Early Life and Going to Vrindavana

This story has to begin with a brahmana named Gangadhara Bhattacharya, of the small village of Chakhandi on the Ganges, in Bengal. It begins with him because tradition says Srinivasa'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 overwhelmed him completely. Through his tears he could only repeat "Chaitanya! Chaitanya!" This habit earned him the name Chaitanya Dasa for the rest of his days.

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, where the couple could hear, 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 Srinivasa. 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 Srinivasa, shall distribute them." Ordinary historical methods cannot check a devotional scene like this. Still, it is the story every later Gaudiya source tells about why the child was named as he was. It also prepares the way for the role Srinivasa 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. But the sources do agree on his age compared with the others. Srinivasa was older than both Narottama and Shyamananda, and he was already a young man by the time of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own disappearance. His maternal grandfather, the astrologer Balarama Vipra, is credited in the Bhakti-ratnakara with reading the birth chart and pronouncing: "On the full moon day of Vaishakha month, in the constellation of Rohini, when all the stars are aligned in the most beneficial way, Lakshmi Priya, the wife of Chaitanya Dasa, gave birth to a son who will be a great devotee of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu."

Boyhood and a First Guru #

Srinivasa 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 Srinivasa was still young, and the loss struck him hard. He moved with his grieving mother from Chakhandi to her own father's house in Jajigram. From Jajigram 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. Srinivasa accepted Narahari as his first instructing (siksha) guru. Narahari was also the first to tell him that Mahaprabhu's own worldly life was drawing to a close. That news sent Srinivasa hurrying, with his mother's reluctant permission, toward Puri.

Arriving Too Late, Again and Again #

What followed became a strange pattern. Several biographers have noted that it is unusual even for devotional literature. Srinivasa 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 thought of 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. Gadadhara told him that Mahaprabhu had personally asked him, before passing, to teach Srinivasa Srimad-Bhagavatam. One version of the story adds a further difficulty. Gadadhara's own copy of the Bhagavatam had become impossible to read, because of the tears he had cried onto its pages during years of separation from Mahaprabhu. So a fresh manuscript had to be sent for from Bengal. Before that teaching could be completed, Gadadhara Pandita himself disappeared from the world. Srinivasa was left to mourn a second teacher he had barely had time to know.

He spent the following period touring the shripatas of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's other associates across Bengal. These were their homes and holy places. At Navadwipa, Vishnupriya Devi, the Lord's widow, blessed him. He went to Shantipura, home of Advaita Acharya's family. At Khardaha, the home of Nityananda Prabhu, 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. His absorption in love for Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was so intense that it seemed to carry the Lord's own ecstatic energy.

A Third Disappointment, and a Turn Toward Gopala Bhatta and Jiva #

When Srinivasa 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. He was convinced he was the most unfortunate man alive, because he had now failed three separate times to reach a teacher before that teacher's 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 is told in Training Under Jiva and Gopala Bhatta Goswami. It covers his formal initiation, his education, and the title by which history remembers him.