The Meeting with Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu

By about 1506 the news that Nityananda Prabhu had been waiting twenty years for had reached him in Vrindavana. Nimai Pandita of Nabadwip, the young logician whose reputation had filled Bengal, had gone to Gaya, received initiation from Ishvara Puri, and come back a different man. He wept at the name of Krishna, fell unconscious in the street, and had begun gathering a small circle of devotees in the courtyard of Srivasa Pandit to chant through the night. Nityananda left Vrindavana at once and walked to Nabadwip.

What he did on arriving is characteristic, and it is the first thing the biographies emphasise. He announced himself to nobody. He went quietly to the house of a devotee named Nandana Acharya, on the Ganges bank at Mayapur, and stayed there without telling anyone who he was. Nandana Acharya, who did know, considered his life fulfilled and said nothing either. For a man who had crossed the subcontinent to reach this town, the decision to sit still in a stranger's house and wait to be found is not obvious behaviour; the tradition reads it as the conduct proper to a servant, who does not present himself but waits to be called.

The next morning Chaitanya Mahaprabhu told the devotees about a dream. He had seen a chariot bearing the flag marked with a palm tree, which is the ensign of Balarama, and on it an extraordinary personality who was asking the way to the house of Nimai Pandita. That person, He said, had arrived in Nabadwip during the night, and they were to go and find Him. Srivasa Pandit and Haridasa Thakura were sent out. They went through the whole town, house by house and market by market, asking whether any remarkable visitor had come, and came back with nothing. Mahaprabhu, the accounts say, smiled at this, got up, and led the way Himself; and the party walked to the house of Nandana Acharya.

The meeting is described in the Chaitanya-bhagavata as a silence. Nityananda saw the effulgence approaching and came to the door; the two of them stood looking at each other without speaking, unable to move. Then Nityananda fell to the ground, and Mahaprabhu picked him up and embraced him, and both of them wept. Nityananda was then about thirty-two years old, Mahaprabhu about twenty. In the ordinary reckoning of Bengali society the older man of an unrelated family and the younger householder pandit had no particular claim on each other at all.

Vrindavana Dasa records that Mahaprabhu then asked Srivasa Pandit to read from the Srimad-Bhagavatam, and that the passage read was the description of Krishna entering the forest of Vrindavana with the cowherd boys, wearing a peacock feather in His hair and yellow cloth, filling His flute with the nectar of His lips. Nityananda lost consciousness before the reading was finished. It is a small and very deliberate piece of narrative construction: of all the verses that might have been chosen for the occasion, the one selected describes the exact scene in which, in a previous descent, the two of them had walked side by side.

What happened over the following days is summarised by Krishnadasa Kaviraja in a handful of verses of the Adi-lila. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu revealed to Nityananda Prabhu a six-armed form bearing a conchshell, a disc, a club, a lotus, a bow and a flute. The composition of that form is the theology of the whole meeting in a single image: the conch, disc, club and lotus belong to Vishnu, the bow to Ramachandra, the flute to Krishna, and the six of them together say that the young sannyasi-to-be of Nabadwip contains all three. The Lord then showed him a four-armed form, and finally the two-armed form of Krishna, the son of Nanda Maharaja, bluish, dressed in yellow, playing the flute. The tradition holds that this sequence was granted to very few people in Mahaprabhu's whole life, and that the order of it, from the composite form down to the original one, was itself an argument about who He was.

Then came an exchange the biographers evidently enjoyed. Nityananda arranged to perform Vyasa-puja, the formal worship offered to the spiritual master, and made Chaitanya Mahaprabhu its object. Mahaprabhu accepted the worship, and then, in the ecstasy of being Nityananda, took up the musala, the plough-like weapon of Balarama. Each of them was insisting, in the only language available, that the other was the master. Krishnadasa Kaviraja notes elsewhere that this ambiguity was permanent: Nityananda serves Chaitanya sometimes as His guru, sometimes as His friend and sometimes as His servant, exactly as Balarama did with Krishna in Vraja, and that although His own incarnations are unlimited He describes Himself as Chaitanya's servant. Shortly afterwards, the Adi-lila adds, Sachi Devi looked at the two of them in her own house and saw Krishna and Balarama.

It is worth being clear about what the sources are here. The Chaitanya-charitamrita compresses this whole episode into six verses, because Krishnadasa Kaviraja was writing decades later and knew that Vrindavana Dasa Thakura had already covered it. The full narrative, with the dream, the fruitless search and the meeting at the door, belongs to the Chaitanya-bhagavata, which was written in Bengal within living memory of the events and, as it happens, on Nityananda Prabhu's own instruction. A reader who wants the detail has to go to the Bengali text; a reader who wants the doctrinal summary will find it in the Sanskrit-quoting Charitamrita. The two do not conflict, but they were written for different purposes.

What did the two of them recognise in each other? The tradition's answer is given plainly in the closing summary of the same chapter: the former son of Nanda Maharaja is now Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and the former Baladeva, Krishna's brother, is now Nityananda Prabhu. But the recognition had a practical content as well, and it showed itself immediately. From this point on, Nityananda is not a follower among followers. He becomes the second pole of the movement. In the Panca-tattva, the five features in which the Lord appears in order to distribute love of God, he stands next to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and before Advaita Acharya, Gadadhara Pandit and Srivasa Thakura. When the sankirtana went out into the streets of Nabadwip, Mahaprabhu danced in one party and Nityananda moved with Him. When Mahaprabhu accepted sannyasa at Katwa in 1510, three men went with Him to make the arrangements, and Nityananda was one of them. And within a year or two of the meeting, when the Lord wanted the holy name taken door to door through Nabadwip to people who had no interest in it whatever, the man He sent was Nityananda, an assignment that ended in blood and is told here.

Gaudiya Vaishnavas take two things from the episode. The first is the concealment. Nityananda Prabhu had every reason to arrive in Nabadwip and announce himself, and did the opposite, and the tradition reads that as a permanent instruction about how a spiritual master behaves: he does not advertise, and the disciple must go looking. The second is the reversal of protocol at the Vyasa-puja. In a religious culture organised with great care around who defers to whom, the two central figures of the new movement spent their first weeks together each trying to place the other in the senior chair. Whatever else the sankirtana movement was going to be, it was not going to be an institution about rank.