Sri Vishvarupa (Shankararanya)

Shankararanya was the sannyasa name taken by Vishvarupa, the elder brother of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. He was born in Nabadwip to Jagannatha Mishra and Sachi Devi, the only one of their children besides Chaitanya Himself (born Vishvambhara) to survive infancy. While still very young, and while his parents were arranging his marriage, Vishvarupa left home, accepted sannyasa under the monastic name Shankararanya, and spent the rest of his life travelling to places of pilgrimage. He passed away at Pandharpur in western India, years before Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own public mission of sankirtana had even begun.

He should not be confused with two other figures who share a similar name: he has nothing to do with the philosophical order founded by the eighth-century teacher Adi Shankaracharya, despite carrying one of that order's traditional sannyasa titles, and he is a wholly different person from Shankara Pandita, an unrelated Vaishnava associate of Mahaprabhu. What the record actually shows is a quiet, thinly documented but genuine figure: Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own brother, remembered in Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own life story chiefly through a handful of verses in Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami's Chaitanya-charitamrita.

The Elder Brother of Gaurahari #

Jagannatha Mishra and Sachi Devi lost eight daughters in infancy before Vishvarupa was born, and Vishvarupa himself was several years older than his younger brother, who would grow up to be Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Chaitanya-charitamrita records the two as the only surviving children of the household. Vishvarupa is described as unusually serious and detached even as a boy, and when his parents began looking for a bride for him he chose instead to leave home and accept the renounced order of sannyasa. He never saw his brother's later life as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the sannyasi and sankirtana preacher of Nabadwip and Puri, because he had already passed away by the time Chaitanya took sannyasa himself in 1510.

Not the Order of Adi Shankaracharya #

The name Shankararanya can mislead a reader who does not know Gaudiya Vaishnava history. "Aranya" is one of ten traditional monastic titles (along with Puri, Bharati, Giri, Vana, Sagara, Tirtha, Ashrama, Parvata and Sarasvati) used across the Dashanami sannyasa order historically associated with Adi Shankaracharya's Advaita tradition. In Vishvarupa's time, before Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own sannyasa gave rise to a distinctly Vaishnava sannyasa lineage in Bengal, this Dashanami order was simply the available formal channel for anyone, of any philosophy, to enter the renounced order. Later Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition (the Gaudiya Vaishnava Abhidana) records that Vishvarupa received sannyasa from a sannyasi named Krishna Bharati in Varanasi at about the age of sixteen; this detail does not appear in Chaitanya-charitamrita itself, so it is worth holding a little more loosely than the verses that do.

Taking a Dashanami name did not make Vishvarupa a philosophical Mayavadi. Chaitanya-charitamrita is explicit that Vishvarupa's sannyasa pleased Chaitanya, who said it had delivered "both his father's family and his mother's family" (Adi-lila 15.14). Srila Prabhupada's purport to that verse draws the line carefully: real sannyasa, taken to serve Krishna, is one of the four honest stages of varnashrama-dharma, while the "so-called Mayavadi sannyasis" who imagine themselves to have become Narayana are a later degradation of the same outward form. Vishvarupa's sannyasa belongs to the first kind. He is a genuinely distinct figure from the various Mayavadi sannyasis Chaitanya Mahaprabhu later met and defeated in debate at Kashi and elsewhere, such as Prakashananda Sarasvati — Vishvarupa was never Chaitanya's opponent, he was His brother.

Leaving Home Rather Than Marry #

The decision came suddenly. As soon as Vishvarupa learned that a marriage was being arranged for him, he left the house the same day and set out to accept sannyasa and wander from tirtha to tirtha. His parents were shattered, and it fell to the young Chaitanya to console them. The full episode, including Chaitanya's own words to his grieving mother and father, is told on Leaving Home Rather Than Marry.

The Vision That Consoled Gaurahari #

Some time later, after his father Jagannatha Mishra had also passed away, Chaitanya fell into an unusual trance in which He described being taken away by Vishvarupa and asked to accept sannyasa himself. The account, and Chaitanya's reply, is told in full on The Vision at Nabadwip.

Word From Pandharpur #

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu did not learn what had become of His brother until years afterward, during His own tour of South India as a sannyasi. In the pilgrim town of Pandharpur He met Sri Ranga Puri, a godbrother of His own sannyasa-guru Ishvara Puri, who told Him that a sannyasi named Shankararanya had attained perfection at that very place. The meeting, and what it meant for Chaitanya, is told on Word From Pandharpur.

Sankarshana in a Sannyasi's Robe #

Chaitanya-charitamrita does not present Vishvarupa as an ordinary renunciate. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami identifies him as an incarnation of Sankarshana, the four-armed expansion of Krishna who is both the ingredient and the moving cause of the material creation, and adds that the part (amsa) and the whole (amsi) are never really separate. In the same breath, the Chaitanya-charitamrita clarifies that it is Sri Nityananda Prabhu, Chaitanya's own eternal companion, who is the original, complete manifestation of Sankarshana in the Lord's own pastimes; Vishvarupa's disappearance is described as a merging back into that same source. It is a small, quiet role in the larger drama of Krishna and Balarama's descent as Chaitanya and Nitai, but Vishvarupa's few verses in the Chaitanya-charitamrita were enough for Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura to count him as the forty-eighth branch of the great tree of acharyas that grew from Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.