In 1515, after the journey to Vrindavana and the ten days with Rupa Goswami at Prayag, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu came to Varanasi and stayed there for about two months. It was not a comfortable place for Him. Varanasi — Kashi, Benares — was the intellectual capital of Sankara's Vedanta, and it maintained a large and prestigious community of ekadandi sannyasis whose life consisted of meditation and the study of the Vedanta-sutra according to the Sariraka-bhasya. Their leader was Prakashananda Sarasvati. He and his followers had views about the golden sannyasi from Bengal, and they expressed them freely.
The charges were specific rather than vague. This Chaitanya, they said, is an illiterate sannyasi who does not know the duties of His own order: instead of studying Vedanta He chants and dances in the streets in the company of sentimentalists, guided by emotion rather than knowledge. That He had been Nimai Pandita, the finest young logician in Nabadwip, before He accepted the renounced order was either unknown to them or beside the point. Mahaprabhu's response, on His first pass through the city, was to smile and say nothing. He did not attend the sannyasis' gatherings, did not accept their invitations, ate only at the house of Tapana Mishra, and stayed with Chandrasekhara, who was by caste a kayastha — a choice that itself said something.
His two hosts found the situation unbearable. While He was teaching Sanatana Goswami, they came to Him and said that they would rather give up their lives than go on hearing Him blasphemed. He smiled again and remained silent. And then a brahmana from the Maharashtra country, a devotee who lived in Varanasi and had been turning the same problem over privately, arrived with a proposal. He had invited every sannyasi in Benares to his house. He knew the Lord never went to anyone else's home, but he asked Him to come. His reasoning was simply that anyone who saw Chaitanya Mahaprabhu at close range would understand who He was — and that if he did not attempt it he would spend the rest of his life in Varanasi regretting it. The Lord accepted the invitation.
What happened at that lunch is told at length in the seventh chapter of the Adi-lila of the Chaitanya-charitamrita and referred to again in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Madhya-lila, where Krishnadasa Kaviraja says he will not repeat himself but will add what he left out. Finding the assembly of sannyasis already seated, Mahaprabhu offered them obeisances, went to wash His feet, and then sat down on the ground at the washing place rather than take a seat among them. Krishnadasa Kaviraja records that an effulgence came from His body like the light of millions of suns, and that the sannyasis rose. Prakashananda Sarasvati himself came over and called Him forward — why are You sitting in an unclean place — and when Mahaprabhu answered that He belonged to a lower order of sannyasis and did not deserve to sit with them, Prakashananda took Him by the hand and seated Him in the middle of the assembly.
Then Prakashananda put the challenge courteously and directly. He knew who this was: Sri Krishna Chaitanya, a disciple of Keshava Bharati, and therefore a member of their own Sankara sampradaya, living in their own city. Why then did He avoid them and refuse even to be seen? Meditation and the study of Vedanta are the whole business of a sannyasi. Why had He abandoned both to chant and dance with fanatics? You look, Prakashananda said, as though you were Narayana Himself; explain why You have adopted the behaviour of low-class people.
Mahaprabhu's reply is the most famous single sentence of the encounter, and it is worth noticing that it is not a counter-argument. My spiritual master, He said, considered Me a fool, and chastised Me. He told Me: You are a fool, You are not qualified to study Vedanta philosophy, and therefore You must always chant the holy name of Krishna, which is the essence of all mantras. He said that simply by chanting one is freed from material existence and comes to see the Lord's lotus feet, and that in this age of Kali there is no religious principle other than the holy name. So, said Mahaprabhu, I have done what I was told.
He then narrated what had followed, and in doing so turned the accusation of madness into the argument. Chanting as instructed, He had found Himself laughing, weeping, dancing and singing like a lunatic, and had gone back to His spiritual master in genuine alarm to ask what sort of mantra he had given Him. His guru had smiled and said that this is the nature of the maha-mantra: whoever chants it develops ecstatic love for Krishna. Religiosity, economic development, sense gratification and liberation are the four goals of human life universally acknowledged, but love of God is a fifth, and beside it the other four are as insignificant as straw in the street. The symptoms that had alarmed Him — perspiration, trembling, tears, faltering voice, apparent madness — were its natural signs. His guru had therefore not corrected Him but ordered Him to continue, and to go out and preach the value of chanting Krishna's name in order to deliver the fallen. Compared with the ocean of bliss available in the holy name, Mahaprabhu added, the happiness of impersonal Brahman realisation is the water in a canal.
