By the last years at Jagannatha Puri, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's condition had become such that His associates kept watch. The Antya-lila of the Chaitanya-charitamrita records that one night Govinda and Svarupa Damodara found the three doors of His room bolted from the inside and the room empty, and found Him lying unconscious outside the lion gate of the Jagannatha temple with the joints of His bones slackened and His body abnormally elongated; that on a full-moon night He walked into the sea, mistaking it for the Yamuna, drifted towards Konarka and was pulled out in a fisherman's net; that He mistook a sand dune outside the town for Govardhana Hill and ran towards it; and that in the small room called the Gambhira He would stand at night and rub His face against the stone walls until it bled, so that Svarupa Damodara arranged for Shankara Pandit to sleep in the room with Him. Those years are described more fully on their own page. The point to register here is that the end, when it came, came to a man whose body had for a decade been visibly failing to contain what was happening inside it.
The dates are among the few things in this story that are firm. Krishnadasa Kaviraja states them flatly: Chaitanya Mahaprabhu appeared in the year 1407 of the Saka era, corresponding to 1486, and disappeared in 1455 Saka, corresponding to 1534, having been visible in this world for forty-eight years. Modern reference works generally give 14 June 1534. The traditional accounts place the event in the month of Asadha, at the height of the season of the chariot festival, and several of them specify the seventh day of the bright fortnight; on that point they are not in complete agreement, and the year is on much surer ground than the day.
What is remarkable about the primary sources is what they do not contain. The Chaitanya-charitamrita, the most authoritative biography in the tradition, does not narrate the disappearance. Its final chapter describes the nights in the Gambhira, records the eight verses of the Siksastaka with the Lord's own commentary, then turns to a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the whole book and ends with the author's prayers and the date of completion. Bhaktivinoda Thakura's summary of that chapter says only that the author hints at the Lord's disappearance. Vrindavana Dasa Thakura's Chaitanya-bhagavata, the earlier biography, likewise does not describe it. Krishnadasa Kaviraja was writing in Vrindavana around 1615, some eighty years after the event, with access to Svarupa Damodara Goswami's notebooks — that is, to the testimony of the man who slept at the Lord's door — and he chose not to tell the story. This is not an accident of transmission. It is a decision, made by more than one author.
Into that silence the tradition has placed several accounts, and they do not agree.
The most widely held among Gaudiya Vaishnavas is that He entered the Tota Gopinatha temple in Puri and merged into the Deity there. Tota Gopinatha stands in a garden near the sea — tota means garden in Odia, which is how the Deity got the name — and the biographies associate it closely with Gadadhara Pandit, who took the vow never to leave the holy place and served there. The Deity is the one image of Krishna in Puri shown seated rather than standing, and the explanation devotees give for that posture belongs to the same cluster of stories: that Gadadhara Pandit, grown old and unable to reach up to garland Him, was relieved when the Lord sat down. On this account, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, in the mood of separation that had consumed His last years, entered the temple and did not come out.
A second account, given in Lochana Dasa Thakura's Chaitanya-mangala, places the event in the great temple instead: the Lord entered the sanctum of Lord Jagannatha and vanished while embracing the Deity, on a stated day of Asadha, with a temple servant as witness.
A third holds that He walked into the sea in a state of trance and was never recovered. This version has an obvious internal support — the Chaitanya-charitamrita itself records that He had done very nearly this once already, and had been dragged out by a fisherman — and an obvious weakness, which is that the same biographers who recorded the earlier rescue in detail record no second and fatal one.
A fourth comes from Jayananda's Chaitanya-mangala, a separate work from Lochana Dasa's and the only early text that gives a connected narrative of the Lord's departure at all. In it He injures His left foot on a brick while dancing during the chariot festival; the wound does not heal; and He passes away at Tota Gopinatha, having told Gadadhara Pandit in advance the night on which He would go. Some scholars have been sceptical of this, pointing out that a departure caused by a wound to the foot is exactly parallel to Krishna's own departure at Prabhasa, and suggesting that Jayananda may have shaped his account to make the identification. Devotional readers have generally taken the parallel as the point rather than the problem. Further versions exist in Kavi Karnapura's dramatic and poetic works and in the Odia Shunya Samhita attributed to Achyutananda, and they do not reduce neatly to any of the four above.
A handful of twentieth-century writers proposed that He met with an accident or with violence within the temple precincts. These suggestions have no support in any sixteenth-century source, devotional or otherwise, and are rejected across the tradition; they are noted here only because they occasionally surface in popular accounts.
How the tradition regards its own reticence is itself part of the answer. The theological position is that an avatara's advent and departure are equally His own act, and that what took place was not death but the pastimes becoming unmanifest — the technical term is aprakata-lila, unmanifest pastime. On that view there was no body left behind, which is why, uniquely, there exists nowhere in the world a samadhi tomb of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, though the samadhis of every acharya in His line after Him are carefully maintained and visited. There is also a plainer explanation, and the two are not in competition. The men who wrote these books had lived through the loss, or had been raised by people who had; Bengali Vaishnava literary convention did not require them to narrate it; and to describe in detail what was, for that community, the worst grief in its history would have served no devotional purpose. Krishnadasa Kaviraja says more than once in the final chapters that he cannot penetrate the Lord's deepest pastimes and will not pretend to. It is consistent with everything else about him that he should stop where he stops.
What He left is not in doubt. In Vrindavana He had installed six men — Rupa, Sanatana, Raghunatha Bhatta, Gopala Bhatta, Raghunatha Dasa and Jiva — with two charges: to locate and restore the lost sites of Krishna's pastimes, then largely forest and farmland, and to write the theology of the movement. They did both, and the result is one of the largest bodies of systematic devotional literature produced anywhere in medieval India: Rupa Goswami's works on devotional aesthetics, Sanatana's on practice, Jiva's philosophical Sandarbhas, Gopala Bhatta's ritual code. Nityananda Prabhu had been sent back to Bengal and had spread the movement across the province. Krishnadasa Kaviraja, writing eight decades later, produced the biography that fixed the tradition's memory of Him. The line of teachers ran on through Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakura and Baladeva Vidyabhushana to Bhaktivinoda Thakura and Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and through Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada to the rest of the world in the twentieth — which the Chaitanya-bhagavata had claimed, in a much-quoted line, would happen in every town and village on earth. And there are the eight verses, treated on a page of their own, which are all He wrote and which the tradition regards as containing everything else in compressed form.
Gaudiya calendars keep the anniversary of His appearance, Gaura-purnima, as the greatest festival of the year, observed wherever the movement has reached. His disappearance is not generally kept with anything like the same emphasis, and in most calendars is not marked as a festival at all — which, given how the biographers handled it, seems less like an oversight than a continuation of the same instinct. The tradition has been content for five centuries not to know exactly what happened on that night in Puri, and to say so.