When Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu accepted sannyasa at Katwa He had intended to walk straight to Vrindavana, but His devotees turned Him toward Jagannatha Puri instead, and it was there, in the first months of 1510, that His life as a wandering mendicant actually began. Krishnadasa Kaviraja sets out the calendar carefully: He took sannyasa in the month of Magha, reached Puri in Phalguna and saw the Dola-yatra festival there, converted the great logician Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya in Chaitra, and at the beginning of Vaishakha announced that He was leaving on a tour of the south. The reason He gave was that He wished to search for His elder brother Vishvarupa, who had taken sannyasa years earlier and vanished into the south; the biographies note plainly that He already knew Vishvarupa had passed away, and that the search was a pretext for a preaching journey.
He wanted to travel alone, and said so, and the devotees would not have it. Nityananda Prabhu argued that a man whose two hands are permanently occupied in chanting and counting the holy names cannot also carry a waterpot and a change of cloth, and that when the Lord fell unconscious in ecstasy on the road there would be nobody to look after His belongings. The compromise was a simple, quiet brahmana named Krishnadasa, who would carry the waterpot and the garments and, as Nityananda put it, would not say a word. Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya sent four sets of cloth after Him and made one further request: that on the banks of the Godavari He should not fail to meet a government officer named Ramananda Raya, and should not dismiss him because he came of a family the brahmanas of Bengal would have called low. The devotees walked with Him as far as Alalanatha, and the Bhattacharya fainted at the roadside as He left; Krishnadasa Kaviraja records, without softening it, that the Lord did not turn round.
The method of the tour was established within the first days and never varied. He walked chanting Krishna's names aloud, and asked every person He passed to chant "Hari! Hari!" Those who did so followed Him for a while, and when He judged the moment right He embraced them and sent them home. The Chaitanya-charitamrita describes what happened next as a chain reaction: each person He had embraced went back to his own village chanting, laughing, weeping and dancing, and asked everyone he met to chant; those villagers in turn became devotees; visitors who came from neighbouring villages simply to look at this transformed man were transformed in the same way; and so, village by village, the practice spread far ahead of the Lord's own footsteps. The biographer's summary is that hundreds of thousands of people in the south became Vaishnavas without ever meeting Him, and he adds the frank observation that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had not manifested this empowering potency in Nabadwip, but did so in the south.
At Kurma-kshetra, the temple of the tortoise incarnation on the Andhra coast, He was received by a Vedic brahmana named Kurma who washed His feet, fed Him, and then begged to be allowed to abandon his household and follow Him. The refusal that the Lord gave him has become one of the most quoted sentences in the whole tradition: stay at home, chant Krishna's name always, teach everyone you meet what Krishna teaches in the Bhagavad-gita and the Srimad-Bhagavatam, and in that way become a spiritual master and deliver this country. Krishnadasa Kaviraja explicitly states that this is not an isolated instruction but the pattern of the entire tour — that wherever the Lord took a meal, He gave His host the same charge before moving on. It is the charter under which Gaudiya Vaishnavism has always sent householders out to preach.
In the same village lived a brahmana named Vasudeva who had leprosy so advanced that his body was full of worms; the biographies record, as the mark of the man, that when a worm dropped from him he would pick it up and put it back rather than let it die. Hearing of the Lord's arrival he came the next morning to Kurma's house, found that He had already left, and collapsed in the road. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu turned back and embraced him. The accounts say that the disease and the distress left him together, that his body became beautiful, and that his first reaction was to worry that he would now become proud — for which the Lord's prescription was, again, constant chanting and constant preaching. From this episode He acquired one of His less familiar names, Vasudevamrita-prada, "He who gave nectar to Vasudeva."
Continuing south He visited the temple of Jiyada-Nrisimha and then came to the Godavari, where the sight of the river reminded Him of the Yamuna and the woods along its bank reminded Him of Vrindavana. There, at the bathing place near Vidyanagara, He met Ramananda Raya, then governor of the Godavari region on behalf of the king of Odisha. The conversations that followed over several evenings are the theological centre of the entire Chaitanya-charitamrita, and they are told in full on their own page; it is enough to say here that the tour's most consequential meeting happened barely a few weeks after it began, and that the Lord afterwards ordered Ramananda Raya to resign his post and come to Puri.
From the Godavari the route ran through an enormous number of temple towns — Mallikarjuna, Ahovala-Nrisimha, Siddhavata, Tirupati and Tirumala, Kanchi, Vriddhakola — and Krishnadasa Kaviraja admits at the outset of his account that he cannot record them in order and will simply list what he can. At Rangakshetra, the great Srirangam temple on an island in the Kaveri, the Lord was invited home by a Sri Vaishnava brahmana of the Ramanuja line named Venkata Bhatta, who pointed out that the four months of Chaturmasya had begun and that a wandering sannyasi was therefore obliged to stay put. The Lord stayed the whole four months. It is at Srirangam, too, that the tour produced its most charming episode: an illiterate brahmana who read the whole Bhagavad-gita aloud every day, mispronouncing it so badly that people laughed at him, and who wept as he read. Asked which passage moved him, he answered that he did not understand a word, but that while he read he saw Krishna sitting on the chariot with the reins in His hands, and could not look away. The Lord embraced him and told him he had understood the Gita correctly.
