Pradyumna Mishra came to Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu one day the way a sincere student comes to a teacher, offering respects, asking with great submission for exactly one thing. "I wish to hear topics concerning Lord Krishna constantly," he said. "Be merciful unto me and kindly tell me something about Krishna."
A Teacher Who Points Elsewhere #
Mahaprabhu's answer was not what a visitor might expect. He did not simply begin speaking. Instead He said, "I do not know about topics concerning Lord Krishna. I think that only Ramananda Raya knows, for I hear these topics from him." He praised Pradyumna Mishra's taste for krishna-katha as rare good fortune, then quoted a verse from Srimad-Bhagavatam: a person who performs his religious duties correctly but never develops attachment for Krishna, or a taste for hearing and chanting about Him, is simply laboring without result. Then He sent Pradyumna Mishra on his way, to the home of Ramananda Raya, who was then living at the Jagannatha-vallabha gardens near the temple.
This point is important. According to the tradition's own understanding, Mahaprabhu is Krishna Himself in the mood of His own devotee. Yet here He does not let the sincere seeker hear from Him directly. He sends him instead to a householder governor, whose social position, in ordinary terms, was well below that of a learned brahmana. This is the first hint of the lesson that the whole episode is meant to teach. That lesson is explained fully on The Lord's Teaching on Hearing about Krishna.
Waiting at Ramananda Raya's Home #
Pradyumna Mishra went straight to Ramananda Raya's house. There a servant seated him properly. When his master did not appear, the servant explained why. Two exceptionally beautiful and gifted young devadasis, dancing girls attached to the Jagannatha temple, were with Ramananda Raya in a secluded part of the garden. He was training them for a drama he had composed. He taught them the songs and the dance that would go with them. With his own hands he also prepared them for their performance before the Deity. He bathed them, massaged them with oil, and dressed and decorated them, exactly as the service required. Verse by verse, he also taught them how to show the continuous, natural and transitional symptoms of ecstatic love through the movements of their eyes and faces. In this way the emotion of his own compositions would show plainly to Lord Jagannatha when the drama was finally performed.
Chaitanya-charitamrita does not pass over this quickly. It describes the details carefully. It says plainly that while doing all this, Ramananda Raya's mind never changed in the slightest, "like a person touching wood or stone." Within, in his own eternal identity, he considered himself a maidservant of the gopis, and he considered the two girls he trained to be gopis themselves. Only outwardly did he appear to be a man doing something unusual and, on the surface, questionable. Krishnadasa Kaviraja calls the whole scene proof that "the greatness of the devotees of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is exceedingly difficult to understand," and he also tells how the day ended. Once the training was over, Ramananda Raya fed the two girls a full meal and sent them home, unseen by anyone else. Only then did Ramananda Raya turn his attention to his waiting guest.
An Apology, and a Bow #
Once the training was finished, Ramananda Raya learned that a guest had been waiting. He hurried to the assembly room and offered Pradyumna Mishra full respect. He apologized for the delay as though he himself were at fault: "Sir, you came here long ago, but no one informed me. Therefore I have certainly become an offender at your lotus feet. My entire home has been purified by your arrival." Pradyumna Mishra's answer was brief and formal: "I came simply to see you. Now I have purified myself by seeing Your Honor." Seeing that the day had grown late, Pradyumna Mishra said nothing further about krishna-katha. He took his leave and went home. He had still not heard the teaching he had come for.
In other words, he had watched something remarkable and left with real doubts about what he had seen. But he had not heard a single word of the talk about Krishna that he had actually come to hear. The next day he went back to Mahaprabhu. What he did then is where the central teaching of the episode appears. It is told on The Lord's Teaching on Hearing about Krishna.
