The two men who would become Rupa Goswami and Sanatana Goswami were, when Chaitanya Mahaprabhu first wrote to them, among the most powerful Hindus in Bengal and among the most despised. Their family were Yajur-vedi brahmanas of the Bharadvaja gotra whose ancestors had come north from Karnataka and settled in Bengal; their father was Kumaradeva, and there were three brothers — Sanatana the eldest, Rupa in the middle, and Vallabha, later known as Anupama. All three had been drawn, more or less against their will, into the administration of Alauddin Hussain Shah, the Sultan of Bengal, who wanted their learning and was not disposed to take no for an answer. Sanatana became revenue minister, holding the title Sakara Mallik; Rupa became the Sultan's private secretary, holding the title Dabir Khas. They lived at Ramakeli, near the capital in what is now Maldah district. For serving a Muslim court they had been formally cast out of brahmana society, and they seem to have accepted that judgment of themselves entirely.
They had begun writing to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu before they ever saw Him, and He had written back — once, He later told them, sending them a single verse about a woman attached to a man other than her husband, who appears wholly absorbed in her household work while her heart is elsewhere. It was an instruction about how to live in a position one cannot leave. Then, in about 1514, on His way toward Vrindavana through Bengal, He came to Ramakeli itself and performed sankirtana there. Crowds beyond counting came out; the Sultan, hearing of it, concluded that a man who attracts such numbers without distributing charity must be a genuine prophet, and ordered his officers not to obstruct Him. He also asked Rupa privately what he made of the visitor, and Rupa answered that the Supreme Person whom the Sultan accepted as a prophet had taken birth in his kingdom, and that the King should consult his own mind, since whatever arose there could be taken as evidence.
The brothers came at night, in disguise, with straw between their teeth and cloth bound round their necks, and fell like rods before Him. Their prayer is one of the most extreme statements of self-abasement in Vaishnava literature. They said that the deliverance of Jagai and Madhai had cost Him nothing, because those two were brahmanas of Nabadwip merely addicted to sin, whereas they themselves were servants of meat-eaters whose whole occupation was inimical to cows and brahmanas, and were fallen millions of times further. If the Lord would deliver them, they said, the name Patita-pavana, saviour of the fallen, would be genuinely earned. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu answered that they were His eternal servants birth after birth, and that from that day their names were Rupa and Sanatana; He asked them to stop humbling themselves, because it was breaking His heart. He also told them what no one else in Ramakeli understood: that He had no business in Bengal at all and had come only to see the two of them. Before they left, the brothers gave Him a piece of political advice — that a crowd of thousands following Him to Vrindavana would make the pilgrimage impossible — and He acted on it, turning back to Puri to plan a quieter journey.
Getting out of Hussain Shah's service was the harder half. Rupa resigned, went home and disposed of his property methodically: half in charity to brahmanas and Vaishnavas, a quarter to relatives, a quarter kept back against legal trouble, and ten thousand coins deposited with a Bengali grocer for emergencies. Sanatana, more senior and less easily released, pleaded illness and stayed at home studying Srimad-Bhagavatam with brahmana scholars. The Nawab sent his own physician, found nothing wrong, came in person, understood that his minister meant to resign, and had him arrested and imprisoned. Sanatana bought his way out, persuading the Muslim jailer that releasing a prisoner is itself a pious act, and fled across the Ganges with a servant named Ishana who was carrying eight gold coins. When an innkeeper in the hills learned of the coins and prepared to murder them for the money, Sanatana simply handed seven of them over, and the disarmed innkeeper guided them safely across the hill tract instead. Rupa meanwhile had left with Anupama to find the Lord, and caught up with Him at Prayag.
Those ten days at Prayag, at the Dasasvamedha-ghata by the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna, are the origin of the theological literature of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Krishnadasa Kaviraja says flatly that the Lord taught Rupa Goswami everything He had heard from Ramananda Raya, and empowered him to understand it, entering his heart so that his conclusions would agree with the disciplic succession rather than with his own opinion. What He gave him is, in substance, the outline of the Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu.