With his host Venkata Bhatta the Lord conducted a long, deliberately provocative argument, teasing him about why the goddess of fortune, who had performed austerities to enter the rasa dance, was never admitted to it while ordinary cowherd girls were. Venkata Bhatta, whose entire tradition held Narayana to be the supreme form of God, could not answer; the Lord finally told him that the joking had a purpose, and led him to the conclusion that Krishna in Vrindavana is the original and complete form of the Divine. The household included a boy who served the Lord throughout those four months. Krishnadasa Kaviraja does not name him — the reason, given elsewhere in the Chaitanya-charitamrita, is that when the author sought the blessings of the surviving Goswamis before beginning his book, this one gave his blessing on condition that his own name never appear in it. The boy was Gopala Bhatta, later Gopala Bhatta Goswami of Vrindavana, one of the Six Goswamis, installer of the Radharamana Deity and the compiler behind the Hari-bhakti-vilasa.
Beyond Srirangam the Lord went on to Rishabha Hill, where He met the elderly sannyasi Paramananda Puri, a godbrother of His own guru, and persuaded him to come to Puri; to southern Mathura, the modern Madurai, where a brahmana devoted to Ramachandra was starving himself to death out of grief that Sita had been touched by Ravana, and was consoled by the Lord's explanation — later confirmed to him from an old palm-leaf manuscript of the Kurma Purana that the Lord tracked down at Rameshvaram and carried back to him — that Ravana had abducted only an illusory form; and finally, past Kanyakumari, to Cape Comorin at the very tip of the peninsula. On the way back up the western side, at a settlement of Bhattatharis in Mallara-desa, His servant Krishnadasa was lured away and had to be physically retrieved, an incident that eventually cost the man his position in the Lord's service.
It was in the temple of Adi-keshava, on the banks of the Payasvini in the far south, that the tour produced its most lasting material result. Among a group of advanced devotees discussing spiritual subjects the Lord found a manuscript chapter of the Brahma-samhita, a text then effectively lost. Krishnadasa Kaviraja's judgement of it is unqualified: there is no scripture equal to it on the final conclusion, and it is essential among all Vaishnava literatures. The Lord had it copied and carried it with Him. Some months later, at Pandarpur in the Maratha country — where He also received the news, from Sri Ranga Puri, that the sannyasi Sankararanya who had attained perfection in that town was in fact His own elder brother Vishvarupa — He came upon a community of brahmanas who read daily from a book of devotional poetry called Krishna-karnamrita, by Bilvamangala Thakura. He had that copied too. The two manuscripts came back to Bengal and Odisha with Him, and the biographer calls them the two jewels He brought home; the first thing He did on reaching Vidyanagara again was to hand both to Ramananda Raya, who copied them.
The debates of the tour are compressed by the Chaitanya-charitamrita into a handful of summary verses. The chapter's opening verse describes the people of the south as strong as elephants but held in the jaws of the crocodiles of Buddhist, Jain and Mayavada philosophy, and the narrative that follows names logicians of the Nyaya school, followers of Jaimini's Mimamsa, Sankhya philosophers, yogis of Patanjali's system and the impersonalist followers of Shankaracharya as opponents whom He met and answered on their own ground before establishing devotion. One Buddhist episode is told at length: a learned teacher who came to argue the nine principles of his school, was defeated, and then attempted to poison the Lord by presenting untouchable food as sanctified offering — a plot that failed, and ended with the teacher's own disciples reviving him by chanting the names of Krishna into his ear until he chanted them himself. At Udupi, the seat of Madhvacharya, He questioned the head of the Tattvavadi school so respectfully that the man did not at first realise he was being examined, and then dismantled the position that the perfection of life is dedicating varnashrama duty to Krishna in order to obtain liberation, on the ground that pure devotees reject liberation itself.
The tour lasted roughly two years, and the Lord returned to Puri by much the same road, so that the villages He had converted saw Him a second time. Its consequences were out of all proportion to its length. Two lost books came back with Him and became foundational texts of a school that did not yet exist; a boy in a Srirangam household became one of its six great theologians; a governor on the Godavari became His most confidential associate; and an instruction given casually to a village brahmana over lunch became the standing order under which the movement has recruited ever since. Gaudiya Vaishnavas take from the South India tour the point that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu did not treat the chanting of the holy name as a folk practice for the unlettered while reserving argument for scholars. He did both, in the same journey, with the same equanimity — and left behind, as the biographer puts it, whole provinces where the only sound to be heard on the road was the name of Krishna.