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 alone is worth pausing on. Mahaprabhu is Krishna Himself in the mood of His own devotee, by the tradition's own understanding — yet here He directs a sincere seeker not to speak to Him directly, but to a householder governor whose social position, by ordinary reckoning, ranked well below a learned brahmana's. It is the first hint of the lesson the whole episode is built to teach, a lesson explored 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, where a servant seated him properly and then, when his master did not appear, 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, teaching them the songs and the dance that would go with them, and readying them, with his own hands, for their performance before the Deity: bathing them, massaging them with oil, dressing and decorating them, exactly as the service required. He was also teaching them, verse by verse, how to express through the movements of their eyes and faces the continuous, natural and transitional symptoms of ecstatic love, so that the emotion of his own compositions would show plainly to Lord Jagannatha when the drama was finally performed.
Chaitanya-charitamrita does not treat this as an aside — it lingers on the details, and says plainly that while doing all this Ramananda Raya's mind never changed in the slightest, "like a person touching wood or stone." Internally, in his own eternal identity, he considered himself a maidservant of the gopis and the two girls he trained as gopis themselves; only externally did he appear to be a man doing an unusual and, on the surface, questionable thing. Krishnadasa Kaviraja calls the whole scene proof that "the greatness of the devotees of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is exceedingly difficult to understand," adding that once the day's training ended, Ramananda Raya fed the two girls a full meal and sent them home, unseen by anyone else, before finally turning 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, hurried to the assembly room, and offered Pradyumna Mishra full respect, apologizing 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, he said nothing further about krishna-katha, took his leave, and went home — the actual teaching he had come for still unspoken.
He had, in other words, witnessed something remarkable and left with real doubts about what he had seen, but without a single word of the discourse on Krishna he had actually come to hear. What he did next — returning to Mahaprabhu the following day — is where the episode's central teaching comes into view, told on The Lord's Teaching on Hearing about Krishna.