One year, as Shivananda Sena's nephew Shrikanta Sena left Jagannatha Puri to return to Bengal, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu gave him a message for the Bengali devotees: they need not make the journey to Puri that year, because He Himself would come to Bengal in the month of Pausha. When Shrikanta arrived with this news, the devotees were overjoyed at the prospect. But as Pausha wore on with no sign of the Lord, Shivananda Sena, Jagadananda Pandita and the others who had been waiting grew disheartened.
A Confident Promise #
It was at this point that Nrisimhananda Brahmachari happened by and asked why everyone looked so unhappy. Told that they were grieving the Lord's non-arrival, he made them an extraordinary assurance: he would bring Mahaprabhu there himself, within three days. Because Shivananda Sena and Jagadananda Pandita already knew something of Nrisimhananda's spiritual power, they believed him and waited.
Nrisimhananda sat down and remained absorbed in meditation for two full days. When he rose, he told Shivananda Sena that Mahaprabhu had already arrived at Panihati, and that by the following noon He would be at Kumarahatta. He asked Shivananda to supply him with ingredients for a feast, and began cooking early the next morning — a wide variety of preparations, which he divided onto three plates: one for Jagannatha, one for Nrisimhadeva, and one for Mahaprabhu Himself.
The Feast the Lord Actually Ate #
As soon as Nrisimhananda sat down in meditation to make the offering, Chaitanya-charitamrita records, Mahaprabhu personally appeared and ate all three plates, leaving no remnant on any of them (Chaitanya-charitamrita, Antya-lila 2.48-75, summarized). Nrisimhananda's response was a piece of deliberate theater: rather than show his joy outright, he made a show of distress. Since Mahaprabhu and Jagannatha are, in Gaudiya theology, ontologically non-different, he reasoned aloud, there was no real fault in the Lord eating Jagannatha's plate — but why had He also taken the plate meant for Nrisimhadeva? "Nrisimhadeva has fasted today," he complained, as if the Deity had been cheated of His offering.
When Mahaprabhu then left for Panihati, Nrisimhananda cried out that all three plates had been eaten and that both Jagannatha and Nrisimhadeva had gone without. Shivananda Sena, uncertain what to make of any of it, nonetheless supplied him with a second round of ingredients, and Nrisimhananda cooked again, this time offering the meal to Nrisimhadeva alone.
Confirmed a Year Later #
The following year, when Shivananda Sena and the Bengali devotees made their annual journey to Puri, Mahaprabhu Himself brought up the incident unprompted, in front of the whole assembly of devotees. "Last year in the month of Pausha," He said, "when Nrisimhananda gave Me varieties of sweetmeats and vegetables to eat, they were so good that I felt I had never before eaten such preparations" (Chaitanya-charitamrita, Antya-lila 2.77). Hearing the Lord confirm the story in His own words, the assembled devotees were struck with wonder, and Shivananda Sena — who had supplied the ingredients without ever quite being sure what had actually happened in his own house — was finally convinced that the meal he had paid for had, in fact, reached Mahaprabhu.
Read together with The Road Built in Meditation, the two pastimes make the same point from two different angles: for a devotee absorbed enough, the line between what happens in meditation and what happens in the world is not where an outside observer would assume it to be.
Why He Offered to Three Plates #
The detail of the three plates is not incidental. Gaudiya theology holds Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Lord Jagannatha and Lord Nrisimhadeva to be non-different at the level of the Absolute, even as They appear in different forms to different devotees for different purposes. Nrisimhananda's staged complaint — that Nrisimhadeva had been left to fast while Mahaprabhu ate His plate — was not confusion about this point but a devotee's way of dramatizing it, forcing the theology into a scene everyone present could feel rather than merely recite. That the Lord Himself later confirmed the meal, unprompted and in specific, sensory terms — remembering the taste of the sweetmeats a full year later — is what convinced Shivananda Sena's household that Nrisimhananda's meditation had not merely imagined a visit, but had actually hosted one.