Early in 1510, a few weeks after He had accepted the renounced order at Katwa and taken the name Sri Krishna Chaitanya, the young sannyasi walked into Jagannatha Puri for the first time. He had come by way of Remuna and Kataka, and He arrived ahead of the devotees travelling with Him, unable to slow His pace once the temple towers came into view. Krishnadasa Kaviraja relates that He passed through the gates, saw the form of Lord Jagannatha, and ran forward to embrace the Deity — and then collapsed unconscious on the floor of the temple. A watchman, seeing a stranger rushing the altar, raised his stick. He was stopped by an elderly, heavily built brahmana who had also seen the fall and who recognised at once that whatever this was, it was not ordinary. That brahmana was Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya, and the conversation that began between them in the following weeks is one of the decisive events in the history of Gaudiya Vaishnavism.
Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya — Vasudeva Sarvabhauma — was not a provincial temple pandit. He was, by common consent, the foremost scholar in Odisha and one of the most formidable logicians in India. Born at Nabadwip, the son of Mahesvara Visarada, he had gone as a young man to Mithila in Bihar to study logic under Pakshadhara Mishra, then the head of the leading school of nyaya in the country. Tradition holds that he memorised the entire curriculum, returned to Bengal, and opened his own school — a move that shifted the centre of gravity of Indian logic from Mithila to Nabadwip, where it has remained ever since. Later he came to Puri as the royal pandit under Maharaja Prataparudra and the recognised authority on Vedanta in Odisha. His Vedanta was Sankara's Vedanta: the Absolute Truth as impersonal, formless, without energies, and the personal form of God as a product of the material mode of goodness. It was this man who now had an unconscious sannyasi on his hands. With the help of the watchman and some of his students he carried the Lord to his own house and laid Him in a sanctified room, and, finding no movement in the abdomen and no breath, held a wisp of cotton to His nostrils until it stirred faintly. Sitting down beside Him, he recognised the condition as a transformation of ecstatic love of the sort the scriptures describe as occurring only in eternally liberated devotees, and wondered how it could possibly appear in a human body.
What Sarvabhauma concluded, once the Lord had revived and he had learned that this was the grandson of Nilambara Chakravarti, a family his own father had respected, was affectionate and entirely wrong. Here was a beautiful young man of about twenty-four who had accepted sannyasa from Keshava Bharati; He was thus, in Sarvabhauma's ranking, a second-class sannyasi of the Bharati line rather than of a first-rate branch of the Sankara order. Worse, He wept, fainted, danced and lost consciousness at the sight of a Deity. To a man trained in nyaya, this was a young renunciant of enormous promise being wrecked by uncontrolled emotion. The remedy was obvious: he would recite Vedanta philosophy before Him continually, so that He would remain fixed in renunciation and enter upon the path of monism. He even offered, if the Lord wished, to re-initiate Him into a more respectable sampradaya. Sarvabhauma's brother-in-law Gopinatha Acharya, who came from Nadia and already knew who this sannyasi was, argued furiously against him — that the Supreme Lord is known only by His own mercy and never by inference, that Sarvabhauma with all his learning was blind to what stood in his own house — and Sarvabhauma replied, smiling, that the scriptures say there is no incarnation of Vishnu in the age of Kali. When Gopinatha Acharya and Mukunda Datta reported these exchanges in distress, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu refused to hear a word against Sarvabhauma: the Bhattacharya, He said, was acting out of paternal affection, and He accepted him as His spiritual master in the matter.
So the classes began. Sitting in the Jagannatha temple, Sarvabhauma on the floor out of deference to a sannyasi and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu on a seat, the greatest Vedantist in Odisha expounded the Vedanta-sutra according to Sankara's Sariraka-bhasya. For seven days the Lord listened without a word. He did not object, did not agree, did not ask a question. On the eighth day Sarvabhauma finally broke off and said what had been troubling him: You simply sit in silence, and I cannot tell whether You are understanding this or not.
Mahaprabhu's first answer was the disarming one He used all His life. He was a fool, He said; He did not study the Vedanta-sutra; He listened only because a sannyasi is supposed to and because Sarvabhauma had ordered Him to. When Sarvabhauma pressed — even a man who does not understand asks questions — the Lord gave the real answer. He understood the meaning of every aphorism perfectly well. What He could not understand were the explanations. The sutras of Vyasadeva, He said, carry their own clear purport; Sarvabhauma's commentary had covered that purport the way a cloud covers the sun. The Bhattacharya had not explained the Brahma-sutra; his business appeared to be to conceal it.
From that sentence the seven days of one-sided lecturing turned into the argument the biographies actually remember. The Vedanta-sutra, Mahaprabhu maintained, is the summary of the Upanishads, and the direct meaning of a Vedic statement must be accepted as it stands; the moment we substitute an interpretation of our own devising, the self-evident authority of the Veda is gone. The Veda calls conchshell and cow dung pure, though by ordinary reckoning they are bone and stool, and no one presumes to explain that away. If we may not reinterpret so small a thing, why should we reinterpret the description of the Absolute? And when the Vedas describe the Absolute in negative or impersonal terms, they are denying material characteristics, not denying personality: the mantra that rejects hands and feet in the same breath says that He walks swiftly and accepts what is offered to Him. Every impersonal description in the end establishes a person.
