Sri Vishvarupa (Shankararanya)

Introduction

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 have a similar name. He has nothing to do with the philosophical order founded by the eighth-century teacher Adi Shankaracharya, even though he carried one of that order's traditional sannyasa titles. He is also a completely different person from Shankara Pandita, an unrelated Vaishnava associate of Mahaprabhu. Only a little is recorded about Shankararanya, and he is a quiet figure, but he was a real one: Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own brother. He is remembered in Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own life story mainly through a handful of verses in Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami's Chaitanya-charitamrita.

Chapter 1

Leaving Home Rather Than Marry

Vishvarupa hears that his marriage is being arranged, and leaves home the same day to accept sannyasa.

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Vishvarupa was Jagannatha Mishra and Sachi Devi's elder surviving son, several years older than his younger brother, who would later become Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Chaitanya-charitamrita describes him as highly qualified and unusually serious for his age. It also says he was an incarnation of Lord Baladeva Himself. As Vishvarupa grew into a young man, his parents naturally began to think about arranging a marriage for him. This was the ordinary next step for any son of a respectable Bengali brahmana household in Nabadwip.

A Decision Made in a Single Day #

Chaitanya-charitamrita tells the moment in a single verse. As soon as Vishvarupa heard that a marriage was being arranged for him, he left home immediately. He did not wait to argue the matter or to be talked out of it. He set out to accept sannyasa and travel from one holy place to another. There is no scene of debate or discussion in the text. The decision and the departure happen at the same moment. This is part of the reason later Vaishnava writers see Vishvarupa's vairagya, his spirit of renunciation, as so complete and so uncompromising.

A later Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition is recorded in the Gaudiya Vaishnava Abhidana, not in Chaitanya-charitamrita itself. This tradition holds that Vishvarupa travelled to Varanasi and received sannyasa there from a sannyasi named Krishna Bharati, at about sixteen years of age. It also holds that at this ceremony he took the name he is remembered by: Shankararanya. Chaitanya-charitamrita does not name his sannyasa-guru. So this detail should be read as a later devotional memory, not as an established fact from the earliest source.

The Parents' Grief #

Jagannatha Mishra and Sachi Devi were devastated. So much of the family's future had rested on their elder son. Now he was gone, and gone by his own sudden choice. By tradition, his new life meant never returning to the household he left. The young Chaitanya, still a boy Himself, took on the work of consoling His grieving father and mother.

Bhala Haila #

Chaitanya's words to His parents are preserved as a direct quotation in Chaitanya-charitamrita. They are surprising, because they so firmly approve of what has just happened. It is good, He tells them, that Vishvarupa has accepted sannyasa, because by doing so he has delivered both his father's family and his mother's family. It is a strange thing to say to grieving parents. Srila Prabhupada's purport to this verse (Adi-lila 15.14) takes care to explain it. The reason is that elsewhere Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is recorded warning against the casual acceptance of sannyasa in this age.

Part of the puzzle is that sannyasa itself has a mixed reputation in scripture. The Brahma-vaivarta Purana lists the acceptance of sannyasa among five acts specifically discouraged in the Age of Kali, alongside the sacrifice of a horse or a cow. The verse says, "In this Age of Kali, five acts are forbidden: the offering of a horse in sacrifice, the offering of a cow in sacrifice, the acceptance of the order of sannyasa, the offering of oblations of flesh to the forefathers, and a man's begetting children in his brother's wife" (Brahma-vaivarta Purana, Krishna-janma-khanda 185.180, quoted in Chaitanya-charitamrita, Adi-lila 17.164). Yet in Chaitanya-charitamrita, Adi-lila 15.14, the words quoted above show Chaitanya Mahaprabhu praising His own brother's sannyasa fully. The answer lies in what kind of sannyasa is being praised. One kind of sannyasa is taken to dedicate one's life fully to Krishna's service, in the proper spirit of varnashrama-dharma. This is not the same thing as the sannyasa of a "so-called Mayavadi," a renunciant who merely wanders about, imagining himself already one with Narayana. Such a person does nothing to actually serve Him. Vishvarupa's sannyasa was formally received within the Dashanami order and carried a Dashanami title. Even so, it belonged to the first kind, the kind Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Himself would accept a few years later. It was never the empty or self-serving renunciation Chaitanya criticized elsewhere. Chaitanya-charitamrita's own text also gives the clearest evidence on one more point. The name "Shankararanya" tells us only about the outward monastic title Vishvarupa carried, not about the philosophy he actually lived and taught.

Chaitanya assured His parents that He Himself would remain and serve them, and this promise gave them at least some peace of mind. It would be some time yet before either of them heard anything more of Vishvarupa. The news that finally came, and how it reached the family, is told in Word From Pandharpur. Not long after this, Chaitanya Himself went through a strange and revealing episode at home. That is told in The Vision at Nabadwip.