The assembly was moved by this — Krishnadasa Kaviraja says their minds changed — but they returned to the substantive point. There is no objection to Your being a great devotee of Krishna, they said; everyone is satisfied with that. But why do You avoid the Vedanta-sutra? What is the fault in it?
Mahaprabhu asked permission to answer, and then answered at length. There is no fault in the Vedanta-sutra. The Vedanta-sutra is the word of the Supreme Person Himself, spoken in the form of Vyasadeva, and therefore free of the four defects of ordinary human speech — mistake, illusion, cheating and defective senses. The fault lies in the commentary. Sankaracharya explained the Vedic literature in terms of indirect meanings, and whoever hears such explanations is ruined by them. Mahaprabhu was careful about how He assigned blame: Sankaracharya himself, He said, is not at fault, because he covered the real purport of the Vedas under the order of the Supreme Lord, for a purpose of His own; it is those who take the Mayavada philosophy as final who lose everything they have gained.
He then went through the specific points, and they are the same points He had made to Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya at Puri. Taken directly, the Absolute Truth is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, full of all spiritual opulence, with none equal to Him; His body, His name, His fame and His entourage are all spiritual, and to hold that the form of Vishnu is a product of the material mode of goodness is the gravest of offences. The living beings are energies, not the energetic — sparks of a blazing fire, not the fire — and the scriptures divide the Lord's potencies into the spiritual, the living beings, and nescience. Mayavada philosophy takes the infinitesimal living being for the Absolute Truth itself, which does not elevate the soul but conceals the glory of God. On creation, Vyasadeva teaches that the cosmos arises by the transformation of the Lord's energy; Sankaracharya, unwilling to accept a transformation which he supposed would change the Absolute itself, concluded that Vyasadeva had erred and substituted the doctrine of illusion. But a touchstone turns iron into gold without itself being altered; if such an inconceivable potency exists in a stone, why should the Supreme Person not possess one? Illusion belongs to the soul's identification with the body; the world is temporary, not false. And omkara is the fundamental sound vibration of the Veda, the sound representation of the Supreme, while the phrase "you are that" is subsidiary — yet Sankara's followers have made the subsidiary statement carry the whole weight of the tradition while covering the principal one. In every case, He argued, the self-evident Vedic text is the highest evidence, and interpretation destroys its self-evident character.
The Mayavadi sannyasis' response is one of the more remarkable passages in the Chaitanya-charitamrita, because they conceded a great deal. They told Him that they had no quarrel with His refutation, that they were perfectly aware that Sankaracharya's word-jugglery is imaginary, and that they accepted it only because they belonged to his school — and that it did not satisfy them. Then they said: let us see how well You can explain the sutras in their direct meaning.
So He did. Brahman means the greatest, and the greatest is the Supreme Person, full in six opulences, the reservoir of all truth and all knowledge, free of material contamination; to describe Him as impersonal is to deny His spiritual potencies, and one who accepts half the truth cannot understand the whole. He is approached only by devotional service, beginning with hearing. Regulated devotional service performed under the direction of a spiritual master awakens the dormant love of God that is already in the heart — that is the process. And love of God is the fifth and highest goal of life, so exalted that the infinite Lord makes Himself submissive to an infinitesimal devotee out of it. Every aphorism of the Vedanta-sutra, He concluded, treats these three subjects and nothing else: one's relationship with the Supreme, the activity by which that relationship is enacted, and the goal of life. When they had heard this, the sannyasis addressed Him as Vedic knowledge personified and asked Him to excuse the offences they had committed in criticising Him. He excused them, gave them the holy name, and then — a detail the biographers record with evident satisfaction — took His meal sitting among them.
