Of everything Govinda Dasa Kaviraja wrote, one song crossed the distance between Bengal and Vrindavana in his own lifetime and has kept crossing distances ever since: bhajahu re mana, sri nanda-nandana abhaya-caranaravinda re — "O mind, just worship the lotus feet of the son of Nanda, which make one fearless." Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita records that after composing it, Govinda Dasa sent the song to Srila Jiva Goswami, who by then was established in Vrindavana as one of the Six Goswamis systematizing Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's teaching. Jiva Goswami was pleased enough with what he read to write back urging Govinda Dasa to keep composing kirtanas of the same standard and send them on to Vrindavana — and tradition holds that it was this exchange, and Jiva Goswami's evident regard for his poetic skill, that earned Govinda Dasa the title Kaviraja, "king of poets."
What the Song Says #
Bhajahu Re Mana is addressed, as its opening word suggests, not to Krishna directly but to the poet's own mind — an unusual device that gives the whole song its particular intimacy. Govinda Dasa pictures his mind exhausted by years of chasing fleeting happiness: sleepless through cold and heat, wind and rain, spending itself in the service of "wicked and miserly men" for the smallest return. Against that exhaustion he sets a single remedy, returned to again and again: take shelter of the lotus feet of the son of Nanda, feet that are abhaya, fearless, because nothing that has once taken shelter there has anything left to fear. He also reminds his mind that this training is impossible alone, and depends on durlabha manava-janama sat-sange, the rare human birth used in the association of saintly persons. The song closes on a personal note, in the bhanita line that names its author, with Govinda Dasa asking simply to hear Krishna's glories, chant them, remember them always, and offer his very self in service.
Srila Prabhupada's Two Purports #
Srila Prabhupada returned to this song more than once. In a purport recorded in San Francisco on 16 March 1967, he explained the play in Govinda Dasa's own name — "Govinda, Krishna, and dasa means servant" — before working through the song's warning that a human life spent chasing fear and fleeting pleasure, without the association of devotees, wastes the rarest opportunity a soul can be given. Five years later, in Los Angeles on 27 May 1972, he returned to the same pada and drew out why Govinda Dasa addresses Krishna as "Nanda-nandana" rather than by name directly — because approaching the Lord through His relationship with a devotee, Prabhupada explained, pleases Him more than a plain, direct address. He then quoted a verse from Srimad-Bhagavatam describing how one who takes shelter of Krishna's lotus feet finds this material world's every step no longer dangerous, using that verse to make, in Sanskrit, the very same point Govinda Dasa's Bengali pada had already made four centuries earlier: fix the mind at Krishna's feet, and fear itself has nowhere left to stand. That a purport-giving acharya returned to a single sixteenth-century Bengali pada on two separate occasions, a generation apart, says something about how deeply this small song had settled into Gaudiya Vaishnava devotional life by the twentieth century.
An Honest Note on the Title Itself #
Kaviraja is not a title unique to Govinda Dasa. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami, author of Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita itself, carried the same honorific, and in Bengali the word doubles as the ordinary term for a hereditary Ayurvedic physician — fitting, since some sources describe Govinda Dasa's own family as belonging to that professional community (see Srikhanda, Family, and the Turn to Vaishnavism). Chaitanya-charitamrita itself gives both senses of the word in different places: the specific account of Jiva Goswami's praise credits Govinda Dasa's title to his poetry, while a separate verse elsewhere in the text uses "kavirajas" simply to mean physicians when counting members of his family circle among Nityananda Prabhu's followers. This page follows Chaitanya-charitamrita's own explanation for Govinda Dasa Kaviraja specifically — poetic excellence, in Jiva Goswami's judgment — while noting honestly that the word carried a second, family-trade meaning this project has not tried to fully untangle from the poetic one.