Sri Nityananda Prabhu

Sri Nityananda Prabhu is the second member of the Panca-tattva and, in Gaudiya Vaishnava theology, the principle of the spiritual master himself. Where Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is Krishna appearing as His own devotee, Nityananda Prabhu is understood to be Balarama — Krishna's elder brother, His first expansion, and the source of all service to Him. Vaishnavas therefore approach Mahaprabhu through Nityananda Prabhu rather than directly, on the principle that one reaches the Lord by the mercy of the Lord's servant. The pairing is so fundamental to Bengali devotional life that the two are almost never named separately: they are simply Gaura-Nitai.

He appeared in the village of Ekachakra, in the Birbhum district of Bengal, around 1474 — some twelve years before Mahaprabhu — as the son of Hadai Ojha (Hadai Pandita) and Padmavati Devi. The biographies describe a childhood spent enacting the pastimes of Krishna and Balarama with the other village boys, in which He would take now one role and now another, and in which the play is said to have carried a conviction that unsettled the adults watching it.

At about the age of twelve or thirteen, a travelling sannyasi named Lakshmipati Tirtha stopped at Hadai Pandita's house and asked, as a guest's request that could not honourably be refused, for the boy as his companion. Hadai Pandita gave his only son away and, the accounts say, collapsed. Nityananda left Ekachakra and did not return for some twenty years, spending them in continuous pilgrimage across the length of India — an itinerary the Chaitanya-bhagavata records at length, covering Gaya, Kashi, Prayag, Mathura, Vrindavana, Dvaraka, Rameshvaram and the tirthas of the south.

He came to Nabadwip around 1506, when He was in His early thirties and Mahaprabhu had already begun the sankirtana movement. The meeting between them is one of the best-loved episodes in Bengali Vaishnava literature: Nityananda, having arrived in the town, concealed Himself, and Mahaprabhu, who knew perfectly well who had come, sent devotees to find Him and eventually revealed Himself in the four-armed and six-armed forms that settled the question of identity for both of them. From that point the two were inseparable, and Nityananda became the movement's most fearless field preacher.

His most famous act belongs to that period. Sent out with Haridasa Thakura to call every householder in Nabadwip to chant, He approached the two notorious brothers Jagai and Madhai and was struck on the head by Madhai with a broken earthen pot, so that blood ran down His face. When Mahaprabhu came in fury to punish them, it was the bleeding Nityananda who threw Himself between the Lord and the brothers and begged that they be forgiven. The episode fixed His reputation permanently as the most merciful of all the Lord's associates — the one who takes the blow and then pleads for the man who struck Him.

When Mahaprabhu settled at Jagannatha Puri, He appointed Nityananda Prabhu to lead the mission throughout Bengal, and it is largely through that appointment that Gaudiya Vaishnavism became a mass movement rather than a Nabadwip phenomenon. Nityananda preached across Bengal for decades, initiated thousands, and organised the householder communities that carried the tradition forward. At the request of the devotees He also married, taking as His wives Vasudha and Jahnava, daughters of Suryadasa Sarakhela; Jahnava Mata became after His disappearance one of the most authoritative teachers in the entire tradition, a woman whose leadership of the Gaudiya community was accepted without dispute.

Gaudiya Vaishnavas hold that no one is qualified to approach Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, still less Radha and Krishna, without first receiving the mercy of Nityananda Prabhu — a doctrine expressed in the much-repeated line of Narottama Dasa Thakura that when Nitai's mercy comes, one attains Radha and Krishna. He is called patita-pavana, the deliverer of the fallen, and the tradition insists that His mercy carries no entrance requirement whatsoever. The reason usually given is precisely the Jagai and Madhai episode: a person who forgave that has, in effect, published His terms.