Writing Sri Chaitanya-mangala

By his own account, in the Sutra-khanda that opens Sri Chaitanya-mangala, Lochana Dasa Thakura did not invent the events of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's life from scratch. He explains that Murari Gupta, a physician who lived in Nadia and had personally witnessed many of the Lord's early pastimes, had already set down an account in Sanskrit verse, and that this account had reached Lochana Dasa Thakura secondhand: Damodara Pandita, who had heard it from Murari Gupta directly, later recited it to Lochana Dasa Thakura, who memorized what he heard and, moved by devotion, recast it into the Panchali metre of eastern Bengali folk poetry so that people who could not follow Sanskrit could still enter into Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's pastimes. Tradition places the actual writing at Baradanga, near Srikhanda, where Lochana Dasa Thakura is said to have sat beneath a great tree beside his guru's bhajana-kutira; that tree and the surrounding site are still shown to visitors at Baradanga today.

A Book in Four Parts #

Sri Chaitanya-mangala runs to more than twenty chapters across four sections. The Sutra-khanda opens with an invocation glorifying Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and His associates, offers Lochana Dasa Thakura's obeisances to his guru Narahari Sarkara Thakura, and previews what is to follow; the Adi-khanda covers the Lord's appearance and childhood in Navadvipa; the Madhyama-khanda, the largest section, covers His youth, marriage, and the events leading to His acceptance of sannyasa; and the Shesha-khanda closes the account. Among the episodes the book is remembered for is a description of Sri Gaurasundara's final, tender conversation with Vishnupriya Devi on the night before He accepted the renounced order of sannyasa — a scene handled at greater length here than in some other early biographies of the Lord.

A Meeting to Settle Two Names #

By the time Lochana Dasa Thakura had finished his manuscript, Vrindavana Dasa Thakura had already written his own life of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and — by tradition's account — had given it the very same title, Chaitanya-mangala. Narahari Sarkara Thakura is said to have asked his disciple to seek Vrindavana Dasa Thakura's blessing before making his own book public, and Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition recounts that the two met at Denur, where Vrindavana Dasa Thakura had done his own writing. Vrindavana Dasa Thakura is said to have read Lochana Dasa Thakura's work with real appreciation, and it was afterward, tradition holds, that his own composition came to be known instead as Chaitanya-bhagavata, leaving the name Chaitanya-mangala to Lochana Dasa Thakura's book — though other accounts credit Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami with suggesting the new name, pointing to his own verse in Sri Chaitanya-caritamrita comparing Vrindavana Dasa Thakura to Vyasadeva: "As Vyasadeva compiled the pastimes of Krishna in Srimad-Bhagavatam, Thakura Vrindavana dasa has depicted the pastimes of Chaitanya." Exactly who proposed the change, and precisely how the meeting unfolded, is not something this page can settle with confidence — it rests on later hagiography rather than on Sri Chaitanya-caritamrita itself, which does not narrate the episode at all. What can be said with more confidence is that Lochana Dasa Thakura's own text pays its own tribute to Vrindavana Dasa Thakura, opening with a verse of respect for him and for how his "Bhagavata's songs have enchanted the entire universe."

Rasa Against Description #

Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition has long placed Sri Chaitanya-mangala and Chaitanya-bhagavata side by side rather than in competition. The nineteenth-century Vaishnava historian Haridasa Dasa, in his Vaishnava Abhidhana, described Chaitanya-mangala as a rasatmika text, full of devotional feeling, set against Chaitanya-bhagavata's character as a varnanatmika text, full of description — and added that in places Lochana Dasa Thakura's poetic expression outdoes Vrindavana Dasa Thakura's own. The Bengali lexicographer Ashutosh Deb, compiling his dictionary generations later, credited Lochana Dasa Thakura as among the first Bengali poets to write in moric metres and among the earliest Bengali writers of history as such. Sri Chaitanya-mangala was later printed and circulated by Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura, and for centuries wandering Gaudiya Vaishnava singers have carried its verses from village to village across Bengal, much as reciters of the Ramayana and Mahabharata have long done with those epics.