The best-known episode of Pundarika Vidyanidhi's life is one he shares with Gadadhara Pandit, who tells the same story from his own side on Initiation from Pundarika Vidyanidhi. It began with Mukunda Datta, who had grown up alongside Pundarika Vidyanidhi in Chittagong and alone among the devotees of Nabadwip knew what he really was. One day Mukunda told Gadadhara, then a young brahmachari known for his indifference to comfort, that he wanted to introduce him to an exceptional Vaishnava, and took him along.
A Disappointing First Impression #
What Gadadhara found was not what he expected. Pundarika Vidyanidhi was reclining on an expensive bed beneath a three-tiered canopy, on sheets as white as milk-foam, with a jewelled box of scented betel within reach, brass spittoons at either side, and two servants cooling him with fans. He received the two visitors warmly and talked pleasantly. Gadadhara, ascetic by nature since childhood, could not reconcile any of it with the word Vaishnava, and came away convinced that Mukunda had brought him to meet nothing more than a comfortable, ordinary man of means.
The Verse That Changed Everything #
Seeing the doubt on Gadadhara's face, Mukunda Datta recited two verses from the Bhagavatam — Uddhava's astonishment, in the Third Canto, that Krishna gave the position of a nurse to the demoness Putana, who had come to kill Him with poison smeared on her breast, and a second verse from the Tenth Canto making the same point about her. The effect on Pundarika Vidyanidhi was immediate and overwhelming. He cried out, fell to the ground, and passed through the full range of ecstatic symptoms the Vaishnava tradition catalogues — tears, trembling, loss of composure — tearing apart the very bedding and canopy that had seemed, moments before, to define him. Several men together could not hold him still, and when the storm of emotion finally passed he lay unconscious for hours.
Gadadhara understood at once what he had done. Misjudging a devotee by his outward circumstances is treated in the Vaishnava tradition not as a private error but as vaishnava-aparadha, an offense at a devotee's feet — among the gravest faults the tradition recognizes. Chaitanya-bhagavata has Mahaprabhu Himself draw the wider lesson afterward in words of striking humility, saying, in effect, that even the demigods cannot always recognize who is a genuine Vaishnava, so how could a foolish child do so unaided — a remark aimed less at Gadadhara's particular mistake than at how easily anyone can make it. When Pundarika Vidyanidhi returned to ordinary consciousness, calm again and giving no sign of what had just occurred, he initiated Gadadhara Pandit, and remained his spiritual master for the rest of his life.
A Mantra Repeated, and a Second Initiation at Puri #
Years later, at Jagannatha Puri, Gadadhara came to Mahaprabhu with an unusual request. He explained that after once having repeated his own mantra aloud to another person, he found he could no longer concentrate while chanting it, and asked Mahaprabhu to give it to him again so his mind would settle. Mahaprabhu refused, on principle: Gadadhara already had an initiating guru, and it would be improper, He said, for anyone else to repeat the mantra while that guru was alive — even for Mahaprabhu Himself. Told that Pundarika Vidyanidhi was not present, Mahaprabhu answered that destiny would bring him, and that he would arrive at Puri within ten days. When Pundarika Vidyanidhi did arrive exactly as foretold, Mahaprabhu's joy at the sight of him echoed His tears from years before in Nabadwip, and Gadadhara went to his guru and asked to hear the mantra again — which Pundarika Vidyanidhi lovingly did. The Chaitanya-charitamrita records this second initiation in the same verse that mentions Pundarika Vidyanidhi witnessing that year's Odana-shashthi festival, an episode told in full on Friendship with Svarupa Damodara at Puri.