After crossing Bengal and reaching Mathura, Narottama wept at his first sight of the Yamuna and pressed on to Vrindavana itself, where Jiva Goswami received him warmly. But Jiva Goswami was not in the practice of formally initiating disciples himself, and he told Narottama to seek shelter instead at the feet of Lokanatha Gosvami, the eldest of the resident Goswamis — an elder so absorbed in separation from Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and so averse to name and fame, that he is said to have asked Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami to leave his own name out of Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita altogether.
A Guru Who Did Not Want Disciples #
When Narottama approached him, Lokanatha Gosvami refused outright. By most accounts he simply did not wish to accept anyone as a disciple — one telling has him asking how he, unable even to properly serve Gaura and Nityananda himself, could take on the responsibility of serving as someone else's guru; another has him protesting that a prince, learned and refined as Narottama plainly was, had no business becoming the disciple of a penniless renunciant. Narottama asked again and again and was refused every time, yet he resolved privately that he would accept initiation from Lokanatha Gosvami or from no one else.
A Year of Hidden Service #
Rather than press his request further, Narottama began going out secretly each night to clean the forest area where Lokanatha Gosvami relieved himself, taking care that his guru-to-be never learned who was doing it. He kept this up for close to a year before Lokanatha Gosvami discovered his identity. Moved by such quiet, unglamorous devotion, Lokanatha Gosvami relented and initiated Narottama on the full-moon day of the month of Shravana — a story still told across Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition as an example of how humility, not birth or status, wins a guru's heart. It is worth noting plainly that this is the story told consistently across the sources consulted for this page: Lokanatha Gosvami himself performed the initiation, however reluctantly at first, rather than delegating the rite to Jiva Goswami or to anyone else.
Formed by Two Goswamis at Once #
After initiation, Narottama remained in Vrindavana, living by madhukari — begging only a little food from door to door, in the manner of a bee gathering pollen, so as never to keep a stocked kitchen of his own. He continued his deeper studies of rasa-shastra under Jiva Goswami, who functioned as his siksha-guru even after Lokanatha Gosvami had become his diksha-guru; Lokanatha Gosvami himself, meanwhile, is remembered chiefly for his single-minded absorption in the Radha-Vinoda Deity that, tradition holds, Krishna personally gave him to carry through the forests of Vraja in a cloth bag. Narottama's own regard for his guru later surfaced in verse: he wrote of Lokanatha Gosvami as "a storehouse of single-minded service to the lotus feet of Radha-Vinoda," the very Deity Lokanatha Gosvami carried through Vraja. Around this time Narottama's closest companion in study became Srinivasa Acharya, and before long they were joined by Shyamananda Prabhu, newly arrived from Gauda-desha. The three studied together under Jiva Goswami with such single-minded absorption that later biographies name them, as a group, the generation that would carry the Goswamis' teaching out of Vrindavana. That moment came when Jiva Goswami called the three of them together and instructed them to take the Goswamis' writings to Bengal and preach the message of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu there (see Return to Bengal and Preaching).