The heart of the disagreement, as Mahaprabhu framed it, was energy. The Mayavadi position denies that the Absolute possesses potencies, and this is its fundamental error, because the Vedic literature everywhere describes the Supreme as full of inconceivable energies — the internal spiritual potency, the marginal potency which is the living being, and the external potency of nescience which covers the living being's constitutional position. The internal potency itself appears as eternity, knowledge and bliss. To say that the Supreme is without form is to describe as formless someone complete in six opulences; to say that He is without energy is to leave nothing that could account for either the world or the soul. The living entity is the marginal energy of the Lord: therefore he is neither identical with the Lord, as monism claims, nor utterly separate from Him. This is the position later systematised as achintya-bheda-abheda-tattva, the inconceivable simultaneous oneness and difference of the soul and the Supreme.
He pressed the same point on the question of how the world came to be. The Vedanta-sutra teaches that the cosmos arises through the transformation of the Lord's inconceivable potency — as a touchstone produces gold from iron without itself changing, so the Supreme manifests the creation by His energy while remaining unchanged in His own eternal form. Sankara, He argued, read that as implying that the Absolute itself is transformed, found this absurd, concluded that Vyasadeva had erred, and replaced transformation with illusion. But illusion applies to the soul's misidentification with the body, not to the cosmos, which is temporary without being false. And in stressing the phrase "you are that" while passing over omkara, the sound form of the Supreme from which all Vedic knowledge proceeds, the commentator had made a subsidiary statement carry the whole weight of the Veda. Krishnadasa Kaviraja records that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu identified hundreds of faults in the Sariraka-bhasya, and that Sarvabhauma defended it with everything his training could supply, and lost. The Lord closed with a summary that would become the frame of all His teaching: the Vedic literature has three subjects — one's eternal relationship with the Supreme Person, the activity by which that relationship is acted upon, and the goal of life which is love of God. Any other reading is imagination.
Then He softened the whole exchange with a remark that turned it in a new direction: even sages who are fully self-satisfied are drawn to the loving service of Krishna, whose qualities are transcendental and whose activities are wonderful. That is the atmarama verse of the Srimad-Bhagavatam. Sarvabhauma, still a scholar to his fingertips, asked to hear it explained — and the Lord, with perfect courtesy, asked him to go first. Sarvabhauma explained it in nine different ways, drawing on the whole apparatus of logic and scripture. Mahaprabhu praised the performance without reservation: no one in the world, He said, could expound a verse like that. And then, without touching any of the nine, He took the eleven words of the verse one by one, combined each in turn with the word atmarama, and gave eighteen explanations of His own.
Sarvabhauma broke. The tradition records that he understood at that moment that this was Krishna Himself, that he condemned himself aloud as an offender who had been blinded by his own learning, and that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, seeing him surrender, showed him first the four-armed form of Vishnu and then His own original form of Krishna with a flute at His lips. Sarvabhauma fell flat, rose, and began to compose. In a very short time he produced one hundred verses in praise of the Lord — Krishnadasa Kaviraja remarks that Brihaspati, the preceptor of the demigods, could not have composed them so fast. The Lord embraced him, and the greatest logician in Odisha fainted, wept, trembled, perspired, and got up and danced.
The conversion showed itself, characteristically, in a small matter of etiquette. Early the next morning Mahaprabhu carried garlands and food remnants from the Jagannatha temple to Sarvabhauma's house and put them into his hands. The Bhattacharya had not yet washed his mouth, bathed or performed his morning duties — for a brahmana of his standing, an unthinkable moment to eat anything. He quoted two verses on the eating of maha-prasadam without regard to time or place and ate it on the spot. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu embraced him, and the two of them danced together; today, He said, He had conquered the three worlds. Some days afterwards Sarvabhauma composed two verses on a palm leaf and sent them to the Lord. Mukunda Datta, intercepting the leaf, copied them onto the outside wall of the room before delivering it; Mahaprabhu read them and tore the leaf up, but the devotees had already learned them from the wall. In them Sarvabhauma declared that Krishna had descended as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu to teach detachment and devotion, and that He had come to restore the ancient system of devotional service to Himself which had almost been lost to the influence of time. Those two verses are still recited by Gaudiya Vaishnavas.
One last exchange is recorded because it shows how completely the man had turned. Reciting a verse of Lord Brahma's from the Bhagavatam, Sarvabhauma altered two syllables, replacing a word meaning "the shelter of liberation" with one meaning "the shelter of devotion." Mahaprabhu caught it at once and objected: the original word refers directly to Krishna, at whose feet all forms of liberation stand, so why change the text? Sarvabhauma held his ground. He knew the Lord's reading was correct, he said, but the very sound of the word "liberation" made him uneasy, while the word "devotion" filled his mind with bliss — and the pure devotee would sooner go to hell than merge into the effulgence. Mahaprabhu laughed and embraced him. The man who had spent his life teaching that merging into Brahman is the goal of existence had come to flinch at the word.
For Gaudiya Vaishnavas the episode carries a weight out of proportion to its length. Historically it gave the movement its bridgehead in Odisha: with Sarvabhauma converted, Kashi Mishra and the leading men of Puri followed, and through Sarvabhauma the Lord eventually gained the confidence of Maharaja Prataparudra himself, which secured the sankirtana movement royal protection in a second kingdom. It was Sarvabhauma who sent Him to Ramananda Raya on the South India tour. Philosophically, it is the first full statement of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's quarrel with impersonalism, and the source from which the later Goswamis drew their critique. And devotionally, the tradition reads it as its own demonstration: that scholarship alone, however vast, cannot reach the Supreme Person, and that the same scholarship, once surrendered, becomes an instrument in His service. Sarvabhauma's own summary was blunter than any of that. Delivering the whole world, he told the Lord, was no great feat; delivering him was the wonder, because reading too many books of logic had turned him into a bar of iron, and the Lord had melted him.