After the vyasa-puja held at Srivasa Thakura's courtyard, Mahaprabhu and the devotees became fully absorbed in the ecstasies of sankirtana, and one day Mahaprabhu revealed a majestic manifestation of His own divinity before them. He sent Ramai Pandita at once to Advaita Acharya's house to announce it and to summon him, with his wife Sita Devi, his son Achyutananda, and the full paraphernalia for worship.
Advaita Acharya Puts the Lord to the Test #
On hearing the news, Advaita Acharya and his household wept with joy and gathered everything needed for worship — but rather than go straight to Shrivasa's courtyard, Advaita chose first to test the Lord's omniscience. He stopped at Nandana Acharya's house and stayed hidden there, sending Ramai back with instructions to say only that he had refused to come.
Mahaprabhu, as the Lord within the heart of every being, was not fooled for a moment. He told the assembled devotees plainly that Advaita Acharya had decided to test Him, and that he was hiding at Nandana Acharya's house with all the paraphernalia for worship still in hand. A second summons, carrying this knowledge, brought Advaita out at once. He fell to the ground at a distance, recited hymns of glorification, and worshiped the Lord with the traditional five offerings while reciting the invocation to Govinda as the source of the brahminical order's welfare. His worship followed the traditional five offerings, and the invocation he recited — offering obeisances to Krishna as Govinda, protector of the brahminical order and of cows, and the source of welfare for the whole world — is one still recited in Gaudiya Vaishnava worship today. Mahaprabhu then commanded him to rise and dance, and Advaita danced on, by every account, until he was completely lost in ecstasy.
Nandana Acharya's own house was, by this point, no stranger to public sankirtana either. The same sources that record his part in these hidden-guest episodes also place him among the devotees who joined the nightly kirtana at Shrivasa's courtyard, and among those who marched in the historic sankirtana procession to the house of the local Kazi — the magistrate whose ban on congregational chanting Mahaprabhu answered not with argument but with a crowd of devotees singing in the streets until the ban was lifted.
The Lord's Own Despair #
A second, far more searching episode followed later. Local opponents, repeatedly bested by Mahaprabhu in scriptural debate, brought fabricated complaints against Him to the town's administrator, and one evening Mahaprabhu led sankirtana specifically to answer their hostility. But that night He felt none of His usual ecstasy in chanting the holy names, and made no secret of His distress.
Advaita Acharya offered an explanation that stung rather than comforted: he said Mahaprabhu had made Nityananda Prabhu "the keeper of the storehouse of love" and had given that love freely to everyone, even those of low birth, while withholding it from Advaita and Srivasa themselves — as if, he said, he himself had somehow dried up the ocean of the Lord's prema. Overwhelmed by these words, Mahaprabhu declared He could not bear to live another moment in a body without prema and ran to the Ganges to drown Himself. Nityananda Prabhu and Haridasa Thakura jumped in after Him and pulled Him from the water.
Once safe, Mahaprabhu confided only in these two that He wished to withdraw from the sight of the other devotees for a time, and He went, once again, to the house of Nandana Acharya — this time not merely to hide but to stay as a guest. He sat upon the household deity's own seat there and let Nandana Acharya serve Him in whatever way he could. When Mahaprabhu asked him to keep the visit secret, Nandana Acharya is remembered as having answered, in effect, that a Lord so thoroughly carried in His devotees' hearts could never truly remain hidden from them for long.
Reconciliation #
Mahaprabhu, aware that the other devotees could not bear the pain of His absence, had Nandana Acharya bring Srivasa Thakura to Him. Srivasa reported that Advaita Acharya, in particular, was fasting in anguish over his earlier words. Mahaprabhu went at once to Advaita's house and found him lying faint and weak on the floor — and felt Himself, in that moment, to be the offender. Advaita rose from his faint, begged forgiveness again and again for his rash statement, and asked only for a place at the Lord's feet, birth after birth.
Twice in this single stretch of the Navadvipa-lila, then, Nandana Acharya's house held one of the Panca-tattva in concealment — first a Lord testing His own Lord, then the Lord Himself retreating from His own devotees' sight. Nandana Acharya is never recorded as saying or doing anything dramatic in either scene; his part was simply to open his door and ask nothing in return, which the tradition remembers as more than enough.