Of everyone in Navadvipa, only Mukunda Datta knew what Pundarika Vidyanidhi's wealth and worldliness actually concealed — and it was Mukunda who decided, one ordinary day, that a young brahmachari named Gadadhara Pandit needed to find out.
A Secret Kept from Nabadwip #
Pundarika Vidyanidhi came to Navadvipa from Chittagong in the guise of a wealthy, sense-enjoying man of the world, and he made no effort to look like anything else. Almost no one there could see past it. Mukunda Datta could, because he had lived in Chittagong himself and had known Pundarika Vidyanidhi long before either of them settled near the Ganges — and because Kavi Karnapura's Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika identifies Pundarika, startlingly, as Vrishabhanu Maharaja, the father of Srimati Radharani in Krishna's own pastimes, the very reason Mahaprabhu Himself would sometimes weep and call out for him as "father." None of that showed on the surface of a man reclining on bolster cushions with betel and attendants at hand, and Mukunda kept the knowledge largely to himself until the day he judged someone else was ready to be shown it.
Taking Gadadhara to See Him #
That someone was Gadadhara Pandit, a twenty-year-old brahmachari who had been indifferent to comfort since childhood and inclined, by temperament, to take externals seriously. Mukunda told him one day that he was going to introduce him to a most exceptional Vaishnava, and took him along. What Gadadhara found was a man reclining on an expensive bed under a canopy, on sheets described as white as the foam of milk, with scented pan in a jeweled box within reach and servants fanning him — and he could not reconcile any of it with what Mukunda had promised him. The doubt showed plainly on his face.
The Verse That Broke the Disguise #
Mukunda saw it, and did the one thing that would settle it. He recited, aloud, Uddhava's verse from the Third Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam marveling that Krishna gave the position of a nurse to the demoness Putana, who had come with poison on her breast to kill Him — asking where a more merciful shelter than that could possibly be found. The effect on Pundarika Vidyanidhi was instantaneous: he cried out, fell to the ground, and displayed the full range of ecstatic symptoms the Vaishnava manuals describe, tearing at the fine bedding and wailing that the Lord's mercy had been withheld from him, before falling unconscious for hours. A single verse, chosen by someone who alone knew which one would land, was enough to strip away an entire disguise in front of a witness who had just judged that disguise correctly on its own terms and completely wrong underneath.
What Came of It #
Gadadhara understood immediately that he had committed a serious offense — judging a devotee by his outward circumstances — and the remedy, worked out between Mahaprabhu's guidance and the force of what Mukunda's recitation had just revealed, was initiation from the very man Gadadhara had misjudged. Gadadhara took the idea back to Mukunda before acting on it, and one account describes Mukunda as much delighted at the request, carrying it to Pundarika Vidyanidhi himself, who happily set a date for the initiation once Mahaprabhu had given His approval. When Pundarika Vidyanidhi returned to ordinary consciousness, giving no sign of what had just happened, he initiated Gadadhara Pandit, and remained his spiritual master for life; a second initiation followed years later at Jagannatha Puri. The fullest account of that side of the story — including how the two Chaitanya-charitamrita passages describing it are reconciled, and what the episode is traditionally taken to teach about judging a Vaishnava by appearances — is told on Gadadhara Pandit's own page, initiation from Pundarika Vidyanidhi.
Mukunda Datta's part in the story ends where this page does. He supplied the introduction and the one verse that mattered, then stepped back — a pattern that recurs everywhere else in his life. He is almost never the person a pastime is centrally about; he is the friend standing just to the side of it, holding the one piece of knowledge, or the one line of scripture, that the moment actually needed. It happened this way at Srivasa Angana with his own offense and its forgiveness, and it happens again here, in a story that belongs, by every reasonable measure, to Gadadhara Pandit and Pundarika Vidyanidhi — except that neither man would have met the other without him.