Years after Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu left Navadvipa for good and took sannyasa, the elderly brahmana who had once been greeted at his own front door as "father" appears one final time in the record — not in Bengal, but in Jagannatha Puri, on the far side of the country, in a crowd of devotees the Lord was embracing one by one.
Devotees Arrive From Bengal #
Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita's account of the Lord's return to Jagannatha Puri, after a long tour of pilgrimage places in South India, describes a stream of familiar faces arriving from Bengal to see Him again. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami calls this stretch of the narrative the Lord's beda-kirtana pastimes — kirtana performed with the Lord encircled by His own devotees — and it opens with a description of Mahaprabhu, back among His people, dancing before the Deity of Jagannatha with an intensity that "merged the entire world into the ocean of ecstatic love."
The devotees were met and welcomed individually, starting with the most senior among them. Advaita Acharya offered prayers at the Lord's feet first, and Mahaprabhu embraced him immediately, in ecstatic love. One by one, the rest of the party followed. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami lingers on one particular arrival: Murari — almost certainly Murari Gupta, long remembered in the tradition as an incarnation of Hanuman — tried to run from the Lord rather than be touched, protesting, "My Lord, please do not touch me. I am most abominable and am not fit for You to touch because my body is sinful." Mahaprabhu would not accept the refusal. "My dear Murari, please restrain your unnecessary humility," He said, and embraced him anyway, sitting him down and personally wiping the dust from his body.
Named in the Same Breath as the Lord's Own Elders #
It is a little further into this same scene that Purandara Acharya's name appears again, folded into a list of senior devotees the Lord embraced together and praised: "Lord Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu then again and again embraced all the devotees, including Ācāryaratna, Vidyānidhi, Paṇḍita Gadādhara, Gaṅgādāsa, Hari Bhaṭṭa and Ācārya Purandara. The Lord described their good qualities and glorified them again and again."
The names on either side of his are not strangers. Acharyaratna was the honorific title of Chandrashekhara Acharya, the Navadvipa elder who had taken young Nimai in as an adopted son; Vidyanidhi was Pundarika Vidyanidhi, another senior figure from the same circle of Navadvipa devotees. In other words, this was not a crowd of strangers being greeted for the first time — it was the household of elders Mahaprabhu had grown up visiting, reassembling around Him one more time, years later and a very long way from home. Purandara Acharya, once a fixed stop on a young man's rounds through his own neighborhood, was now a guest the Lord Himself sought out to embrace and praise by name.
Looking for the One Who Stayed Back #
The scene closes on a detail that says as much about Mahaprabhu as about anyone He embraced that day. Having gone through the whole gathered party, the Lord noticed someone missing and asked after him: "Where is Haridasa?" Haridasa Thakura, it turns out, had not come forward to be greeted at all — he was found further off, lying flat on the open road, offering obeisances from a distance rather than pushing himself into the Lord's sight.
Purandara Acharya's own reaction to being singled out and embraced is not recorded — Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita names him only as one voice in a chorus of devotees the Lord was glad to see again. But the placement of his name, sitting between two men whose stories are well documented, is itself a kind of evidence: whatever else has been lost about him, he was, by the Lord's own reckoning, worth embracing twice — once as a young householder's neighbor in Navadvipa, and once as an old friend rediscovered on the far side of India.