Years after Tapana Mishra settled in Varanasi, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu kept His promise. Chaitanya-charitamrita places the meeting on His return journey from Vrindavana. He was now a sannyasi, passing through Kashi, and around Him were other men of the renounced order chanting "Hari bol!" at the bathing ghats. Tapana Mishra recognized Him and fell at His feet in tears. Mahaprabhu lifted him up and embraced him. From then on He made Tapana Mishra's home His own whenever He was in the city.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Where Mahaprabhu stayed | Two months at Chandrasekhara Vaidya's house |
| Where Mahaprabhu ate | Two months, daily, at Tapana Mishra's house |
| Raghunatha's task | Massaging the Lord's feet after His afternoon rest |
| Devotees named together | Chandrasekhara Vaidya, Tapana Mishra, and Tapana Mishra's son Raghunatha Bhattacharya |
Two Months at the Family Table #
Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita describes the arrangement exactly. Mahaprabhu stayed at Chandrasekhara Vaidya's house for two months, but He took His meals every day at Tapana Mishra's house. This means that Raghunatha's own household fed the Lord daily for the whole of that stay. For a boy in that house, this was not a single visit or a special occasion. It was two months of the Supreme Lord's ordinary daily presence at the family table. Tapana Mishra himself washed the Lord's feet on His arrival. Tradition says that he then drank that water together with his family in a state of open ecstasy. This was the household service in which Raghunatha, still a child, was about to be given his own small part.
A Boy's Small, Enormous Service #
One detail survives in the text itself, brief but exact. After finishing His lunch each day, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu would lie down to rest, and Raghunatha would massage His legs. The verse names him simply as "Raghu, the son of Tapana Mishra". Chaitanya-charitamrita records nothing more dramatic than this about the boy's part in those two months, and it does not need to. The boy was given the ordinary task of serving a guest's tired legs, and that guest was Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Himself. So even as a child he had already received a mercy that most people spend a lifetime seeking.
Some later devotional retellings add that Raghunatha, once he grew older, worried whether the Lord would even remember a boy He had known so briefly. Years afterward, walking the long road to Puri, he wondered aloud whether Mahaprabhu, surrounded by so many devotees by then, would still recognize "such a worthless wretch" as himself. According to this same tradition, Mahaprabhu answered this doubt before Raghunatha could even complete his obeisances. He called out his name and embraced him at once. Then He told him plainly that He remembered the affection Raghunatha's own mother and father had shown Him, life after life, and how lovingly his mother had fed Him every day at Kashi. Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita itself does not describe this later exchange in quite those words. But the warmth it describes fits well with the way the text treats Raghunatha throughout. He is never a minor character. He is a young man whom the Lord had chosen from boyhood.
An Education Completed, and a Pull That Would Not Fade #
After Mahaprabhu's stay ended and He continued on toward Bengal and Nilachala, Raghunatha returned to ordinary life: studies, scripture, the routines of a brahmana household. But something in those two months had already settled the direction of his life, even if years would pass before he acted on it. Once his formal education was complete, Chaitanya-charitamrita says, he gave up all his duties and set out to see the Lord again, on foot, without waiting for anyone's permission. That journey, and what happened on the road to Jagannatha Puri, is told in The Journey to Jagannatha Puri.
