Once settled near Radha-kunda, Narayana Bhatta Goswami spent roughly eight years doing something no single person before him is recorded to have done as thoroughly: walking, in person, through the entire sacred landscape of Vraja-mandala, and setting down what he found.
Eight Years Among the Groves #
His method, as later writers describe it, combined walking with listening and reading — visiting village after village and grove after grove, questioning local memory, and checking what he heard against the authority of the Varaha Purana and other scripture. Where a pond, a hillock or a stand of trees carried a local tradition of some pastime of Radha and Krishna, he recorded it; where deities had been lost, hidden, or simply forgotten under generations of upheaval, he searched them out and helped reestablish their worship. By the time Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had passed from this world and the first generation of His closest Vraja-based associates was aging, much of this local knowledge risked being scattered or lost with them; Narayana Bhatta Goswami's long walk was, in effect, a race to gather it into a single durable account before it disappeared.
Twelve Forests, Four Rings #
The result of this survey was an organized map of Vraja built around its twelve traditional forests — Mahavana, Kamyavana, Madhuvana, Talavana, Kumudavana, Bahulavana, Bhandiravana, Bhadravana, Khadiravana, Lohavana, Vrindavana and Belvana. Narayana Bhatta Goswami is credited with arranging this land into four nested categories — vana, upavana, prativana and adhivana — covering what tradition calls the eighty-four kos of Vraja-mandala, a traditional measure of distance that later pilgrims and guidebooks generally reckon at somewhere near 270 kilometers of walking in total. In doing so he effectively fixed the boundary that later pilgrims would walk as the Chaurasi-kos Parikrama, the eighty-four kos circuit still followed today, and gave that circuit a clear internal order rather than leaving it as a loose collection of holy sites.
Deities Brought to Light #
Tradition connects his prayers directly to at least one specific, still-visible result: the deity now worshiped in the Shriji Temple at Barsana is said to have manifested on the second day of the bright half of the month of Ashadha in 1570 CE, in answer to Narayana Bhatta Goswami's devotion. This is temple tradition rather than an independently verifiable historical record, and this page presents it as such rather than as settled fact.
His rediscovery work was not limited to uncovering hidden deities; it also meant identifying, and then keeping alive, the memory of specific pastimes at specific spots. At the narrow passage called Sankari-khor, between two hills near Barsana, local memory held that Krishna and His cowherd friends used to intercept the gopis as they carried milk, yoghurt and butter across the hills, plundering their loads under the pretense of collecting toll at a "toll gate," or dana-ghati. Narayana Bhatta Goswami is credited with turning that remembered pastime into an enacted one, inaugurating a yearly performance of it at Sankari-khor — a tradition described further on The Ban-Yatra Tradition.
According to at least one modern account, his work of uncovering lost pastime-places also overlapped with the efforts of Sri Rupa Goswami and Sanatana Goswami in Vrindavana proper — though the other sources consulted for this page do not corroborate any direct joint effort between them, and the generation gap between Narayana Bhatta Goswami's arrival in Vraja and the Six Goswamis' own decades of work there makes a close collaboration uncertain at best. It is reported here as a single, unconfirmed claim rather than an established fact.
A Landscape Later Scholars Still Study #
The twelve forests Narayana Bhatta Goswami surveyed are not merely a devotional curiosity confined to old guidebooks. They remain a recognized unit of study in their own right: the American scholar David L. Haberman built an entire academic monograph, Journey Through the Twelve Forests: An Encounter with Krishna, around walking this same landscape and talking to the pilgrims and residents who still treat it as sacred ground. That a sixteenth-century Vaishnava's fieldwork still frames how modern scholarship approaches this stretch of North India is itself a measure of how thoroughly Narayana Bhatta Goswami's survey took hold.
What Narayana Bhatta Goswami wrote down from all this walking became his own book, described on Writing the Vraja-bhakti-vilasa — the text that, in turn, made possible the pilgrimage described on The Ban-Yatra Tradition.