Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had not yet accepted sannyasa when Lokanatha Gosvami first came before Him at Nabadwipa, sometime around 1509-1510 CE. Mahaprabhu embraced him, told him He intended to renounce household life very shortly and go to Vrindavana Himself, and instructed Lokanatha to go there ahead of Him and settle. Lokanatha, by every account a person of deep feeling, was overcome imagining the Lord's beautiful hair shorn for sannyasa and the grief His devotees would feel — but he surrendered to the order and prepared to leave.
A Friend Who Would Not Let Go #
Bhugarbha Goswami was not, so far as any source records, given a personal instruction from Mahaprabhu to travel to Vrindavana. What moved him was simpler: he saw how much the parting cost his close companion, and he chose to walk the road with him rather than let him go alone. Whether that closeness was a blood tie — the Sadhana-dipika calls Bhugarbha Lokanatha's paternal uncle — or simply the bond of two men who had grown up devoted to the same Lord, the sources do not agree, and this site does not pretend to settle it (see Bhugarbha Goswami's main biography page for that disagreement in full). What is recorded is the decision itself: Bhugarbha went with him.
The Road from Bengal to Vraja #
One later account, compiled by Srila Bhakti Ballabh Tirtha Goswami Maharaj of Sree Chaitanya Gaudiya Math, traces the route the two companions walked: through Rajmahal, Tajpur, Purnia, Ayodhya, Lucknow, and other holy places along the way, before finally arriving in Vraja-mandala. No source gives an exact date for their arrival, and the geography of a sixteenth-century pilgrimage on foot across northern India resists any precise timeline — but the distance itself, several hundred miles through unfamiliar country, says something about the seriousness of the undertaking for two men who had, as far as is recorded, no material means beyond what devotees along the way chose to offer them.
Ahead of Rupa and Sanatana #
Even after reaching Vrindavana, Lokanatha Gosvami's own heart kept pulling him back toward Mahaprabhu. When word reached him that the Lord had taken sannyasa and gone to Puri, and from there on pilgrimage to South India, Lokanatha set off to find Him — first south, then back toward Vraja when he heard Mahaprabhu had gone there, then toward Prayag when he heard the Lord had moved on again. It was only after Mahaprabhu appeared to him in a dream and told him plainly to stop wandering and remain in Vrindavana for his bhajana that Lokanatha finally settled. Bhugarbha Goswami's own movements during these years are not separately recorded, but every source that mentions the two of them together places them in Vraja, already established there, well before Rupa Goswami, Sanatana Goswami and Gopala Bhatta Goswami gradually arrived to join them — early enough that later Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition remembers Bhugarbha and Lokanatha as senior in age and experience to several of the Goswamis whose names became far better known. Their years in Vraja before that larger community formed are themselves the subject of this site's next page, Calling Out the Names of the Twelve Forests.