Vishvarupa was Jagannatha Mishra and Sachi Devi's elder surviving son, several years older than his younger brother, who would later become Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Chaitanya-charitamrita describes him as highly qualified and unusually serious for his age, an incarnation, it says, of Lord Baladeva Himself. As Vishvarupa grew into a young man, his parents naturally began to think about arranging a marriage for him, the ordinary next step for any son of a respectable Bengali brahmana household in Nabadwip.
A Decision Made in a Single Day #
Chaitanya-charitamrita telescopes the moment into a single verse: as soon as Vishvarupa heard that a marriage was being arranged for him, he left home immediately, without waiting to argue the matter or to be persuaded out of it, and set out to accept sannyasa and travel from one holy place to another. There is no scene of debate or negotiation in the text. The decision and the departure happen in the same breath, which is part of why later Vaishnava writers treat Vishvarupa's vairagya, his spirit of renunciation, as so complete and so uncompromising.
Later Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, recorded in the Gaudiya Vaishnava Abhidana rather than in Chaitanya-charitamrita itself, holds that Vishvarupa travelled to Varanasi and received sannyasa there from a sannyasi named Krishna Bharati, at about sixteen years of age, and that it was from this ceremony that he took the name by which history remembers him: Shankararanya. Chaitanya-charitamrita does not name his sannyasa-guru, so this detail should be read as a later devotional memory rather than an established fact from the earliest source.
The Parents' Grief #
Jagannatha Mishra and Sachi Devi were devastated. Their elder son, on whom so much of the family's future had rested, was gone, and gone by his own sudden choice, into a life that by tradition meant never returning to the household he left. It was the young Chaitanya, still a boy Himself, who took on the work of consoling His grieving father and mother.
Bhala Haila #
Chaitanya's words to His parents are preserved as a direct quotation in Chaitanya-charitamrita, and they are startling for how firmly they approve of what has just happened: it is good, He tells them, that Vishvarupa has accepted sannyasa, because by doing so he has delivered both his father's family and his mother's family. It is a strange thing to say to grieving parents, and Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami's own purport-writers have had to explain it carefully ever since, because Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is elsewhere recorded warning against the casual acceptance of sannyasa in this age.
Part of the puzzle is that sannyasa itself has a mixed reputation in scripture. The Brahma-vaivarta Purana lists the acceptance of sannyasa among five acts specifically discouraged in the Age of Kali, alongside the sacrifice of a horse or a cow. Yet the very next line of Chaitanya-charitamrita, in the words this page has just quoted, shows Chaitanya Mahaprabhu praising His own brother's sannyasa without reservation. The explanation lies in what kind of sannyasa is being praised. Sannyasa taken to dedicate one's life fully to Krishna's service, in the proper spirit of varnashrama-dharma, is not the same thing as the sannyasa of a "so-called Mayavadi," a renunciant who merely wanders about imagining himself already one with Narayana while doing nothing to actually serve Him. Vishvarupa's sannyasa, even though it was formally received within the Dashanami order and carried a Dashanami title, belonged to the first kind, the kind Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Himself would accept a few years later. It was never the empty or self-serving renunciation Chaitanya criticized elsewhere. This is also the clearest evidence, right inside Chaitanya-charitamrita's own text, that Vishvarupa's identity as "Shankararanya" is a matter of the outward monastic title he carried, not of the philosophy he actually lived and taught.
Chaitanya assured His parents that He Himself would remain and serve them, and with that promise their minds were at least partly set at ease. It would be some time yet before either of them heard anything more of Vishvarupa. What that news eventually was, and how it reached the family, is told in Word From Pandharpur; what happened to Chaitanya Himself not long after this, in a strange and revealing episode at home, is told in The Vision at Nabadwip.