Krishnadasa Kaviraja lays out the shape of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's life with unusual precision. He was visible in this world for forty-eight years, from 1486 to 1534. The first twenty-four He spent as a householder in Nabadwip. The remaining twenty-four He spent as a sannyasi based at Jagannatha Puri — and of those, the first six were consumed by travel, to South India, back through Bengal, and to Vrindavana and Prayag, while the last eighteen were spent continuously at Puri without leaving. This page is about those eighteen years, and particularly about the twelve at the end of them, which the tradition regards as the most inward and the least describable part of His life.
The house was chosen for Him. When the devotees were looking for somewhere near the temple that would be quiet enough, King Prataparudra suggested the residence of a brahmana named Kashi Mishra, close to the Jagannatha temple, secluded and calm. Kashi Mishra's response, when the proposal reached him, was that he was fortunate; when the Lord arrived he fell at His feet and surrendered himself and everything he owned. Within that house was a small inner room, the Gambhira, and it is by that name — not by the name of the house — that the last phase of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's life is known throughout the Gaudiya tradition. The site is still shown to pilgrims in Puri.
The circle around Him settled quickly and barely changed afterwards. Svarupa Damodara Goswami served as His confidential secretary and, more importantly for posterity, kept notes; the Chaitanya-charitamrita states outright that its account of the middle and final pastimes rests on Svarupa Damodara's notebooks. Ramananda Raya, whom the Lord had met on the Godavari and ordered to resign his governorship, retired on full pension and moved to Puri, where he became the second of the two men admitted to the Lord's nights. Paramananda Puri, an elderly godbrother of the Lord's own guru, was given a room in the same house. Gadadhara Pandit took kshetra-sannyasa — the vow never to leave the holy place — and settled at the Tota Gopinatha temple in a garden by the sea, where the Lord came to hear him read the Bhagavatam. Govinda served as personal attendant and slept across the doorway of the Gambhira. Haridasa Thakura, who as a Muslim by birth would not enter the temple, was given a solitary residence nearby. Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya, the Vedantist the Lord had converted in His first weeks at Puri, was a constant presence, as were Jagadananda Pandit, Shankara Pandit and a shifting body of Odia devotees.
The rhythm of the years had two fixed points. The first was daily: darshana of Lord Jagannatha in the temple, and kirtana. The Lord's ecstatic states in the temple courtyard, and particularly at the Simha-dvara, the lion gate, are described so often in the Antya-lila that they cease to be exceptional events and become simply what happened. The second was annual: every year, at the season of the chariot festival, the devotees of Bengal came down to Puri in a large party organised by Shivananda Sena, who took charge of ferry tolls and lodgings for a group that included Advaita Acharya, Nityananda Prabhu, Srivasa Pandit, wives and children, and on one famous occasion a dog. They stayed four months, through Chaturmasya, and went home. It was the Lord's one sustained contact with the movement He had left behind in Bengal, and He used it to give instructions — most consequentially the year He told Nityananda Prabhu to stop coming to Puri altogether and remain in Bengal to preach.
The chariot festival itself was the centre of the year. Krishnadasa Kaviraja describes the Lord dividing His kirtana party into seven divisions with two mridangas each, fourteen drums in all, and dancing before the chariots as they were dragged along the sandy road from the main temple to the Gundicha temple. King Prataparudra swept the road ahead of the chariot with a golden-handled broom. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Himself established the practice, still observed, of washing out the Gundicha temple with water before the deities arrive — and did the scrubbing personally, which is why the episode is remembered as a lesson in service rather than a piece of ceremony.
What He experienced in the festival is the theological heart of the Puri years, and the biographies are explicit about it. As the chariot moved, He fell behind the procession; the chariot stopped; when He came forward it moved again. At one point He raised His arms and recited a verse which Krishnadasa Kaviraja says nobody present understood except Svarupa Damodara — a verse spoken by a woman who says that the man who stole her heart in her youth is her husband again, that the nights and the flowers and the breezes are the same as they were, that she herself is the same, and that nevertheless her mind is not happy here and longs for the riverbank where they first met. The Lord's own gloss followed. The gopis of Vrindavana had once met Krishna again at Kurukshetra, after years of separation, and had not been consoled by it. Addressing Lord Jagannatha directly, He said: You are the same Krishna and I am the same Radharani, and We are meeting as We met at the beginning — but at Kurukshetra there are crowds and horses and chariots, and in Vrindavana there are flower gardens and bees and birds; here You are dressed as a royal prince surrounded by warriors, and there You were a cowherd boy with a flute; here there is not a drop of the happiness I had with You there. Come back to Vrindavana. On this reading, the whole Ratha-yatra is Radharani pulling Krishna's chariot away from His imperial capital and back towards the village where He was loved without reference to His power. It is why Gaudiya Vaishnavas identify the Gundicha temple with Vrindavana, and why the festival is performed in cities all over the world today with that meaning attached.
