A Meeting at Sanatana Goswami's Hut #
This second, later mention does not come from the Chaitanya-charitamrita. It comes from Narahari Chakravarti Thakura's later history, the Bhakti-ratnakara. Srila Jiva Goswami had sent Shrinivasa Acharya and Narottama Dasa Thakura to see all the holy places of Vraja-mandala, with Srila Raghava Pandita Goswami of Govardhana as their guide. On the way the three came back to Nandishvara, the hill of Nanda Maharaja, and Raghava went to the hut beside Pavana-sarovara where Sanatana Goswami had once lived. Sanatana's disciple Gopala Mishra, the son of Sanatana's family priest, was there, and Uddhava Dasa was among the devotees present. The Bhakti-ratnakara says:
śrī-uddhava dāsa mādhavādi ye ye chilā / paraspara mili' sabe mahā harṣa hailā
"Sri Uddhava Dasa, Madhava and all the others who were there met one another, and everyone was overjoyed." (Bhakti-ratnakara, Fifth Wave, p. 252, 1912 Bengali edition; English rendering ours)
The people of Vraja quickly brought food, and that day there was a great festival there. One line, printed in brackets in the 1912 edition, adds that they all spent the night in nama-sankirtana, singing the holy names together. At dawn Raghava took his leave and set out again with the two young devotees (pp. 252-253). The whole visit is told in Through the Forests of Vraja.
A twentieth-century reference work, the Gaudiya Vaishnava Abhidhana, describes this meeting as Uddhava Dasa receiving the travellers at his own ashrama (vol. 3, p. 1156), and some later accounts repeat this. The Bhakti-ratnakara itself places the meeting at Sanatana Goswami's hut in Nandishvara, with Gopala Mishra and Uddhava Dasa among the devotees there. The Raghava of this journey is not the same person as Raghava Pandit of Panihati, who is remembered chiefly for the yearly bhandara he sent to Jagannatha Puri.
Seeing Off the Scriptures to Bengal #
The same source mentions Uddhava Dasa again, later. He was among the devotees who gathered in Vrindavana for a much more important departure. On that day Shrinivasa Acharya, Narottama Dasa Thakura and Shyamananda Prabhu set out for Bengal, carrying the precious manuscripts of Rupa Gosvami, Sanatana Gosvami, Jiva Gosvami and the other Vrindavana Goswamis. Otherwise, these scriptures would have stayed locked away in Vraja, unread by the growing community of Gaudiya Vaishnavas back in Bengal and Odisha. In its list of the Vaishnavas who gathered at Sri Govinda's temple on the morning the books were loaded onto the cart, the Bhakti-ratnakara names "Sri Uddhava, who from time to time went to Gauda", that is, to Bengal, most likely this same Uddhava Dasa (Sixth Wave, p. 486). The fuller story of that journey is part of Shrinivasa Acharya's own life. It includes the theft of the manuscripts along the way and their safe arrival in the end, and it is told at length in Carrying the Scriptures to Bengal.
A Small, Steady Presence #
Together with the Vitthalanatha episode, these two mentions give only the outline of a life, not its details. They show a Vrindavana devotee who was, it seems, settled there. He was known well enough to be named twice across a generation of Gaudiya Vaishnava history. In his younger years he was present at a Deity's darshan. In his later years he was still among the Vaishnavas of Vraja, meeting the young pilgrims with joy at Nandishvara and gathering with the others when the books left for Bengal. Bhakti-ratnakara does not say when he died or where, and nothing in either source suggests he wrote, taught or left disciples. What it does keep, in two short and separate mentions, is a small, steady presence at the edges of some of Gaudiya Vaishnavism's better-known events. He is exactly the kind of quiet devotee that the tradition's own histories were careful to still name.
