However little Shridhara made in a day, he split it in two before he did anything else. Half went to the worship of Mother Ganga, and only the other half was his to live on. Srila Prabhupada records the practice simply in his purport to Sri Chaitanya-caritamrta Adi-lila 10.67: "he spent fifty percent of his income to worship the Ganges, and the balance he used for his subsistence." Think about what that meant for a man in Shridhara's position. This was not a wealthy householder giving away a part of what he could easily spare. This was a man who could not afford an unbroken water pot, yet he gave away half of an already small income before he let himself have any of it.
That order mattered. The vow was not "give something to the Ganges if there's anything left over." In his life there was rarely going to be anything left over. So, by his own design, the offering came first, every day, without exception. Only after it was kept did Shridhara turn to his own needs. His life had almost nothing fixed or settled in it. But this daily act of setting something aside was itself a kind of discipline. He repeated it so often that it became part of who he was, not just something he did.
Wealth Measured a Different Way #
Gaudiya Vaishnava retellings of his life describe how the Lord, in the guise of the young Nimai Pandit, once asked Shridhara directly why he stayed so poor when he worshiped Vishnu so faithfully. It was as if devotion should have bought him some relief from his circumstances. As the tradition remembers it, Shridhara answered by comparing himself to a bird that makes its nest from tree to tree and finds just enough food each day. Living like this, he was just as content as a king in his palace enjoying every comfort money could buy. In his telling, the difference between the two was not something to be measured in wealth at all. It was a small piece of Vaishnava philosophy from a man who sold banana bark for a living: whoever has love for Krishna is rich, and whoever does not, however much he owns, is poor.
Chanting Through the Night #
The same discipline continued after dark. Shridhara stayed up chanting the holy names long into the night, night after night. His neighbors noticed this habit, but they misunderstood it. They assumed, reasonably enough given how he lived, that hunger pains from his poverty were keeping him awake, not devotion. Nobody thought to ask if a poor banana-seller might simply be spending his nights in bhajana because that was what he wanted to do. It is a small detail in the sources, but it fits everything else known about him. His devotion was carried on so quietly and so steadily that the people around him mistook it for something else entirely. While Shridhara lived this life of steady, mostly hidden devotion, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu began a daily habit of His own. He started visiting Shridhara's stall, as told in Mahaprabhu's Play for the Water Pot.
