Student Life and Nimai Pandita the Scholar

By the time Nimai was five He had been enrolled in the village school, and by eight He was studying at the tola of Gangadasa Pandita in the neighbouring village of Ganganagar. Vyakarana — Sanskrit grammar — was the foundation of the entire traditional curriculum and the hardest of its disciplines: a student who could handle Panini's system and the commentarial literature built on it was considered fit for anything else that might follow. The biographies record that Nimai not only mastered grammar with unusual speed but began composing His own commentaries on it, and that He would sometimes reduce older students to silence by finding a defensible alternative reading of a rule they had taken as settled.

Two griefs shaped this period of His life. The first was the departure of His elder brother. Vishvarupa, some years older, had grown into a young man of marked detachment; rather than accept the marriage his parents were arranging, he left home and accepted sannyasa, taking the name Shankararanya. For Sachi Devi and Jagannatha Mishra it was a hard blow, and the Chaitanya-charitamrita relates that Nimai afterwards consoled His mother with a promise that He would not do the same — a promise Vaishnava readers have always found poignant, given what He would do at twenty-four. The chapter also preserves an episode in which Vishvarupa appeared to Nimai in a dream and invited Him to take sannyasa and join him, and Nimai declined and was sent back.

The second grief was the death of Jagannatha Mishra, while Nimai was still a boy. The family, never wealthy, was left in real difficulty. Nimai continued His education substantially on His own, working through His father's books in smriti — the literature of religious and social law — and in nyaya, the formidable school of Indian logic for which Nabadwip was then the most famous centre in India. That He acquired a working command of nyaya essentially without a teacher is one of the details the biographers stress; nyaya was a discipline in which students commonly spent a decade under a master.

By His mid-teens Nimai had opened His own tola and was teaching grammar to His own students on the bank of the Ganges. Accounts of Him as a teacher are vivid and consistent: brilliant, playful, mercilessly quick in debate, and not above enjoying His own superiority. He is described walking the streets of Nabadwip with a crowd of students behind Him, stopping any scholar He met and challenging him on some fine point, and then dismantling whatever position the man defended — sometimes, having done so, arguing the opposite side with equal force just to demonstrate that He could. Nabadwip's pandits found Him formidable and rather trying. The town's assessment, by the time He was sixteen, was that this was the sharpest logician of His generation and that no one in Nadia could stand against Him in argument.

That reputation was sealed in the encounter with the travelling scholar Keshava Kashmiri Pandita, who came to Nabadwip undefeated after touring the learned assemblies of India, and left it having conceded to a teenager on the bank of the Ganges; the full account is given separately.

The Chaitanya-charitamrita also records, from these years, incidents in which the future direction of His life shows through the scholar's exterior. He forbade His mother to eat grains on Ekadashi, the fortnightly fast day observed by Vaishnavas — a small domestic instruction, but a distinctly Vaishnava one from a boy whose fame rested entirely on secular learning. He took part, on the plea of illness, in the Ekadashi observance at the house of the wealthy brothers Hiranya and Jagadisha. He sported in the Ganges with the other young men of the town and joked with the girls at the bathing ghats. This last is treated by Gaudiya commentators as more than adolescent high spirits, since the same commentators read the whole of His household life as a period in which the Lord conducted Himself in a fully human way while remaining, in His own nature, exactly what He was.

There is a tension in this stage of His life that the tradition does not attempt to smooth over. The young Nimai Pandita was proud, and knew He was, and enjoyed it. Vaishnava writers read the pride not as a defect subsequently corrected but as part of the design: the Lord established Himself as the most accomplished scholar in the most learned town in Bengal, so that when He afterwards abandoned scholarship for the chanting of the holy name, no one could say He had taken up devotion because He was incapable of anything more demanding. The man who taught Nabadwip to chant was the same man who had beaten Nabadwip at its own game first.