-gita and Srimad-Bhagavatam, and on that basis help others toward the same goal. Kurma followed Him some distance the next morning before being sent back home. The Chaitanya-charitamrita repeats this kind of scene so often on this tour that Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami eventually says he could fill a whole book with such meetings alone. This particular one, however, was not quite finished.

A Crawl Toward a Glimpse #

Somewhere nearby lived another brahmana, Basudeva Vipra. He was a man of real spiritual depth, and his body had been ravaged by leprosy so advanced that his open wounds were full of worms. He is remembered for a single, striking habit: if a worm fell out of one of his sores, he would pick it up with his own hand and place it back, unwilling even to let a worm starve on his account. When word reached him one night that a sannyasi singing the Lord's names was passing through, and that this was no ordinary sannyasi, Basudeva Vipra set out for Kurma's house at once. His body could barely carry him. He walked where he could and sat when he had to. Every account says that he crawled the rest of the way. He moved in any way still left to him, toward a chance to see the Lord.

Too Late, and Then Not #

When he arrived, he was told that Mahaprabhu had already left. The disappointment broke him. Basudeva Vipra fell to the ground and lost consciousness. He had given everything he had left to reach a glimpse of the Lord, and now he mourned that lost glimpse. At that same moment, some distance away, Mahaprabhu stopped mid-stride, as if listening for something no one else could hear. He turned around and walked back. The Chaitanya-charitamrita says He went so fast that He seemed to cover the distance instantly. He reached the spot where Basudeva Vipra lay and lifted him up in His own arms. He did not hesitate at all, and He showed no concern for what touching an untouchable leper's wounds might mean.

The Cure and Sudama's Words #

The touch did what nothing else could. The leprosy and the grief both left him in the same instant, and Basudeva Vipra's body was transformed. The wounds were gone, and his form was made whole and beautiful. Overwhelmed, he fell at Mahaprabhu's feet and spoke a verse from the Srimad-Bhagavatam. These were the same words the poor brahmana Sudama once used before Krishna at Dvaraka. In them he said that he was nothing but a sinful, unworthy friend of a brahmana, while the person embracing him was the Supreme Personality of Godhead Himself, full in six opulences. Only this comparison, taken from the Lord's own earlier pastimes, seemed to fit what had just happened to him.

Preach, and You Will Never Be Proud #

Basudeva Vipra's next reaction says as much about him as the cure itself. He grew afraid. As long as his body had marked him as untouchable, he reasoned, he had had no room for pride, and that humility was exactly what had let him reach the Lord in the first place. Now that he had a beautiful body, he worried that he would lose that humility, and with it everything he had just been given. Mahaprabhu was moved by the honesty of his fear. He told him that a devotee of his standing would never be overtaken by false pride. Then, in place of a warning, He gave him a task: chant the holy names without pause, and preach Krishna consciousness to whomever he could reach. That, Mahaprabhu said, was how Krishna would come to accept him fully. It would not be a reward kept back for later. It would be the natural next step for a man who had already shown where his heart stood.

Vasudevamrita-prada #

With that instruction given, Mahaprabhu disappeared from the spot as suddenly as He had returned to it. Kurma and Basudeva Vipra, the two brahmanas the Lord had touched in that single day, found each other, embraced, and wept together over what they had just witnessed. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami ends the episode by noting that this act alone earned Chaitanya Mahaprabhu a new name among His devotees - Vasudevamrita-prada, the giver of nectar to Vasudeva - preserved, he adds, in verses written by Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya himself. Nothing further is recorded of Basudeva Vipra's life afterward: whether he did in fact spend his remaining years preaching, where he lived, or when he passed from this world. The Chaitanya-charitamrita, having made its point, simply moves on to the next house on the road.

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Closing

Who Was Basudeva Vipra #

Basudeva Vipra (also written Basudev Bipra, or in its Sanskrit form Vasudeva Vipra) was a brahmana of South India. His entire recorded life fits into one of the most retold episodes in the whole Chaitanya-charitamrita. In that episode, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had already gone far down the road on His tour of South India. Then He stopped, turned around, and walked back to embrace a man dying of leprosy. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami gives the story fifteen closely packed verses in Madhya-lila, chapter seven. He closes it by noting that Mahaprabhu Himself came away from the meeting with a new name. Nothing is recorded about Basudeva Vipra before this day, and nothing after it. But the single scene that the Chaitanya-charitamrita does preserve is one of the tradition's clearest statements of what a devotee's faith is worth, whatever the condition of the body that carries it.

A Body Given Over to Disease, a Mind Never Given Over to Despair #

Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami introduces him plainly: a brahmana of real spiritual stature, suffering from a leprosy so advanced that his open sores were full of living worms. The verses do not dwell on the disease. They dwell on his response to it. If a worm fell from one of his wounds, Basudeva Vipra would pick it up himself and set it back in place, unwilling to let even a worm go hungry from his own body. The smell of his wounds kept ordinary people away, but he does not seem to have thought of this as a hardship worth mentioning. The text makes it clear that his attention was entirely on bhakti. There was none left over to spend on his own condition.

The Name Vasudevamrita-prada #

Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami closes the episode by recording that, from this incident alone, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu became known as Vasudevamrita-prada, the giver of nectar to Vasudeva. Srila Prabhupada's purport notes that the name is preserved in verses composed by Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya. He was the Puri pandit whom Mahaprabhu had converted from Mayavada philosophy shortly before this tour began. The name was earned by curing one little-known, dying brahmana. Yet one of the greatest scholars of Jagannatha Puri sang it. This says something about how the Chaitanya-charitamrita ranks its devotees. It ranks them not by learning or birth, but by how intense their surrender is.

The principle behind the cure is that a Vaishnava's body is never actually material, however diseased it may be or however low his birth. Mahaprabhu stated this directly on a separate occasion, to Haridasa Thakura and Sanatana Gosvami at Jagannatha Puri. Basudeva Vipra's story comes from years earlier, on the road to Kurmakshetra. It shows that same teaching acted out, not spoken.

One Name, Several Devotees #

Readers researching Gaudiya Vaishnava history should be careful with this brahmana's name. "Vasudeva" was a common name among Mahaprabhu's associates. The tradition also remembers Vasudeva Ghosh, one of the three kirtaniya brothers of Mahaprabhu's Navadwip sankirtana party. It also remembers Vasudeva Datta Thakura, the devotee who begged to take on the sins of the entire universe himself. Basudeva Vipra shares only the name with them. No connection between him and either man is recorded anywhere. In fact, the Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika's own listing under "Vasudeva" (text 188) is about Vasudeva Ghosh, one of the three singing Ghosh brothers, not about this brahmana. No previous identity in Krishna-lila has been found for Basudeva Vipra himself. No guru, birthplace or date of disappearance survives for him either. This is unlike the Sanoriya Vipra, whose link to Madhavendra Puri is at least on record. What survives for Basudeva Vipra is exactly the fifteen verses of Madhya-lila chapter seven. It is a thin record, but an unusually vivid one.