Rupa Goswami and Sanatana Goswami came to Vrindavana to begin their own careful work of finding and restoring the places of Krishna's pastimes. By the time they arrived, Lokanatha Gosvami and Bhugarbha Goswami had already been living there for some years. At that time the district's forests were overgrown. For centuries there had been no organized Gaudiya Vaishnava presence to maintain its most sacred sites, so they were scattered and half-forgotten.
A Search Without a Map #
Later devotional accounts describe how the two companions went about the work in front of them. They had no map and no local guide who remembered the old names accurately, and no scholarly method to fall back on. So they simply walked through the district calling out the names of Vraja's twelve principal forests (Bhandiravana, Kamyavana, Mahavana, Talavana, and the rest). They trusted that the forests themselves, or their presiding deity, would answer. Tradition holds that Srimati Vrinda Devi responded to that sincerity by revealing the exact location of each forest to them in turn. She is the guardian of Vraja's sacred groves, and herself an expansion of Krishna's own pastime potency.
Before the Larger Community Arrived #
The sources that mention it record this as work Bhugarbha and Lokanatha did before Rupa and Sanatana Goswami began their own more thorough recovery of Vraja's sacred places. It was a first, less systematic effort. Later scholarship would build on it, not repeat it from nothing. Several accounts connect this same period to Radha-Govindaji specifically. The two companions are said to have worked to uncover the lost and neglected sites connected to that Deity's own pastime places. This was years before the famous Govindadeva temple was built in the following generation. This entire episode survives only in devotional biographical tradition, not in any of Bhugarbha's or Lokanatha's own writings. Neither man left behind an account of how, or exactly when, this search took place, and no independent record fixes a date to it.
These two companions are remembered as having located the twelve forests (Bhandiravana, Kamyavana, Mahavana, Talavana and the others named in Vraja's own devotional geography). To this day, these forests remain the basic map that pilgrims follow on parikrama of Vraja-mandala. The exact history of how that map was recovered in the sixteenth century is not known. But the tradition that gives Bhugarbha and Lokanatha an early part in it at least places them at the right time. It places them there before the district had any organized Gaudiya Vaishnava presence to maintain such a map at all.
A Quiet Foundation #
Nothing about this work made either man famous. Lokanatha Gosvami went on to actively avoid recognition for the rest of his life, and Bhugarbha Goswami is recorded nowhere as claiming credit for what the two of them found. But the tradition does preserve a link between this early, humble search and Bhugarbha's later disciples. One of them, Chaitanya Dasa, went on to serve as pujari of Sri Govindadeva itself. This detail reads naturally as the continuation of an attachment to serving that particular Deity, one that reached back to these first years in Vraja (see Bhugarbha Goswami's main biography page for his disciples in full). A later moment in Bhugarbha's own life is better recorded. This is his direct appearance by name in Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita, told at Named at Gopala's Darshan in Mathura.