The teaching begins with a piece of arithmetic designed to locate the listener. There are living beings without number in 8,400,000 species, wandering up and down through the universe according to their acts. Of these only a small fraction are human; of humans, only some follow any revealed principle at all, and half of those merely profess it; of the sincere, most are weighing good and bad work for their own advantage; out of many such, one becomes genuinely wise; out of many millions of the wise, one attains liberation; and out of many millions of the liberated, a pure devotee of Krishna is very difficult to find. The point of the funnel is not despair but the identification of what is rare and therefore valuable — and the rare thing is transmitted not by merit but by contact. Wandering through the universe, one fortunate soul obtains by Krishna's grace the association of a genuine spiritual master, and from the mercy of Krishna and the guru together he receives the seed of the creeper of devotional service.
Everything else in the Prayag teaching hangs off that image. The seed, the bhakti-lata-bija, is planted in the heart, and the devotee becomes a gardener. He waters it with hearing and chanting, and it sprouts and grows — and the Lord traces its growth with a startling geography: it climbs past the walls of the universe, crosses the Viraja, passes through the impersonal Brahman effulgence, and reaches Goloka Vrindavana, where it takes shelter at the wish-fulfilling tree of Krishna's lotus feet and produces its fruit, which is love of God. The gardener remains here, sprinkling water; the fruit ripens there, and when it falls he tastes it. Two dangers are named. The first is offence at the feet of a Vaishnava, which the Lord compares to a mad elephant that gets inside the garden and uproots the creeper, leaving its leaves to dry; the gardener's business is to fence against it. The second is weeds — unwanted creepers that grow beside the bhakti creeper and drink the same water — and the list is precise and uncomfortable: desire for material enjoyment, desire for liberation, deceitful behaviour, violence toward animals, profiteering, and the craving for mundane adoration and importance. If the gardener cannot tell one creeper from another, his watering feeds the weeds and starves the devotion, so an intelligent devotee cuts them out the moment he sees them.
From there Mahaprabhu defined what pure devotional service actually is: service rendered favourably to Krishna, in the way Krishna wants it, free of any other desire and uncovered by either speculative knowledge or fruitive action. Desire for enjoyment and desire for liberation He called two witches that haunt the heart; while they remain, the bliss of devotion cannot be tasted. He described the ripening of attachment into love through the analogy of sugar — cane seed, cane, juice, liquid molasses, solid molasses, sugar, candy, rock candy — and set out the five relationships in which love is tasted, from neutrality through servitude, friendship and parental affection to conjugal love. And He drew the distinction on which the whole of Gaudiya aesthetics rests: where awareness of Krishna's majesty is prominent, as at Mathura, Dvaraka and Vaikuntha, love is somewhat crippled by reverence; where it is absent, as in Vrindavana, Yasoda can bind the Absolute Truth to a mortar with a rope and the cowherd boys can climb on His shoulders. Then, characteristically, He stopped: I have given only a general survey, He said, and you may consider how to adjust and expand it. Rupa Goswami spent the rest of his life doing exactly that.
When the Lord left for Varanasi, Rupa begged to come with Him and was refused: your duty is to carry out My order, and you are close to Vrindavana now, so go there. Rupa fainted on the riverbank as the boat pulled away.
Sanatana reached Varanasi soon after and stood at the door of Chandrasekhara's house. The instruction began with clothes. Sanatana was still dressed as a nobleman; he was told to change, and tore up an old cloth of Tapana Mishra's to make himself a dhoti and underwear. When the Maharashtrian brahmana offered him regular meals he refused, saying he would beg a little from several houses instead. But he was still carrying an expensive woollen blanket from his ministerial days, and the Lord looked at it repeatedly without saying anything. Sanatana understood, went down to the Ganges, found a Bengali mendicant drying a torn quilt, and traded the blanket for the quilt over the man's astonished objections. Mahaprabhu's comment when he came back is one of His most quoted: a good physician who has cured a disease does not leave a little of it behind.
