Very little is recorded of Srila Jagannatha Dasa Babaji's early years, and Vaishnava tradition itself makes no great claim to fill that gap — what has been preserved concerns almost entirely the extraordinary old age he lived into and the pastimes of that period, not the ordinary facts of a childhood. He is said to have been born around the year 1800 in the Mayamanasimha district of Bengal (in present-day Bangladesh), and the biographical sketches that survive move quickly past his birth to the line of spiritual succession that formed him.
A Guru Lineage from Baladeva Vidyabhushana #
That lineage is recorded with some precision. The great Gaudiya Vedanta commentator Srila Baladeva Vidyabhushana had a disciple named Uddhava Dasa; Uddhava Dasa's own disciple was Madhusudana Dasa Babaji, who lived at Suryakunda near Radhakunda in the Vraja area; and Madhusudana Dasa Babaji's disciple was Jagannatha Dasa Babaji himself. This places him only three links removed from one of the most important philosophical authorities in the Gaudiya tradition, and it was at Suryakunda, in the intense devotional atmosphere of Vraja, that he took up the mendicant life of a babaji.
Vaishnava Sarvabhauma #
He became, in time, so widely respected across the Gaudiya Vaishnava community that he was given the title Vaishnava Sarvabhauma — literally "emperor among Vaishnavas," or chief of the Vaishnavas — an honorific that recognised not scholarly output, since he is not known to have written anything himself, but a depth of realised devotion that the whole community had come, independently, to recognise and defer to. Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura himself is recorded as calling him the topmost general among Gaudiya Vaishnavas — high praise from a man not given to loose speech.
The Long Years at Suryakunda and Vrindavana #
Jagannatha Dasa Babaji spent many years living and performing bhajan in Vrindavana and its surrounding holy places, years about which — beyond the fact of his residence and his reputation as "a perfect devotee" — comparatively little narrative detail survives. It was only in his extreme old age, when he had already been a recognised authority for decades, that the specific, vividly remembered episodes of his life begin, most of them preserved because his own disciples and associates, above all his devoted servant Bihari Dasa, witnessed and retold them. His installation of Deities at Suryakunda, and what happened to Them afterward, is told here, and his pivotal role in identifying the lost birthplace of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu at Mayapur is told here.