Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita credits Sanatana Gosvami by name with four major works - "the Hari-bhakti-vilasa, Brihad-bhagavatamrita, Dasama-tippani and Dasama-carita" - and each met a distinct need of the small, still-forming Gaudiya Vaishnava community Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had asked him to help build.
Hari-bhakti-vilasa: A Code of Vaishnava Conduct #
Among Sanatana's four instructions from Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was a direct charge to "compile a book establishing the proper behavior for devotees of Krishna in order to create the foundations of a Vaishnava society." At Varanasi, when Sanatana asked for guidance on how to begin, the Lord gave him a detailed synopsis: "Because you asked Me for a synopsis, please hear these few indications. In the beginning describe how one must take shelter of a bona fide spiritual master," followed by instructions covering initiation, morning duties, Deity worship with five, sixteen or fifty prescribed ingredients, the etiquette of approaching a temple, the observance of Ekadashi and festival days such as Janmashtami and Rama-navami, and the general conduct expected of a Vaishnava toward guru, scripture and fellow devotees alike. Sanatana carried out this charge together with Gopala Bhatta Gosvami, and the resulting Hari-bhakti-vilasa became, and remains, the foundational manual of ritual and ethical conduct for the entire Gaudiya Vaishnava community - the text from which later teachers such as Raghunatha Bhatta Gosvami and generations after them have drawn the specifics of daily sadhana. Sanatana also wrote his own auto-commentary on the work, guiding later readers through its dense ritual prescriptions.
Brihad-bhagavatamrita: A Journey Through the Hierarchy of Devotion #
Where the Hari-bhakti-vilasa addresses practice, the Brihad-bhagavatamrita addresses doctrine, cast in the form of a narrative. Roughly 2,500 verses long and divided into two parts, the work follows a fictional Brahmana named Gopa-kumara on a journey first through the various planetary systems and forms of liberation available within the material and spiritual worlds, and then into the eternal realm of Krishna Himself, using the story to lay out, in careful order, the ranking of Krishna's devotees - who is more advanced than whom, and why, and what qualities mark each stage of advancement in bhakti. Sanatana wrote his own commentary on the work as well, called the Dig-darshini ("Compass," or "Pointer of Direction"), without which many of the book's more compressed theological arguments are difficult for a modern reader to follow.
Brihad-vaishnava-toshani: Opening the Tenth Canto #
Sanatana's third major work, also known as the Dasama-tippani, is an extensive commentary specifically on the Tenth Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam - the canto describing Krishna's own birth, childhood and youthful pastimes in Vrindavana, and therefore the single most theologically important portion of the entire Bhagavata Purana for the Gaudiya tradition. Later commentators, including Srila Jiva Gosvami, built directly on Sanatana's readings here, and the work stands as one of the tradition's earliest sustained attempts to draw out the specifically devotional, rasa-centered meaning of Krishna's pastimes as opposed to a purely narrative or philosophical reading of the same verses.
Krishna-lila-stava: Praise in Verse #
Sanatana's fourth recorded work, Krishna-lila-stava, is a devotional poem of 432 verses retracing Krishna's pastimes as told in the Bhagavata Purana, from the opening of the Tenth Canto through the killing of Kamsa - a poetic companion, in effect, to the same portion of scripture his prose commentary addressed in the Brihad-vaishnava-toshani. It is in this same work that Sanatana addresses the Bhagavata itself directly, in lines that later Gaudiya writers have quoted as capturing his personal relationship to the scripture he spent so much of his life explaining: "O holy Bhagavata, you are my only company, my only friend, and my guru. You are my greatest treasure and my personal saviour. You are the emblem of my highest fortune and the very form of ecstasy. I offer my obeisances unto you."
A Legacy Carried Forward #
Taken together, these four works gave the Gaudiya Vaishnava community, within a single generation of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own life, both a functioning code of conduct and a serious body of Sanskrit theology to stand alongside it - exactly the two things Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had specifically instructed Sanatana to produce. It was on the strength of source material like this, gathered and organized first by Sanatana and Rupa and carried onward by their nephew Jiva Gosvami, that Krishnadasa Kaviraja Gosvami was later able to compose Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita itself, drawing repeatedly on the Goswamis' own writings and on Raghunatha Dasa Gosvami's personal memories of them for its account of these same events. The full circle of that debt - Sanatana instructed by the Lord, writing the tradition's law and doctrine, and a later Goswami using those same writings to record Sanatana's own life for those who came after - is itself part of what the tradition means when it calls Sanatana's decades in Vrindavana foundational.