The reconciliation had a sequel, recorded in the Madhya-lila. One of Prakashananda's own disciples, a scholar of his guru's calibre, stood up in the sannyasis' assembly and argued at length for Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's position — that Sankaracharya's interpretations are verbally accepted by scholars but do not satisfy the heart, and that in the age of Kali formal renunciation delivers no one — and then began chanting the name of Krishna. Prakashananda Sarasvati himself then spoke, and what he said amounted to a public retraction: that Sankaracharya had explained Vedanta as he did because he was determined to establish monism, and that anyone who wishes to establish his own opinion cannot interpret a scripture directly; that the six schools of Indian philosophy are each busy refuting the others and none arrives at the Supreme Person; and that the proper course is therefore to follow the mahajanas, the great authorities, since dry argument is inconclusive. The words of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, he said, are a shower of nectar.
Not long afterwards Mahaprabhu bathed at Panchanada and went to the temple of Bindu Madhava, where the sight of the Deity overwhelmed Him and He began to dance in the courtyard with Chandrasekhara, Paramananda Puri, Tapana Mishra and Sanatana Goswami chanting beside Him. Hundreds of thousands of people took up the chanting. Prakashananda, hearing the sound from nearby, came with his disciples and joined it. When the kirtana stopped he caught hold of the Lord's feet, and there followed an exchange in which each insisted on his own inferiority — Mahaprabhu protesting that Prakashananda was the spiritual master of the world and that He was not fit to be the disciple of his disciple, and Prakashananda answering that his offences had been counteracted by touching those feet, and that henceforward he would practise devotional service. When Prakashananda described Him as the Supreme Lord, Mahaprabhu objected sharply, on the principle that to identify a fallen conditioned soul with God is a serious offence.
Prakashananda's questions this time were entirely different in temper. He asked to hear the Brahma-sutra from Him. Mahaprabhu answered that Vyasadeva had explained his own aphorisms, and that his commentary is the Srimad-Bhagavatam — the same purport set out in eighteen thousand verses. He traced the chain by which its essence was transmitted: four verses spoken by Krishna to Brahma, given by Brahma to Narada, given by Narada to Vyasadeva, and expanded by Vyasadeva into the Bhagavatam. He expounded those four verses, showing that they contain sambandha, abhidheya and prayojana, and advised Prakashananda to study the Bhagavatam scrutinisingly, because then the actual meaning of the Brahma-sutra would become clear. At that point the Maharashtrian brahmana mentioned that Mahaprabhu had recently explained the atmarama verse of the Bhagavatam — the verse stating that even those who are entirely self-satisfied are drawn to the loving service of Krishna — in sixty-one different ways. The assembly, astonished, asked to hear them, and He gave them again. Everyone present concluded that this was Krishna Himself.
From that day, Krishnadasa Kaviraja writes, the Mayavadi sannyasis and the scholars of Varanasi took to discussing Srimad-Bhagavatam, and the city that had ridiculed Him spent five days chanting Hare Krishna with Him in the streets, until the crowds around His lodgings grew so great that He left for Puri through the Jharikhanda forest. His own comment to His companions was made laughing. He had come to Varanasi to sell His goods, He said, and had found no customers, and it had begun to look as though He would have to carry them home; but since His devotees were so unhappy about it, He had given them away for nothing. Krishnadasa Kaviraja's summary is that He turned the whole city into a second Nabadwip.
The episode is remembered by Gaudiya Vaishnavas for reasons beyond its outcome. It is the one place in the biographies where Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's argument against impersonalism is set out at length before an expert and hostile audience rather than to a devotee, and where His opponents concede the points on the record. It is also the standing example of His method: He never began by asserting His own position, but by accepting the charge against Him and repeating His guru's low estimate of Him, and argued only when asked to. And it answers, by demonstration rather than by claim, the accusation that the sankirtana movement was emotionalism without a philosophy behind it. One footnote survives from later centuries: some Gaudiya writers have identified Prakashananda Sarasvati with Prabodhananda Sarasvati, the poet of the Radha-rasa-sudha-nidhi, but the identification is disputed and most authorities, including Srila Prabhupada in his purports, treat them as two different persons, Prabodhananda having come from the Ramanuja line in the South rather than from the Sankara sampradaya of Kashi.