Then, for two months, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu taught him. Sanatana opened by asking the questions the tradition treats as the beginning of all enquiry — not what should I do, but who am I, and why do the threefold miseries of material life trouble me. He added that he did not even know how to ask properly. The Lord's answer began with the constitutional position of the living being: the living entity is eternally a servant of Krishna, because he is the marginal energy of Krishna, simultaneously one with Him and different from Him, as a spark is one with fire and not fire. Krishna's energies are three — the spiritual, the living beings, and the illusory — and the soul, being marginal, may live in either world. Having forgotten Krishna since time out of memory, he has been captured by the external energy, and is raised to comfort and plunged into suffering by turns, like a criminal repeatedly submerged and lifted out of water by a king. He cannot recover by his own effort, and so Krishna educates him from three directions at once: through the revealed scriptures, through a realised spiritual master, and from within, as the Supersoul.
On that foundation the Lord laid out the three-part structure that organises all Gaudiya theology. The scriptures inform the living being of his eternal relationship with Krishna — that is sambandha. Acting on that relationship through devotional service is abhidheya. And the awakening of love of God, which is life's ultimate goal, is prayojana. He illustrated it with a story. An astrologer visited a poor man and told him that his father had died elsewhere leaving a great treasure buried in that very place, thereby establishing his connection to a wealth he did not know he had — but knowledge alone did not put it in his hands. So the astrologer told him where to dig: not on the south, where wasps would drive him off; not on the west, where a ghost would prevent his touching it; not on the north, where a black snake would devour him; but on the east, where a little digging would bring his hand to the pot. The three wrong directions are fruitive work, mental speculation and mystic yoga; the east is devotional service.
What followed over those weeks was an extraordinary syllabus: the Absolute Truth analysed as Brahman, Paramatma and Bhagavan; the Lord's expansions and the classes of incarnation; the opulence and the sweetness of Krishna and the relation between them; the sixty-four items of regulative devotional service and the difference between regulated practice and spontaneous love; the symptoms of emotion and love and the stages by which they intensify to mahabhava; the description of Goloka Vrindavana. At Sanatana's request the Lord also explained the atmarama verse of the Srimad-Bhagavatam in sixty-one different ways, dismantling every word of it — Sanatana had heard that He once gave eighteen explanations of it at Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya's house in Puri and wanted to hear it for himself. And He gave Sanatana a synopsis of what would become the Hari-bhakti-vilasa, the manual of Vaishnava practice. At the end Sanatana said his mind could not hold a drop of the ocean he had been given, and asked the Lord to put His hand on his head and declare that everything He had taught would be manifest to him. Mahaprabhu did exactly that.
Then He gave the two brothers their mission, and it had two halves. Broadcast the revealed scriptures on devotional service, and excavate the lost places of pilgrimage in the district of Mathura; establish the worship of Radha and Krishna in Vrindavana, and preach from there. In 1515 this was a daunting instruction: Vrindavana was then largely forest and farmland, and the sites of Krishna's pastimes were known only in fragments, from local memory and scriptural hints. Both halves were carried out. Rupa and Sanatana, joined eventually by Gopala Bhatta, Raghunatha Bhatta, Raghunatha Dasa and Jiva, became the Six Goswamis of Vrindavana; they identified and restored the holy places, established the temples of Govindaji and Madana-mohana, and wrote the corpus — Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu, Ujjvala-nilamani, Hari-bhakti-vilasa, Brihad-bhagavatamrita and much else — on which every later Gaudiya acharya has depended. When devotees returning from Vrindavana were asked how the brothers lived, the answer was that they had no fixed residence, slept under a different tree each night, begged a little dry bread and fried chickpeas, owned a waterpot and a torn quilt, chanted and wrote almost around the clock, and slept an hour and a half.
Gaudiya Vaishnavas take two things from this episode above all. The first is that the movement's philosophy is not folk piety but a deliberately commissioned body of work: Chaitanya Mahaprabhu wrote almost nothing Himself, and instead trained two men over ten days and two months and sent them to write it down, which is why the tradition regards Rupa Goswami's books as carrying His own authority. The second is who those two men were. The theological architects of Gaudiya Vaishnavism were court officials of a Muslim sultanate, excommunicated by the brahmanas of their own province, who introduced themselves to the Lord as lower than the worst criminals of Nabadwip. The tradition has never forgotten that, and knows them by the names He gave them that night at Ramakeli.