A brahmana named Gangadhara Bhattacharya, of the small Ganges-side village of Chakhandi in Bengal, is where this story has to begin, because tradition says Shrinivasa's whole life was foretold before he was born. Gangadhara had gone to Katwa and there watched Chaitanya Mahaprabhu accept sannyasa, the renounced order of life. The sight of the Lord's hair being cut undid him completely, and he could only repeat "Chaitanya! Chaitanya!" through his tears — a habit that earned him the name Chaitanya Dasa for the rest of his days.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Father | Gangadhara Bhattacharya, later known as Chaitanya Dasa |
| Mother | Lakshmi Priya |
| Birthplace | Chakhandi, on the Ganges, Bengal |
| First instructing guru | Narahari Sarakara Thakura of Shrikhanda |
| Grammar and poetics teacher | Dhananjaya Vidyavachaspati |
| Bhagavatam instruction (unfinished) | Gadadhara Pandita, at Jagannatha Puri |
A Son Promised at Puri #
Some years after Katwa, Chaitanya Dasa and Lakshmi Priya, still without a child, traveled to Jagannatha Puri to seek Mahaprabhu's blessing. According to the Bhakti-ratnakara's account of the visit, Mahaprabhu told His personal servant Govinda, within earshot of the couple, that a son would soon be born to them: "Indeed his wife will give birth to a jewel of a son, who will be named Shrinivasa. He will be the manifest form of My love and will be non-different from Me... Through Rupa and others I will bring scriptures into the world, and through Shrinivasa, shall distribute them." However devotional and unverifiable such a scene necessarily is by ordinary historical standards, it is the story every later Gaudiya source tells about why the child was named as he was, and it sets up the role Shrinivasa would in fact go on to play. He was born on a full-moon day of the month of Vaishakha; sources place the year anywhere from around 1517 to around 1530, and no independent record settles the question.
Boyhood and a First Guru #
Shrinivasa grew up devoted to both his parents, hearing Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's pastimes and the Vrindavana lila of Radha and Krishna from his father, and learning kirtana from his mother. He studied Sanskrit grammar, logic, and poetics under the scholar Dhananjaya Vidyavachaspati and by most accounts mastered these subjects unusually fast. His father died while Shrinivasa was still young, a loss that struck him hard, and he moved with his grieving mother from Chakhandi to her own father's house in Jajigram. It was from Jajigram that he first visited nearby Shrikhanda and met Narahari Sarakara Thakura, an associate of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu known for the rare privilege of singing the Lord's glories in His presence. Shrinivasa accepted Narahari as his first instructing (siksha) guru, and it was Narahari who first told him that Mahaprabhu's own worldly life was drawing to a close — news that set Shrinivasa hurrying, with his mother's reluctant permission, toward Puri.
Arriving Too Late, Again and Again #
What followed became a pattern that several biographers have noted as unusual even by the standards of devotional literature: Shrinivasa kept setting out to meet a great soul and arriving just after that person had died. Word reached him on the road to Puri that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had already left the world. He is said to have fainted and briefly considered ending his own life before a dream of Mahaprabhu urged him to continue the journey anyway. In Puri he was received warmly by Gadadhara Pandita, who told him that Mahaprabhu had personally asked him, before passing, to teach Shrinivasa Srimad-Bhagavatam. One version of the story adds a further complication: Gadadhara's own copy of the Bhagavatam had become illegible from the tears he had cried onto its pages during years of separation from Mahaprabhu, and a fresh manuscript had to be sent for from Bengal. Before that teaching could properly run its course, Gadadhara Pandita himself disappeared from the world, and Shrinivasa was left to mourn a second teacher he had barely had time to know.
He spent the following period touring the shripatas — the homes and holy places — of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's other associates across Bengal: Navadwipa, where Vishnupriya Devi, the Lord's widow, blessed him; Shantipura, home of Advaita Acharya's family; Khardaha, the home of Nityananda Prabhu, where Jahnava Devi urged him not to delay any further in going to Vrindavana. Everywhere he went, the devotees who met him reported the same impression — that his absorption in love for Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was so intense it seemed to embody the Lord's own ecstatic energy.
A Third Disappointment, and a Turn Toward Gopala Bhatta and Jiva #
When Shrinivasa finally set out for Vrindavana, the pattern repeated itself a third time. Four days before he reached the town, he learned that Sanatana Goswami had died four months earlier; on reaching Mathura itself, he was told that Rupa Goswami had died only three days before. By his own account he collapsed under a tree, convinced he was the most unfortunate man alive, having now failed three separate times to reach a teacher before his passing. That night, tradition says, Rupa and Sanatana Goswami appeared to him and told him plainly what to do next: go to Vrindavana, take shelter of Gopala Bhatta Goswami, and study under Jiva Goswami "with all his life and soul." The training that followed — his formal initiation, his education, and the title by which history remembers him — is told in Training Under Jiva and Gopala Bhatta Goswami.