A sannyasi came to Ekachakra when Nityananda was twelve years old and asked directions to the house of Hadai Pandita. He was fed and lodged as any renunciant guest would have been in a devout brahmana household. What happened next is told, with small variations, in every biography of Nityananda Prabhu, and it is the hinge on which his early life turns.
Before he would eat, the sannyasi asked his host to promise in advance that a request of his would be granted. Hadai Pandita gave the promise; a guest who asks for hospitality on those terms is not to be refused, and in the etiquette of the time an unconditional word given to a sannyasi at the door was absolute. The meal was taken. Then, on the point of leaving, the guest named what he wanted: he was travelling alone to the holy places and needed a companion, and he asked for the boy.
Hadai Pandita had one surviving son, and everything the biographies say about him turns on how much he loved him. The traditional accounts describe him standing there working through the only precedent that could help him — Dasaratha, who had given Rama and Lakshmana into the hands of Vishvamitra and let them go into the forest rather than break his word to a sage. He went in to his wife and asked her what he should do, and Padmavati answered that whatever he decided she would accept. He came back out with tears in his eyes and told the sannyasi that if he really wanted the boy he could take him. Nityananda, by the biographers' account, wanted to go and had been waiting for the opportunity, but would not have broken his parents' hearts himself; when the request came from outside, he treated it as the arrangement he had been waiting for, consoled his mother and father, and left.
Hadai Pandita collapsed as soon as his son was out of sight, and the accounts are unanimous that he never recovered. He could not eat and could not sleep. He is described as remembering, over and over, that he had never in his life let the boy out of his sight even to walk to the market. The tradition holds that he lived on for some time only because his mind was continuously fixed on the Supreme Lord, and that he eventually died of the grief. It is one of the harshest passages in Gaudiya hagiography, and the tradition has never softened it: the deliverer of the fallen begins his public life by leaving behind a household that was destroyed by his going.
The identity of the sannyasi is one of the points on which the sources genuinely differ, and it is worth stating the disagreement rather than papering over it. Vrindavana Dasa Thakura's Chaitanya-bhagavata simply says that a sannyasi came. Later Bengali tradition names him as Lakshmipati Tirtha, a senior figure of the Madhva line. Narahari Chakravarti's Bhakti-ratnakara tells the story differently again: there the boy leaves Ekachakra with an unnamed sannyasi, and the meeting with Lakshmipati comes later and further south, at Pandharpur, where Lakshmipati was visiting a brahmana disciple in whose house Nityananda happened to be staying unrecognised. In that account Lakshmipati, weeping in the night over his own unworthiness while singing of Balarama, is given a dream in which Balarama appears, tells him that a brahmana's son in the dress of an avadhuta has come to that village and will become his disciple, and speaks a mantra into his ear; the next morning Nityananda came and asked him for initiation, and he gave it.
The question of who initiated Nityananda Prabhu is unsettled in the tradition itself. The Premavilasa says Ishvara Puri. Jiva Goswami says Sankarshana Puri, a disciple of Madhavendra Puri. The Bhakti-ratnakara says Lakshmipati, who was Madhavendra Puri's own guru — a genealogy which, as Gaudiya historians have noted, would make Nityananda the spiritual grandfather of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and sits awkwardly with the easy fraternal relationship the two of them plainly had. What the Chaitanya-bhagavata records is simpler and probably safer: that Madhavendra Puri treated Nityananda as a friend and equal, while Nityananda treated Madhavendra Puri with the deference due to a guru.
The pilgrimage itself lasted about twenty years, from his twelfth to his thirty-second year, and the itinerary preserved by Vrindavana Dasa is long enough to be worth reading as itinerary. He began close to home, at the temple of Vakresvara and the groves of Vaidyanatha, then went to Gaya, and on to Kashi, where he bathed in the Ganges and could not drink enough of the water. He kept the month of Magha at Prayag with the customary morning bath at the confluence. Then Mathura — which the biographies call the place of his previous appearance — where he played in the Yamuna at Vishrama-ghata, circled Govardhana Hill, and walked through all twelve forests of Vrindavana. At Gokula he sat down in the house of Nanda Maharaja and wept.