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Chapter 2

The Vision at Nabadwip

After eating betel offered to the Deity, the young Chaitanya describes a vision of being called to sannyasa by His absent brother.

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Some years after Vishvarupa left home to accept sannyasa under the name Shankararanya, a strange, brief episode took place in the house of Jagannatha Mishra in Nabadwip. Chaitanya-charitamrita tells it almost in passing. It comes between an account of the young Lord's schooling and the death of His father. It is one of the few moments in the whole of Chaitanya-charitamrita where Vishvarupa appears again. By this point he had been absent for years, and even now he appears only inside his brother's own mystical experience.

Betel Meant for the Deity #

One day, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu ate some betel nuts that had been offered to the household Deity. Betel of that kind is not ordinarily eaten by a child, and it acted on Him as an intoxicant: He fell to the ground unconscious. His father and mother, alarmed, sprinkled water on His face and revived Him as quickly as they could. When Chaitanya came back to His senses, He said something that neither of them had ever heard from Him before.

Taken Away by Vishvarupa #

What Chaitanya described was an experience of being taken away by His brother. Vishvarupa, He said, had come and led Him off. Vishvarupa asked Him to accept the sannyasa order as well, and to follow the same path Vishvarupa himself had already taken years earlier. Chaitanya-charitamrita records His reply to Vishvarupa inside this vision almost word for word: "I have my helpless father and mother, and also I am but a child. What do I know about the sannyasa order of life? Later I shall become a householder and thus serve my parents, for this will please Lord Narayana and the goddess of fortune." Vishvarupa was satisfied, or at least accepted the answer. He is described as bringing Him back home. Before doing so, Vishvarupa asked one thing of Him: to offer thousands and thousands of obeisances, on his behalf, to their mother Sachi Devi.

A Message Carried Across a Vision #

Chaitanya-charitamrita does not spell out whether this should be understood as a literal dream, a mystic vision brought on by the sacred remnants Chaitanya had eaten, or something else again. But the episode's role in the larger story is clear. Vishvarupa has been gone from the story since Leaving Home Rather Than Marry. This is the one place where he speaks again, however briefly. Here his continuing concern for the mother he left behind is recorded in his own words, however they reached Chaitanya. It is also the only place in Chaitanya-charitamrita where Chaitanya is shown declining an invitation to sannyasa, years before He would accept it Himself after His father's passing.

Not long after this vision, Jagannatha Mishra himself passed away. Chaitanya, though grieving, carried out the funeral rites for His father according to Vedic custom. Then He settled for some years into married life as a grihastha, exactly as He had told Vishvarupa He intended to do. In all this time, no word of what had actually become of Vishvarupa himself had reached the family. How it finally did, years later and far from Bengal, is told in Word From Pandharpur.

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Chapter 3

Word From Pandharpur

Years later, on His own South Indian pilgrimage, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu learns from Sri Ranga Puri that His brother had died a perfected sannyasi at Pandharpur.

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By the time anyone in Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's family learned what had actually become of Vishvarupa, Chaitanya was no longer the schoolboy who had once been carried off in a vision. He had taken sannyasa Himself in 1510, left Bengal, settled for a time in Jagannatha Puri, and then set out on a long tour of pilgrimage sites across South India. It was during this tour, in the pilgrim town of Pandharpur on the bank of the Bhima River in what is now Maharashtra, that the news finally reached Him.

An Unexpected Godbrother #

Word reached Chaitanya Mahaprabhu that Sri Ranga Puri was staying in the town at a brahmana's house. Ranga Puri was a disciple of Sri Madhavendra Puri, and therefore a godbrother of Chaitanya's own diksha-guru, Ishvara Puri. Chaitanya went to see him at once. The moment He set eyes on him, He fell flat on the ground in ecstatic obeisance. He was weeping and trembling, and His body showed every outward sign of transcendental emotion. Ranga Puri was startled by such a greeting from a stranger. He asked Him to get up, and remarked that anyone capable of such love must surely be connected to Madhavendra Puri himself. The two embraced, both in tears. Once they had composed themselves, they sat down and talked about Krishna continuously for five to seven days.

A Curry of Banana Flowers #

During their conversation Ranga Puri asked where Chaitanya had been born. When he heard the answer, Navadvipa, a flood of old memories came back to him. He had travelled to Nabadwip once before, years earlier, with Madhavendra Puri, and had eaten at the very home of Jagannatha Mishra. He remembered, with real fondness, an unusual curry made of banana flowers that Chaitanya's mother, Sachi Devi, had cooked for the visiting sannyasis. He also remembered Sachi Devi herself, her devotion and her motherly warmth, "exactly like the mother of the universe." Chaitanya-charitamrita is full of small, human details like this one. Here a simple meal, remembered decades later, links the deep theological meeting of the two sannyasis back to an ordinary Bengali kitchen.

