Some time during the Nabadwip years, before Pundarika Vidyanidhi had ever set foot in the town, the devotees gathered around Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu heard Him weeping and calling out for someone none of them had met. He was asking, again and again, when He would see His father. When they asked who this father was, Mahaprabhu explained that a great Vaishnava named Pundarika Vidyanidhi, who wished to live by the Ganges, would soon be arriving from Chittagong — and that his devotion, though few would be able to see it, purified the world simply by the sound of his name.
Tears for a Stranger #
This was not a passing remark. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami records in the Chaitanya-charitamrita that Mahaprabhu counted Pundarika Vidyanidhi as the third great branch of His own tree of devotees, and that the Lord would sometimes weep simply on hearing his name spoken. The identity behind the tears was the one described on Birth and Early Life in Mekhala — Pundarika Vidyanidhi as Vrishabhanu, the father of Srimati Radharani, so that Mahaprabhu, absorbed in Radharani's own mood of separation, genuinely experienced him as a father not yet seen.
Sri Chaitanya-bhagavata records Mahaprabhu going further still, telling the puzzled devotees exactly why they should expect to be fooled when Pundarika Vidyanidhi finally appeared. His character, Mahaprabhu said, was extraordinary beyond what anyone could guess from looking at him: his very name purified the world, yet he would arrive dressed and living like an ordinary man of pleasure, and no one watching him would be able to tell what he really was. It was, in effect, advance warning of the very misjudgment that Gadadhara Pandit would go on to make in person not long afterward. When Pundarika Vidyanidhi finally arrived and came before Him late one night, overcome with love, unable even to offer his obeisances, Mahaprabhu drew him to His chest and wept over him — an embrace the devotees present understood at once to mean that this stranger from Chittagong, whom Mahaprabhu's own circle now also knew as Acharyanidhi, stood among the very dearest of the Lord's associates.
Reunited Again at Puri #
The affection did not fade with time or distance. Years later, during one of Mahaprabhu's tours through Bengal after He had accepted sannyasa, the Chaitanya-charitamrita describes Him meeting a whole gathering of devotees — Acharyaratna, Vidyanidhi, Pandita Gadadhara, Gangadasa, Hari Bhatta and Acharya Purandara among them — and embracing each of them again and again, praising their qualities without tiring of it. Pundarika Vidyanidhi, by then the diksha-guru of Gadadhara Pandit, stood among that company as one of the Lord's most cherished associates, not merely as an old acquaintance from Chittagong.
Father Has Come #
A smaller echo of the same longing appears again at Jagannatha Puri, in the story of how Gadadhara Pandit came to ask his guru to repeat the diksha mantra to him a second time — told in full on Initiating Gadadhara Pandit. When Mahaprabhu had to explain that only Pundarika Vidyanidhi himself could properly do this, He is remembered as having predicted the exact day of his arrival and then greeted the news with the same unguarded joy He had shown years before in Nabadwip, crying out that His father had come. Chaitanya-bhagavata closes its own telling of the first meeting between Pundarika Vidyanidhi and Gadadhara Pandit with the promise that whoever hears that story sincerely will receive a share of the very love of God it describes — a claim the tradition makes for very few episodes in the entire Chaitanya-lila.