From there the route runs the length and breadth of the subcontinent: Hastinapura, where he wept at the home of the Pandavas and called aloud on Balarama, the holder of the plough, to deliver everyone; Dvaraka, and a bath in the sea; Siddhapura; Matsya-tirtha, where he distributed cooked rice at a large festival. He visited both Siva-Kanchi and Vishnu-Kanchi, and the account says he laughed at the bitterness of the sectarian quarrel between the two. He went to Kurukshetra, to Naimisharanya, to the western Sarasvati. At Ayodhya he wept at Rama's birthplace, and in the country of Guhaka the boatman he is said to have lost consciousness for three days remembering the devotion of a man whom orthodox society classed as untouchable. He bathed in the Sarayu, the Gomati and the Gandaki, climbed Mount Mahendra to bow to Parashurama, and went up to Haridwar. He travelled through the Dravida country — Venkata, Kanchi, the Kaveri, Sri Rangam, where he stayed some while — and south to Madurai, the Tamraparni and the Malaya hills, then north again to Badarikashrama, where he stayed in seclusion and, the biographies say, met Vyasadeva. He came at last to Setubandha and Rameshvaram at the southern tip of the peninsula, and to Jagannatha Puri, where he is described as fainting at the first sight of the disc on top of the temple and then losing consciousness repeatedly before the Deity.
Only one episode from these twenty years survives in the Chaitanya-charitamrita, and it survives at second hand. When Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was travelling to Puri in 1510 and reached Kataka, Nityananda told Him the story of Saksi-gopala — the Deity who walked from Vrindavana to Vidyanagara to give evidence for a brahmana in a lawsuit — because he had heard it from the townspeople himself, years before, on this very journey. Krishnadasa Kaviraja notes the fact almost in passing at the head of the fifth chapter of the Madhya-lila. It is a small thing, but it is the one point at which the twenty years of wandering touch the historical record of Mahaprabhu's own life.
The meeting the tradition cares most about is the meeting with Madhavendra Puri, and every account treats it as the emotional centre of the whole pilgrimage. Madhavendra Puri is regarded in Gaudiya Vaishnavism as the origin of the line — the first to whom love of Krishna in the mood of Vraja was manifest, and the spiritual grandfather, through Ishvara Puri, of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Himself. The biographies say that when the two of them saw each other, both lost external consciousness and fell, and that Ishvara Puri, Brahmananda Puri and the other disciples standing round wept. When they recovered they embraced and rolled on the ground. Nityananda said that all his pilgrimages had been completed in that moment, since the holy places live at the feet of a pure devotee. They stayed together for a considerable time speaking of Krishna, and Madhavendra Puri said that in all his travels he had found nothing like it, and that whoever became averse to Nityananda could never be dear to Krishna. Then they parted, one going south to Setubandha and the other north to the Sarayu.
Finally he returned to Mathura and settled in Vrindavana, and here the accounts record something that is easy to read past and is, in fact, the most revealing thing in the chapter. He ate almost nothing, taking a little milk only when it was brought to him unasked. He knew perfectly well that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was at that moment a young man in Nabadwip with His divinity still concealed. And although he possessed the power to give love of God to anybody he chose, he gave it to nobody. He would not begin until the Lord had begun. He waited in Vrindavana, playing in the Yamuna with the local children, until the news reached him that the sankirtana movement had started; then he went straight to Nabadwip.
That refusal is what Gaudiya Vaishnavas take from the twenty years. A tour of the tirthas by a man the tradition identifies as Balarama is not a search; the pilgrim in this case is the object of the pilgrimage, and the accounts say as much when they observe that he went to the holy places in order to purify them. What the period actually establishes is his relation to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, which is the relation of a servant who possesses everything and will use none of it without an order. The original spiritual master does not act on his own initiative. He waits, sometimes for twenty years, and when the word comes he moves the same day.