Against this stands one of the most stubborn refusals of His life. Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya asked, on King Prataparudra's behalf, for an interview. The Lord covered His ears with His hands. For a man in the renounced order, He said, meeting a king is as dangerous as meeting a woman, and to do either is to drink poison; and when the Bhattacharya protested that this king was a great devotee, He answered that the King might be a devotee but was still to be regarded as a venomous snake, and warned that if the request were repeated he would not see Him in Puri again. To Ramananda Raya, who tried later, He was blunter: there may be a great quantity of milk in a pot, but one drop of liquor makes it untouchable; the King has every good quality, but the single word "king" has infected everything. The King's own reaction, when this was reported to him, was despair — has Chaitanya Mahaprabhu come to deliver every kind of fallen soul except Prataparudra? He said that if he did not receive the Lord's mercy, his body and his kingdom were both useless to him.
What followed was a sustained campaign of affectionate manoeuvre by everyone around Him. Nityananda Prabhu obtained a used outer garment of the Lord's from Govinda and had it sent to the King, who worshipped it as he would have worshipped the person. Ramananda Raya, an accomplished diplomat, worked the subject into conversation at every opportunity until the Lord's resistance began to soften. Pressed once more for an interview, the Lord made a counter-offer that was also a joke at His own expense: bring Me the King's son instead, since scripture says the son represents the father. The prince came, a beautiful boy dressed in yellow with a blackish complexion, and the Lord — reminded instantly of Krishna — embraced him. Finally Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya gave the King a plan. On the day of the chariot festival, after the dancing, the Lord would rest in the garden at Balagandi. Go there alone and out of your royal dress, he said, recite the chapters of the Bhagavatam that describe Krishna's dance with the gopis, and take hold of His feet while He is absorbed.
The King did exactly that. He asked the assembled devotees' permission before approaching, then knelt and began to massage the Lord's legs as He lay with His eyes closed, reciting the gopis' song of separation. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu said, again and again, go on reciting. At the verse in which the gopis call the narration of Krishna's activities the life of those who are afflicted in this world, the Lord stood up and embraced him, crying that he was the most munificent of men — and, the biographer emphasises, at that moment He did not know who the man was. Only afterwards did He ask. The King's answer was that he was the servant of the Lord's servants and hoped to be accepted as such. The mercy had been given for the service rendered, not withheld for the office held; and Krishnadasa Kaviraja lets the irony stand without comment.
The last twelve years are a different matter altogether. The Chaitanya-charitamrita states that throughout them the Lord was continuously overwhelmed, night and day, by separation from Krishna, and that He passed His nights in the Gambhira with only Svarupa Damodara and Ramananda Raya, reciting verses — from Jayadeva's Gita-govinda, from the Bhagavatam, from Ramananda Raya's own play, from Bilvamangala Thakura's Krishna-karnamrita, and from eight verses of His own composition — and tasting their meanings until morning. The external events of those years, as the Antya-lila records them, are almost all involuntary. One night Govinda and Svarupa Damodara found the three doors of His room bolted from inside and the room empty, and found Him unconscious outside the lion gate of the temple, His body abnormally elongated and the joints of His bones slack; they brought Him back by chanting into His ear. He mistook a sand dune outside Puri, called Chataka-parvata, for Govardhana Hill and ran towards it. On a full-moon night He mistook the sea for the Yamuna and walked into it, was carried by the current towards Konarka, and was hauled ashore in the net of a fisherman who thought he had caught a very large fish and then went briefly mad from touching Him. At night in the Gambhira He would stand and rub His face against the stone walls until it bled, and Svarupa Damodara had to arrange for Shankara Pandit to sleep in the room with Him.
Neither of the two great biographies attempts to explain these years so much as to record them. Vrindavana Dasa Thakura, who covers the Nabadwip period at length, becomes brief; Krishnadasa Kaviraja, who covers this period, says repeatedly that the Lord spoke like a madman, that only Svarupa Damodara understood what He was saying, and that his own intelligence cannot penetrate it. What the tradition takes from the Puri years is not primarily a set of teachings — those were given elsewhere, to Rupa and Sanatana and Ramananda Raya — but a demonstration. Gaudiya Vaishnavism holds that the highest attainment in devotion is not union but a particular quality of separation, vipralambha-bhava, and that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu spent the last twelve years of His life exhibiting it in a human body so that the claim would not remain theoretical. The distilled statement of what those nights produced is the set of eight verses He composed, described on its own page, and after them the biography stops.