When Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's tour of South India carried Him past Kolapura and on to Pandarpur, a temple town on the banks of the Bhima River, He went straight to the temple of Vitthala Thakura and stood before the Deity in open joy. He chanted and danced there as He had at every stop on the journey, and a brahmana who happened to see Him, moved by the sight, invited Him home. The brahmana fed Him with great love and respect, and only once the meal was finished did the Lord receive the piece of news that would shape the rest of His stay in the town.
A Brahmana Named Ramadasa #
Chaitanya-charitamrita names this host only once, and only in its own summary chapter: a brahmana called Ramadasa, whose sufferings Mahaprabhu is said to have relieved simply by the meeting itself (Madhya-lila 1.113). Nothing more about him survives — no family, no later life, not even a description of what those sufferings were. The name Ramadasa recurs several times across Chaitanya-charitamrita for different devotees Mahaprabhu met in the south, and this Pandarpur brahmana is a separate man from any of them; the text gives no reason to connect him to the others beyond sharing a common name.
Word of Another Sannyasi Nearby #
What Mahaprabhu learned, resting at Ramadasa's house, was that another sannyasi — a disciple of Srila Madhavendra Puri named Sri Ranga Puri — was staying at a second brahmana's home nearby. He went immediately. Entering the house and seeing Ranga Puri seated there, Mahaprabhu fell flat on the ground in obeisance, His body overtaken all at once by the visible marks of ecstatic love: tears, the hairs of His body standing on end, trembling, and perspiration breaking out over His whole frame. Not a word had yet passed between the two men.
Recognized by a Symptom, Not a Name #
Ranga Puri, astonished at what he was seeing, called out for the stranger to rise — "Your Holiness, please get up" — and then, before any introduction was made, offered a guess that turned out to be exactly right: "Your Holiness is certainly related to Sri Madhavendra Puri, without whom there is no fragrance of ecstatic love." He had not been told who this visitor was. He had simply recognized the flavor of the devotion itself, and reasoned backward to its only possible source. Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura's own remark on this exchange explains why that guess carried so much weight: before Madhavendra Puri, the Madhva line of sannyasis worshipped Krishna alone, in a mood the tradition treats as comparatively formal; it was Madhavendra Puri, this site's own account of Life in the Madhva Sampradaya tells in fuller detail, who first brought the sweeter, more intimate mood of Radha and Krishna together into that worship. A disciple of that same line, seeing this particular kind of ecstasy in a total stranger, had only one place to look for its origin.
The Embrace #
Ranga Puri lifted Mahaprabhu up from the ground and embraced Him, and the two men, shoulder to shoulder, wept together in a shared ecstasy that neither seems to have needed words to explain. Only once they had both grown calm enough to speak did Mahaprabhu complete the introduction Ranga Puri had already half-guessed: He was the disciple of Isvara Puri, Ranga Puri's own godbrother under Madhavendra Puri. What had looked, for a moment, like a meeting between total strangers turned out to be a reunion inside the same small family of sannyasis — and once that was settled, the two of them simply sat down and talked. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami records that they continued discussing Krishna together, without interruption, for five to seven days.
That conversation did not stay on general devotional subjects for its whole length. Before it ended, an ordinary question about Mahaprabhu's birthplace turned up something neither man could have expected — a piece of family news thirty years old, waiting in an old sannyasi's memory. That part of the same conversation is told on News of Vishvarupa. This meeting is also recounted from the other side of the lineage, in the account of how Mahaprabhu treated His own guru's memory throughout His life, on Mahaprabhu's Reverence for His Guru.