Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya did not go looking for Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Their first meeting happened because Sarvabhauma was, as usual, near the Jagannatha temple, and a stranger fell unconscious in front of him.
An Unknown Sannyasi Collapses #
Early in 1510, a young sannyasi walked into the Jagannatha temple, saw the Deity, ran toward the altar to embrace Him, and collapsed on the floor in what looked, to the temple watchmen, like a vagrant about to be beaten and thrown out. Sarvabhauma happened to be present. Something about the fall stopped him — he had already noticed the beauty of the young man and the visible transformations that come with ecstatic love of God — and he intervened before the guards could act, then had the unconscious sannyasi carried, with the help of his own students and the temple guards, to his own house.
A Physician's Test #
Once home, Sarvabhauma did what any careful scholar of the scriptures would do before drawing conclusions: he checked. He watched for movement in the abdomen and found none; he checked the breathing and found none either. Only when he held a wisp of cotton before the nostrils and saw it stir faintly did he relax. Sitting beside the still body, he recognised the specific symptoms — later identified in the Chaitanya-charitamrita as suddipta-sattvika, a technical term for ecstatic transformation — as something the scriptures describe occurring only in eternally liberated souls, and he found himself unable to account for how such a thing could appear in an ordinary human body (Chaitanya-charitamrita, Madhya-lila 6.9-12).
An Old Family Connection #
While Sarvabhauma tended the unconscious sannyasi, word reached Nityananda Prabhu and the devotees travelling with the Lord that He had been carried to a house near the temple. It was Sarvabhauma's own brother-in-law, Gopinatha Acharya — married to Sarvabhauma's sister and himself a Nadia man who already knew exactly who this sannyasi was — who found the group at the temple gate and led them there. Once the devotees began chanting the holy names, the Lord returned to external consciousness, and Sarvabhauma, delighted to be host to visitors from his own home region, fed everyone generously and sent them to bathe in the sea. When he learned the young man's family background — grandson of Nilambara Chakravarti, a scholar his own father Mahesvara Visarada had respected, and son of Jagannatha Mishra, formerly named Vishvambhara Mishra — his interest turned personal. He was old enough to be the young sannyasi's father, and he began to feel exactly that kind of protective affection.
A Well-Meant, Mistaken Plan #
That affection produced a plan Sarvabhauma was sure was sound. Here was a strikingly beautiful young man of about twenty-four, newly renounced under Keshava Bharati — in Sarvabhauma's own ranking of sannyasa lineages, only a middling line — who wept, fainted and danced at the sight of a Deity. To a lifelong logician, that combination looked less like sanctity than like a fine mind about to be wrecked by uncontrolled sentiment. He even offered, quite sincerely, to arrange reinitiation into a more prestigious sannyasa order. The remedy he settled on was to recite Vedanta philosophy at the Lord continually, until sober renunciation replaced the emotional excess.
Gopinatha Acharya's Objection #
Gopinatha Acharya, who understood exactly who stood in his brother-in-law's house, argued against the plan as forcefully as courtesy allowed: that the Supreme Lord is known only by His own mercy, never by inference or scholarship, and that Sarvabhauma, for all his learning, was blind to what was directly in front of him. Sarvabhauma, unmoved, replied that scripture itself denies any incarnation of Vishnu in the current age of Kali. When the exchange was reported to Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, He refused to hear a word said against Sarvabhauma. The Bhattacharya, He told His devotees, was acting purely out of paternal affection, and He accepted him, without qualification, as a spiritual master — setting the stage for the seven days of one-sided Vedanta lectures told in seven-days-of-silence.