Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu

Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486–1534) is worshipped throughout Bengal, Odisha and the wider Vaishnava world as Krishna Himself, appearing in the mood and complexion of His own greatest devotee, Srimati Radharani, to relish and distribute the sweetness of pure love of God. Historically, He is the founder of Gaudiya Vaishnavism and the figure who transformed congregational chanting of the holy names — sankirtana — from an occasional devotional practice into a mass spiritual movement that swept across Bengal and Odisha in His own lifetime and, through His followers, eventually reached the entire world.

He was born on the evening of Phalguna Purnima (the full-moon night of the Bengali month of Phalguna), 23 Phalguna in the year 1407 of the Sakabda era — 18 February 1486 by the Western calendar — in the town of Sridhama Mayapur on the banks of the Ganges in Nabadwip, Nadia district, Bengal. His birth coincided with a total lunar eclipse, during which, by long custom, the townspeople were already in the river chanting the holy names for purification; the whole of Nabadwip was thus, without knowing it, chanting Krishna's name at the exact moment the Lord Himself appeared. His maternal grandfather, the astrologer and scholar Nilambara Chakravarti, cast His horoscope and predicted that this child would become the greatest of spiritual teachers; he named Him Vishvambhara, "one who maintains the entire universe."

His father, Jagannatha Mishra, was a pious brahmana from Sylhet in East Bengal who had settled in Nabadwip; his mother, Sachi Devi, is remembered in Vaishnava literature as the ideal of a chaste and devoted mother. Vishvambhara was their tenth and last child; of their earlier children only one, His elder brother Vishvarupa, survived infancy, and Vishvarupa himself renounced the world for sannyasa while still young, leaving Sachi Devi to pour her whole heart into her youngest son. Because a nimba tree stood near the spot where He was born, the child was affectionately called Nimai; His golden-hued complexion later earned Him the names Gaurahari and Gauranga ("the golden one").

Nimai's schooldays and early reputation as a prodigy and a mischievous, wonder-working child are told in detail in a dedicated page on His childhood pastimes — from His constant weeping as an infant that stopped only when neighbours chanted "Haribol," to His swift mastery of Sanskrit grammar, logic and rhetoric under the pandit Gangadasa in the village of Ganganagar. By His teenage years He was already recognised as Nabadwip's foremost young logician, a reputation sealed when He met and gently overcame the celebrated undefeated scholar Keshava Kashmiri Pandita in a debate on the banks of the Ganges — an episode told in full here.

Nimai was married young, in the traditional way, to Lakshmipriya, the daughter of Vallabhacharya of Nabadwip; she passed away from a snakebite while He was away teaching in East Bengal, a loss that grieved Sachi Devi deeply. At his mother's request, Nimai married a second time, to Vishnupriya, the daughter of the royal pandit Sanatana Mishra. It was as a married householder pandit, running His own tola (school) and already famous for scholarship, that the decisive turning point of His life took place.

In His early twenties Nimai travelled to Gaya to perform the shraddha (memorial rites) for His departed father. There, at the temple of Vishnupada, He met the wandering Vaishnava sannyasi Ishvara Puri, a disciple of Madhavendra Puri, and received from him initiation into the chanting of the Hare Krishna maha-mantra. The change in Him was immediate and total: the brilliant but somewhat proud young logician of Nabadwip returned home as an ecstatic devotee, sometimes weeping, sometimes fainting, sometimes dancing, absorbed constantly in the holy names. Nabadwip watched its most famous pandit become, in the eyes of the world, a man transformed by divine emotion.

From this transformation flowed the inauguration of the sankirtana movement — nightly congregational chanting that began quietly at the house of Srivasa Pandit and, joined by Nityananda Prabhu, Advaita Acharya, Gadadhara Pandit and a growing circle of devotees, soon filled the streets of Nabadwip; the full story, including the famous confrontation with the local magistrate Chand Kazi, is told here. It was in this same period that two notorious drunkards and criminals of the town, Jagai and Madhai, were transformed into saints by Nityananda Prabhu's mercy and the Lord's own compassion — an episode Gaudiya Vaishnavas cite to this day as proof that no soul, however fallen, is beyond the reach of the holy name; read the full account here.

Recognising that the sectarian pride of caste and family was becoming an obstacle to His mission of freely distributing love of God to everyone regardless of birth, Nimai left home at the age of twenty-four and accepted the renounced order of sannyasa at Katwa from Keshava Bharati, taking the name by which He is now known throughout the world: Sri Krishna Chaitanya. The full story of that departure — and of the household He left in tears behind Him — is told here.

As a sannyasi, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu first travelled toward Vrindavana but was drawn instead to Jagannatha Puri in Odisha, where he took up residence and remained, on and off, for the rest of His manifest life. From Puri He undertook a long preaching tour through South India, walking as far as Rameshvaram and Kanyakumari, converting Mayavadi sannyasis, Buddhists and ordinary villagers alike through the chanting of the holy names, and meeting the great devotee-statesman Ramananda Raya on the banks of the Godavari, with whom He held the profound theological conversations recorded in the Chaitanya-charitamrita. On this journey He also delivered the priest Venkata Bhatta and his young son, who would later become Gopala Bhatta Goswami, one of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavana.

Later He travelled north through Bengal, met and personally trained Rupa Goswami and his brother Sanatana Goswami — two former ministers in the Muslim administration of Bengal whom He instructed, in ten days at Prayag and afterwards at Varanasi, in the philosophy and practice of pure devotional service, charging them with the twin mission of excavating the lost pilgrimage sites of Krishna's Vrindavana pastimes and writing the theological literature that would give Gaudiya Vaishnavism its philosophical foundation. In Varanasi He also debated the Mayavadi sannyasi Prakashananda Sarasvati and his following of impersonalist monks, converting the entire assembly to Krishna bhakti.

For the last eighteen years of His life Chaitanya Mahaprabhu resided at Jagannatha Puri in the house of Kashi Mishra, surrounded by intimate associates such as Svarupa Damodara Goswami, who served as His confidential secretary, the poet-king Prataparudra, Paramananda Puri and Ramananda Raya. From Puri He directed the mission at a distance: appointing Nityananda Prabhu to preach throughout Bengal, sending the Six Goswamis — Rupa, Sanatana, Raghunatha Bhatta, Raghunatha Dasa, Jiva and Gopala Bhatta — to live and write in Vrindavana, and personally training disciples such as Raghunatha Dasa Goswami in the deepest moods of devotional life.

Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu disappeared from this world on 14 June 1534, at the age of forty-eight, during kirtana at the Tota Gopinatha temple in Puri; the exact circumstances of His disappearance are described with deliberate reticence in the Vaishnava histories and remain, appropriately, one of the most discussed mysteries in the tradition.

His theological legacy is systematised in the philosophy of achintya-bheda-abheda-tattva — the "inconceivable, simultaneous oneness and difference" of the living being and the Supreme — and in the practical teaching that in the present age of Kali, the congregational chanting of Krishna's holy names is the most direct and universally accessible path to love of God, open to every human being regardless of caste, creed or qualification. His only written legacy, eight verses known as the Siksastaka, remains the concise summary of that teaching. Everything else we know of His words and pastimes comes down through the biographical and theological works of His followers — chiefly Vrindavana Dasa Thakura's Chaitanya-bhagavata and Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami's Chaitanya-charitamrita — and through the unbroken line of acharyas, from the Six Goswamis of Vrindavana down to Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura and Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who carried His sankirtana movement to the rest of the world.