Word of Shankararanya #

Then Ranga Puri turned to a piece of news of his own. He recalled that one of the "deserving sons" of the Nabadwip household had himself accepted sannyasa at a very young age, taking the name Shankararanya. He told Chaitanya plainly that this same sannyasi, Shankararanya, had attained perfection right here in Pandharpur. Ranga Puri may not even have realized what he was telling Chaitanya. Chaitanya's reply confirmed it: "In My previous ashrama, Shankararanya was My brother, and Jagannatha Mishra was My father." Years had passed since Vishvarupa walked out of the household to become a wandering sannyasi. Years had also passed since the strange vision that had once brought his voice back into his brother's life for a moment. Now, from a stranger's fond memory of a curry, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu learned that His brother had already left this world at the very place where He now stood.

Eleven Days at Vitthala's Temple #

Chaitanya remained in Pandharpur for eleven days in all. After Ranga Puri set out again for Dvaraka, Chaitanya stayed on four more days. He bathed in the Bhima River and visited the temple of Vitthala, the local form of Krishna worshiped at Pandharpur, before continuing His own tour southward. Chaitanya-charitamrita and later Gaudiya tradition both describe Vishvarupa's disappearance there in the same terms used elsewhere for his identity. It was not simply death. It was a return: an incarnation of Sankarshana passing back into the source from which he had never really been separate. Vishvarupa appears in only a handful of verses across the whole of Chaitanya-charitamrita. But he was, quite literally, the brother Chaitanya Mahaprabhu never stopped remembering.

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Closing

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. Later, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own sannyasa gave rise to a clearly Vaishnava sannyasa lineage in Bengal. But in Vishvarupa's time, before that, this Dashanami order was simply the usual formal way 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 should be treated as a little less certain than the verses that do appear there.

Taking a Dashanami name did not make Vishvarupa a philosophical Mayavadi. Chaitanya-charitamrita clearly says 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 makes a careful difference. Real sannyasa, taken to serve Krishna, is one of the four honest stages of varnashrama-dharma. But the "so-called Mayavadi sannyasis" who imagine themselves to have become Narayana are a later, fallen version of the same outward form. Vishvarupa's sannyasa belongs to the first kind. He is quite different from the various Mayavadi sannyasis, such as Prakashananda Sarasvati, whom Chaitanya Mahaprabhu later met and defeated in debate at Kashi and elsewhere. Vishvarupa was never Chaitanya's opponent; he was His brother.

Sankarshana in a Sannyasi's Robe #

Chaitanya-charitamrita does not present Vishvarupa as an ordinary renunciate. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami calls him an incarnation of Baladeva (Adi 13.74), and Srila Prabhupada's purport to that verse calls him an incarnation of Sankarshana. Sankarshana is the four-armed expansion of Krishna who is both the ingredient and the moving cause of the material creation. The purport also adds that the part (amsa) and the whole (amsi) are never really separate. Elsewhere (Adi-lila 5.6-8), the Chaitanya-charitamrita makes clear that Sri Nityananda Prabhu, Chaitanya's own eternal companion, 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. His role is small and quiet in the larger drama of Krishna and Balarama's descent as Chaitanya and Nitai. But the Chaitanya-charitamrita still counts him among the branches of the great tree that grew from Chaitanya Mahaprabhu: in Srila Prabhupada's translation of Adi 10.106, "The ācārya Śaṅkarāraṇya was considered the forty-eighth branch of the original tree."

Kavi Karnapura's Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika (verse 58) states the same truth:

aṁśāṁśinor abhedena vyūha ādyaḥ śacī-sutaḥ
baladevo viśvarūpo vyūhaḥ saṅkarṣaṇo mataḥ

"The original form of the Supreme Lord is considered not different from the Lord's direct expansions. For this reason it is considered that Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu, the son of Srimati Saci-devi, is non-different from His expansion Lord Vasudeva, the first member of the Catur-vyuha. In the same way Sri Visvarupa is considered non-different from the incarnation Lord Sankarsana, the second member of the Catur-vyuha." (Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika 58)

The point about the part and the whole comes from Srila Prabhupada's purport to Chaitanya-charitamrita Adi 13.74: "He is nondifferent from Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu, for the aṁśa and the aṁśī, or the part and the whole, are not different. As an incarnation of Saṅkarṣaṇa, Viśvarūpa belongs to the quadruple manifestation of catur-vyūha."