Long before either brother met Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, they were simply the sons of Mahesvara Vishrada, a respected scholar who lived in Vidyanagara, a village in the Nadia district of Bengal not far from Nabadwip. Vishrada, the Chaitanya-charitamrita notes, had been a classmate of Nilambara Chakravarti, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own maternal grandfather, which places the family within the same close circle of Nadia pandits that produced Mahaprabhu Himself. Of his two sons, one, Vasudeva, left home to study logic and Vedanta and eventually rose to become the chief pandit of the Jagannatha Puri royal court under Maharaja Prataparudra. The other, Madhusudana, appears to have stayed closer to Vidyanagara and earned the scholarly title Vachaspati, by which the Chaitanya-charitamrita most often calls him: Vidya-Vacaspati.
A Brother's Conversion #
Vasudeva Bhattacharya's story after leaving home is told at length elsewhere. He became famous as Sarvabhauma, "lord of the whole earth" of learning. Maharaja Prataparudra brought him to Puri. And one day in 1510, a young sannyasi in ecstasy was carried into his house, and that sannyasi turned out to be Krishna Himself. That whole account is one of the best-recorded conversions in Gaudiya Vaishnava history, and it is told on Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya's own page. Here we follow what came after it. Once Sarvabhauma had surrendered to Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, his brother Vachaspati also appears in the record. He too was drawn into the Lord's company at Puri, alongside Sarvabhauma.
Worship Him As Wood, Worship Him As Water #
The Chaitanya-charitamrita describes a moment when Mahaprabhu, "out of His causeless mercy," gathered the two brothers together and gave each of them a personal instruction. Krishna, He explained, is manifest in this age in two accessible forms: as wood, in the Deity of Lord Jagannatha, and as water, in the river Ganges. Both are directly the Supreme, not symbols of Him. Sarvabhauma, already installed as a royal pandit at the temple, was told to worship Lord Jagannatha. Vachaspati, whose family home lay along the Ganges in Bengal, was told to worship mother Ganges herself. It is a brief exchange of only a handful of verses, but it shows something important. Mahaprabhu was not simply treating Vachaspati as a part of his brother's larger story. He gave him his own, specific service, suited to where he actually lived and what he could do.
This small instruction also carries a theological point, which Srila Prabhupada explains in his purport to this verse. The Vedic teaching "everything is Brahman" does not mean that everything, in a general way, is equally worthy of worship. It means that the Supreme Lord can and does manifest Himself directly through specific forms of wood and water, for the deliverance of conditioned souls in this age. "Lord Jagannatha is the Supreme Lord Himself in the form of wood, and the river Ganges is the Supreme Lord Himself in the form of water" (Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita, Madhya-lila 15.135). In the same purport, Srila Prabhupada also quotes the Bhagavad-gita, where Krishna Himself says: "By Me, in My unmanifested form, this entire universe is pervaded. All beings are in Me, but I am not in them" (Bhagavad-gita 9.4). Sarvabhauma and Vachaspati were brothers who were given instructions that fit together. So they became a living example of that teaching, not just people who received a general blessing.
A Family at the Center of Two Stories #
Seen together, the two brothers' lives show a good deal of what the Chaitanya-charitamrita has to say about scholarly Nadia in this period. One brother stayed at the center of Mahaprabhu's public life in Puri, meeting kings and composing Sanskrit verses in the Lord's honor. The other returned home to Bengal. There, as told on The Crowds at Vidyanagara, his own quiet household was suddenly overwhelmed when the Lord came to visit him in turn.
