Sri Srivasa Thakura

Sri Srivasa Thakura, also called Srivasa Pandit, is the fifth member of the Panca-tattva, and represents in that grouping the pure devotee — bhakta-tattva. He is regarded in the tradition as an incarnation of Narada Muni, the archetypal travelling devotee and kirtana performer of the Puranas, which is fitting for the man in whose courtyard the sankirtana movement began.

He was born in Srihatta and settled in Nabadwip, on the bank of the Ganges near Mahaprabhu's own home, with his wife Malini Devi and his brothers Sripati, Srirama and Srikanta. He was considerably older than Nimai and was already a practising Vaishnava, quietly worshipping Krishna and chanting the holy names, at a time when the town's religious life was dominated by ritual and by scholarship in logic. Vaishnava accounts describe him as one of the very few people in Nabadwip who recognised what had happened to Nimai Pandita after His return from Gaya — not a breakdown, but the manifestation of pure love of God.

His house became the birthplace of the movement. For a full year, before the chanting went out into the streets, Mahaprabhu held nightly kirtana at Srivasa Thakura's home with the doors closed, so that scoffers could not enter and make sport of what they saw. It was there that the ecstatic pastimes of that first period took place: the Lord's manifestation of divine forms, the twenty-one hours of continuous ecstasy, the abhiseka in which Srivasa worshipped Him formally as the Supreme Lord. That courtyard, Srivasa Angan, is still shown at Mayapur and is among the most visited sites in the Gaudiya world.

Association with the Lord cost him. The orthodox brahmana community of Nabadwip resented the nightly chanting, and Srivasa Thakura, as its host, absorbed much of the hostility. The Chaitanya-charitamrita records the incident in which a brahmana named Gopala Chapala, hoping to have him publicly disgraced as a worshipper of the goddess Bhavani, laid out wine and the paraphernalia of tantric worship on his doorstep overnight — a slander that failed, and for which the man afterwards contracted leprosy and had eventually to take shelter of the very devotee he had tried to ruin.

The episode for which he is most honoured, however, is the death of his son. During one of the nightly kirtanas at his house a child of his family died, and the household — knowing what the news would do to the assembled devotees and to the Lord — kept it silent and let the chanting continue until it had finished of itself. When Mahaprabhu learned of it He is described as deeply moved, and He caused the dead boy to speak, so that the child himself explained to his grieving relatives the transmigration of the soul and the fact that his time with them had simply ended. The composure of Srivasa Thakura on that night is cited throughout Gaudiya literature as the standard of what devotional resolve looks like under the worst pressure a householder can face.

When Mahaprabhu took sannyasa and moved to Puri, Srivasa Thakura remained in Bengal but travelled each year with the party of Bengali devotees for the Ratha-yatra festival, and is repeatedly named in the Chaitanya-charitamrita among those closest to the Lord in the Puri years. He stands in the Panca-tattva for the ordinary devotee — no incarnation of the Lord and no potency of the Lord, but a householder brahmana who gave his house, his reputation and his peace to the movement, and whose courtyard is where it all started.