When Sanatana reached Varanasi and took his place quietly at the door of Chandrasekhara's house, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu recognized him at once, telling His host, "There is a devotee at your door. Please call him in," though Chandrasekhara at first saw nothing but a Muslim mendicant waiting outside. Once inside, the Lord went to him immediately, embraced him, and both men wept, "shoulder to shoulder," in a display of feeling that astonished Chandrasekhara. When the Lord began cleansing Sanatana's travel-worn body with His own hands, Sanatana protested that he should not be touched; Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's answer became one of the most quoted lines in the entire Chaitanya-charitamrita: "I am touching you just to purify Myself, because by the force of your devotional service you can purify the whole universe." Asked how he had escaped, Sanatana narrated the whole story of the jailer, the crossing, and the road to Varanasi from beginning to end, and learned in turn that Rupa and Anupama had already gone on ahead to Vrindavana.
The Blanket and the Torn Quilt #
Before any formal teaching began, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu quietly tested and worked on Sanatana's remaining attachment. Sanatana had arrived wearing a single valuable woolen blanket - the one gift from his brother-in-law Srikanta - and though he lived a life of strict begging in every other way, going door to door for alms rather than accept full meals even when a wealthy brahmana offered them, the Lord kept glancing repeatedly at this one costly possession. Understanding the unspoken point, Sanatana went to bathe in the Ganges, found a poor Bengali mendicant drying a ragged quilt, and asked to trade his fine blanket for it outright. The mendicant, astonished, asked why a gentleman would want to make such an obviously unequal trade; Sanatana insisted he meant it seriously, and the exchange was made. When Sanatana returned wearing the torn quilt, the Lord asked what had become of the blanket, heard the story, and remarked with evident satisfaction that Krishna, having already delivered Sanatana from the deepest hell of material existence, would allow no trace of attachment to remain: "After vanquishing a disease, a good physician does not allow any of the disease to remain." It is this small, almost domestic scene - not any grand miracle - that later generations of Gaudiya Vaishnavas have most often pointed to when explaining why Sanatana Gosvami is remembered as the very model of a Vaishnava's relationship to possessions.
Sambandha, Abhidheya, Prayojana #
With Sanatana's last attachment gone, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu began the teaching for which this meeting is chiefly remembered. He told Sanatana plainly that the Vedic literature reduces to three subjects: "sambandha, abhidheya, prayojana" - the living entity's eternal relationship with God, the regulated practice by which that relationship is revived, and the ultimate goal of love of God that practice leads to. At the foundation of it all lay a single, oft-repeated declaration of the soul's true identity: "jivera 'svarupa' haya - krsnera 'nitya-dasa' / krsnera 'tatastha-sakti', 'bhedabheda-prakasa'" - "It is the living entity's constitutional position to be an eternal servant of Krishna, because he is the marginal energy of Krishna and a manifestation simultaneously one with and different from the Lord." From this single point the Lord unfolded, across what Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita records as Madhya-lila chapters 20 through 24, an extended account of Krishna's personal opulence, His various energies, the nature of the soul's forgetfulness and bondage in material life, and - illustrated through a memorable parable of a poor man who does not know his own father left him a buried treasure - exactly why the soul needs revealed scripture and a bona fide guide to recover what is already, in truth, his own.
A Minister's Mind, Freely Given #
Krishnadasa Kaviraja Gosvami pauses partway through this teaching to note something about the manner of Sanatana's questioning, not just its content: "rāja-mantrī sanātana — buddhye bṛhaspati / prabhura kṛpāte puche asaṅkoca-mati" - "Sanatana Gosvami had been a minister under Nawab Hussain Shah, and he was undoubtedly as intelligent as Brihaspati, the chief priest of the heavenly kingdom. Due to the Lord's unlimited mercy, Sanatana Gosvami questioned Him without hesitation." Commenting on this same exchange in a 1966 lecture, Srila Prabhupada made the same point in plainer language: Sanatana's years as "a politician... a minister" had made him sharp and unafraid to ask exactly the question that needed asking, and it was that same trained intelligence, redirected now toward Krishna instead of statecraft, that let him absorb in two months a body of teaching that would take his own later students a lifetime to unpack. Before sending him onward, the Lord also gave Sanatana a synopsis for the book he had been asked to write establishing rules of Vaishnava conduct - the beginning of what would become the Hari-bhakti-vilasa - before Sanatana finally turned his steps toward Mathura and Vrindavana, the place he would not leave again for the rest of his life, told in Arrival in Vrindavana and Madana-mohana.