Every year at Jagannatha Puri, Lord Jagannatha's chariot began its slow journey down the broad sandy road toward the Gundicha temple. It was pulled by the temple servants called gaudas, while King Prataparudra himself swept the road ahead with a golden-handled broom. Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu came every year to dance in front of that chariot. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami describes this dancing in one particular year in the thirteenth chapter of Chaitanya-charitamrita's Madhya-lila. In that description, Shubhananda Dvija appears briefly as part of an actual scene, not just as a name in a list.
Seven Groups for One Dance #
Mahaprabhu did not dance alone. According to the chapter's own summary, he divided his assembled sankirtana party into seven separate groups, with two mridanga drums in each. So fourteen mridangas sounded together along the road. For the first group, he appointed Damodara Svarupa as chief singer and gave Advaita Acharya the position of dancer. He then organized a second group and made Srivasa Thakura its chief singer (Madhya 13.38). The text goes on to name the men who sang the response to Srivasa Thakura's lead: "Gangadasa, Haridasa, Sriman, Shubhananda and Sri Rama Pandita," while Nityananda Prabhu himself was appointed to dance in that same group (Madhya 13.39). This is the only scene in all the accepted Gaudiya texts that names Shubhananda among other devotees while he is doing something. He is singing in Srivasa Thakura's own party, with Nityananda Prabhu dancing in front of him.
Mahaprabhu moved between all seven groups as they sang. The tradition holds that he was mystically present in each of them at once, so every group felt sure he was dancing with them alone. As the chariot moved on, the groups in the end came together into one huge, loud kirtana, with the Lord dancing in the middle of it all. Somewhere within that great sound of drums and voices, the moment involving Shubhananda took place.
The Foam That Fell From His Mouth #
Dancing before Jagannatha's cart, Mahaprabhu passed into a state of ecstasy so overwhelming that foam appeared at the corner of his mouth. This is one of the known bodily signs of transcendental bhava, and Chaitanya-charitamrita records it again and again through his life. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami gives what happened next in a single couplet: "That foam, taking it, Shubhananda drank. A relisher of the mellow of Krishna-prema, he was very fortunate" (sei phena lañā śubhānanda kaila pāna / kṛṣṇa-prema-rasika teṅho mahā-bhāgyavān, Madhya 13.110).
The two words Krishnadasa Kaviraja chooses to describe him deserve a closer look. Kṛṣṇa-prema-rasika means something more than simply "devoted". A rasika is someone with a trained and refined taste for a particular flavor. Here the flavor is prema, love of Krishna in its most intense, ecstatic form. Mahā-bhāgyavān, "very fortunate," is the author's own judgement on the act. He shows no disgust or surprise that a devotee drank another man's saliva. He shows the opposite, almost envy, that Shubhananda alone in the crowd was placed close enough, and was bold enough, to take that particular prasada. In the world Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami is describing, whatever falls from Mahaprabhu's own body in a state of divine ecstasy is not ordinary matter at all.
One Verse, Remembered #
Nothing else is recorded about how Shubhananda came to be standing close enough to Mahaprabhu to do this, what he felt in the moment, or what became of him afterward. He is not shown speaking, and no later chapter returns to him. What survives is this one couplet. There is also his place, earlier in the same chapter, as one of the five singers responding to Srivasa Thakura in that same festival's dancing. For a great many of the devotees who followed Chaitanya, this is all that the historical record usually keeps. There is no biography, only a single, clearly remembered act, written down because someone who was there thought it was worth remembering.
