By the last years at Jagannatha Puri, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's condition had become such that His associates kept watch over Him. The Antya-lila of the Chaitanya-charitamrita records what happened. One night Govinda and Svarupa Damodara found the three doors of His room bolted from the inside and the room empty. They found Him lying unconscious outside the lion gate of the Jagannatha temple. The joints of His bones had loosened, and His body had become unnaturally long. On a full-moon night He walked into the sea, mistaking it for the Yamuna. He drifted towards Konarka and was pulled out in a fisherman's net. He also mistook a sand dune outside the town for Govardhana Hill and ran towards it. In the small room called the Gambhira, He would stand at night and rub His face against the stone walls until it bled. So 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 note here is simple. When the end came, it came to a man whose body had for a decade clearly been unable to contain what was happening within it.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Year | 1455 of the Saka era, corresponding to 1534 |
| Date usually given | 14 June 1534 |
| Traditional month | Asadha, at the height of the chariot festival season |
| Age | Forty-eight years visible in this world |
| Place, on the most widely held account | The Tota Gopinatha temple, Puri |
| Samadhi | None exists anywhere in the world |
The Date of His Disappearance #
The dates are among the few things in this story that are certain. Krishnadasa Kaviraja gives them plainly. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu appeared in the year 1407 of the Saka era, which corresponds to 1486, and disappeared in 1455 Saka, which corresponds to 1534. He was 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 chariot festival season. Several of them name the seventh day of the bright fortnight, but the accounts do not fully agree on the day. The year is much more certain than the day.
The Silence of the Primary Sources #
The most striking thing about the earliest sources is what they leave out. The Chaitanya-charitamrita, the most authoritative biography in the tradition, does not tell the story of the disappearance. Its final chapter describes the nights in the Gambhira and records the eight verses of the Siksastaka with the Lord's own commentary. Then it gives a chapter-by-chapter summary of the whole book, and it ends with the author's prayers and the date he completed it. 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, also does not describe it. Krishnadasa Kaviraja was writing in Vrindavana around 1615, some eighty years after the event. He had Svarupa Damodara Goswami's notebooks, the record of the man who slept at the Lord's door. Yet he chose not to tell the story. This silence did not happen because the story was lost over time. It was a choice, made by more than one author.
The Differing Traditional Accounts #
Into that silence the tradition has placed several accounts, and they do not agree.
Merging Into the Tota Gopinatha Deity #
The account 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. In Odia, tota means garden, and that is how the Deity got the name. The biographies connect it closely with Gadadhara Pandit, who took the vow never to leave the holy place and served there. This Deity is the one image of Krishna in Puri shown seated instead of standing. Devotees explain this with a story from the same group of stories. Gadadhara Pandit had grown old and could not reach up to garland Him. Then the Lord sat down, and Gadadhara Pandit was relieved. In this account, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu entered the temple in the mood of separation that had filled His last years, and He did not come out.
Vanishing While Embracing Lord Jagannatha #
A second account is given in Lochana Dasa Thakura's Chaitanya-mangala. It places the event in the great temple instead. In this account, the Lord entered the inner shrine of Lord Jagannatha and vanished while embracing the Deity. It names the day in Asadha when this happened, and it says that a temple servant was the witness.
Walking Into the Sea in Trance #
A third account holds that He walked into the sea in a state of trance and was never found. One thing clearly supports this version. The Chaitanya-charitamrita itself records that He had almost done this once already, and a fisherman had dragged Him out. But this version also has a clear weakness. The same biographers who recorded the earlier rescue in detail record no second time in the sea from which He did not return.
The Wounded Foot in Jayananda's Account #
A fourth account comes from Jayananda's Chaitanya-mangala. This is a separate work from Lochana Dasa's, and it is the only early text that gives a connected story 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. He passes away at Tota Gopinatha, after telling Gadadhara Pandit in advance the night on which He would go. Some scholars have doubted this account. They point out that Krishna's own departure at Prabhasa was also caused by a wound to the foot, so the two are exactly alike. They suggest that Jayananda may have shaped his account to show that the Lord is Krishna. Devotional readers, however, have generally seen this likeness as the very point of the story, not as a problem.
Other Early Versions of the Story #
Other versions are found in Kavi Karnapura's plays and poems and in the Odia Shunya Samhita, which is said to be by Achyutananda. They do not fit neatly into any of the four accounts above.
Modern Theories of Accident or Violence #
A few twentieth-century writers suggested that He met with an accident or with violence inside the temple grounds. No sixteenth-century source, devotional or otherwise, supports these ideas, and they are rejected across the tradition. They are mentioned here only because they sometimes appear in popular accounts.
Aprakata-Lila and the Absence of a Samadhi #
The way the tradition understands its own silence is itself part of the answer. Its theology teaches that an avatara's advent and departure are both His own act. It teaches that what took place was not death. Instead, His pastimes became unmanifest, that is, hidden from our sight. The technical term is aprakata-lila, unmanifest pastime. In this view no body was left behind. That is why, uniquely, there exists nowhere in the world a samadhi tomb of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Yet the samadhis of every acharya in His line after Him are carefully maintained and visited.
Why the Biographers Stopped Where They Did #
There is also a simpler explanation, and both explanations can be true together. The men who wrote these books had lived through the loss, or had been raised by people who had. The customs of Bengali Vaishnava writing did not require them to describe it. For that community it was the worst grief in its history, and describing it in detail would have served no devotional purpose. Krishnadasa Kaviraja says more than once in the final chapters that he cannot enter into the Lord's deepest pastimes and will not pretend to. His stopping where he does fits everything else we know about him.
What He Left Behind #
What He left behind is not in doubt. In Vrindavana His work was carried on by six men: Rupa, Sanatana, Raghunatha Bhatta, Gopala Bhatta, Raghunatha Dasa and Jiva. He sent Rupa, Sanatana and Raghunatha Bhatta there Himself, and the other three came to live there in time. He had given Rupa and Sanatana two tasks, and all six took them up. They were to find and restore the lost sites of Krishna's pastimes, which were then mostly forest and farmland. They were also to write the theology of the movement. They did both. The result is one of the largest collections of systematic devotional books produced anywhere in medieval India. It includes Rupa Goswami's works on rasa, the taste of devotion, Sanatana's works on practice, Jiva's philosophical Sandarbhas and Gopala Bhatta's rules of worship. 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 how the tradition remembers Him. The line of teachers continued through Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakura and Baladeva Vidyabhushana to Bhaktivinoda Thakura and Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the twentieth century it went on through Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada to the rest of the world. In a much-quoted line, the Chaitanya-bhagavata had claimed that this would happen in every town and village on earth. And there are the eight verses, treated on a page of their own. They are all that He wrote, and the tradition regards them as containing everything else in short form.
Gaura-Purnima and the Unmarked Anniversary #
Gaudiya calendars keep the anniversary of His appearance, Gaura-purnima, as the greatest festival of the year, and it is observed wherever the movement has reached. His disappearance is generally not kept with anything like the same emphasis. In most calendars it is not marked as a festival at all. Given how the biographers handled the event, this does not seem to be an oversight. It seems to come from the same feeling that kept the biographers silent. For five centuries the tradition has been content not to know exactly what happened on that night in Puri, and to say so openly.
