Discipleship Under Madhavendra Puri

Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita introduces Ramachandra Puri the same way it introduces his godbrother Ishvara Puri: as a disciple of Srila Madhavendra Puri, without a word about family, birthplace, or the name he carried before taking sannyasa. Both men are Madhavendra Puri's initiated disciples. Only one of them is remembered for how he behaved at his guru's deathbed, and Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami makes sure a reader cannot miss which one, or why.\n\n## A Guru Absorbed in Longing for Mathura\n\nBy the end of his life, Madhavendra Puri had become an invalid. He could not move his own body, and Ishvara Puri served him constantly through that decline, personally cleaning him and reciting Krishna's name and pastimes so that his guru's mind stayed fixed on the Lord. Through all of it, Madhavendra Puri remained absorbed in a single longing. He chanted Krishna's holy name, and at times he cried out, "O my Lord, I did not get shelter at Mathura" (Antya-lila 8.19). It was not ordinary grief. Chaitanya-charitamrita and the purports written on it are emphatic that this was the highest stage of ecstatic love for Krishna, expressed as separation, the same mood Srila Madhavendra Puri is remembered for throughout his life.\n\n## Instruction Where None Was Wanted\n\nRamachandra Puri came to that same bedside, heard the same weeping, and understood none of it. He read his guru's cries as the ordinary unhappiness of a man who believed himself already liberated, and he told him so: "If you are in full transcendental bliss, you should now remember only Brahman. Why are you crying?" (Antya-lila 8.21). It is worth being precise about what makes this more than simple bad manners. Ramachandra Puri was advising his own spiritual master, uninvited, at the hour of his death, to stop feeling what Chaitanya-charitamrita treats as the deepest devotion available to a soul, and to replace it with an impersonal, Brahman-centered detachment. Srila Prabhupada's purport to this verse states plainly that Ramachandra Puri "was not sufficiently expert to understand the feelings of Madhavendra Puri," and that his own thinking ran, "latently," toward impersonalism — the very cast of mind Gaudiya Vaishnavas call Mayavada.\n\n## Get Out, You Sinful Rascal\n\nMadhavendra Puri's reply came without delay. "Hearing this instruction, Madhavendra Puri, greatly angry, rebuked him by saying, 'Get out, you sinful rascal! ... I am dying without achieving the shelter of Krishna, and therefore I am greatly unhappy. Now this condemned foolish rascal has come to instruct me about Brahman'" (Antya-lila 8.22, 25). He told Ramachandra Puri plainly that his unasked-for advice was only adding to his pain, warned him not to show his face again, and said that seeing him at the moment of death would cost him the fruit of his whole life. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami does not soften what this meant for the disciple being addressed: "Ramachandra Puri was thus denounced by Madhavendra Puri. Due to his offense, gradually material desire appeared within him" (Antya-lila 8.26).\n\n## Two Examples, One Lesson\n\nChaitanya-charitamrita then draws the comparison it has been building toward from the start. "Ishvara Puri received the blessing of Madhavendra Puri, whereas Ramachandra Puri received a rebuke from him. Therefore these two persons... are examples of the objects of a great personality's benediction and punishment. Madhavendra Puri instructed the entire world by presenting these two examples" (Antya-lila 8.32). Ishvara Puri went on, the text says, to become "an ocean of ecstatic love" for Krishna, and in time the guru of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Himself. Ramachandra Puri, in the same passage, is described as becoming "a dry speculator and a critic of everyone else" (Antya-lila 8.31) — a description Chaitanya-charitamrita generalizes into a rule about anyone attached to dry speculative knowledge: such a person "has no relationship with Krishna. His occupation is criticizing Vaishnavas. Thus he is situated in criticism" (Antya-lila 8.27).\n\nNot long afterward, still reciting the same verse of longing for Mathura, Madhavendra Puri passed from this world. The fault-finding cast of mind his rebuke could not undo did not end with him. It would surface again, years later and in front of a much larger audience, when the same Ramachandra Puri arrived at Jagannatha Puri and found himself in the company of Madhavendra Puri's own disciple's disciple, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu — an encounter told in full in The Criticism of Mahaprabhu's Eating.