Vakresvara Pandita's disappearance is remembered, by every source consulted for this page, on the sixth day of the bright fortnight of the month of Ashadha - a single day after the sixth day, by the same tradition's reckoning of his appearance roughly eleven lunar months apart. As with his appearance, no year is recorded anywhere, and this page reports the date as devotional memory rather than settled history.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Disappearance day | Sixth day of the bright fortnight of Ashadha (traditional; no year recorded) |
| Traditional samadhi location | The "64 Samadhis" area associated with Vrindavana, per secondary sources |
| Literary legacy in his own name | None survives; no book or composition by Vakresvara Pandita himself is known to this page's research |
| Biography written about him | Gaura-krishnodaya, by the Oriya devotee Sri Govinda dasa - referenced in Srila Prabhupada's own purport, but not known to survive in any widely accessible form |
| Living legacy | The spiritual line running through Gopala Guru Goswami and Dhyanachandra Goswami, and the continued worship of Sri Radha-Kanta at Puri |
No Book of His Own #
Unlike Rupa Goswami, Sanatana Goswami or several of the other great Gaudiya teachers who left behind their own theological and literary works, Vakresvara Pandita does not appear, from any source consulted for this page, to have written anything under his own name. His significance to the tradition was never as an author. Srila Prabhupada's own purport to Chaitanya-charitamrita Adi 10.17 notes that his life was instead the subject of someone else's book: "Sri Govinda dasa, an Oriya devotee of Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu, has described the life of Vakresvara Pandita in his book Gaura-krsnodaya." That text does not appear to have a modern edition or translation readily available, and this page has not been able to locate or verify its content directly - it is recorded here as evidence that a fuller, dedicated biography of Vakresvara Pandita once existed in the tradition, even though it is not accessible today.
What has instead carried his memory forward is exactly what made him distinctive in life: his dancing, his mercy toward Devananda Pandita, and above all his guru-disciple line. Devotional sources place his own samadhi, or memorial tomb, in the area of Vrindavana known as the "64 Samadhis," where memorials to many of the generation of Vaishnavas who lived through Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own pastimes are kept - though this detail rests on a single secondary source consulted for this page and could not be independently verified against a primary account.
A Living Spiritual Line #
What can be verified, and verified directly through Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita's own text, is that Vakresvara Pandita's role as guru to Gopala Guru Goswami did not end with his own disappearance. Gopala Guru Goswami went on to train Sri Dhyanachandra Goswami, and the two of them together produced the Sri Gaura-Govindarcana-Smarana-Paddhati, a manual for meditative worship of Gauranga and Radha-Govinda still consulted by some Gaudiya Vaishnavas today. That entire written tradition - real, dated, and still in use - traces back, in its opening link, to Vakresvara Pandita's own initiation of a young Oriya boy named Makaradhvaja Pandit. In this sense, though Vakresvara Pandita left no book of his own, his teaching survived at one remove, carried forward by a disciple and a disciple's disciple in a way that very few of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's other named branches can claim as directly.
The Deity He Served, Still Worshipped Today #
The Deity of Sri Sri Radha-Kanta, which Vakresvara Pandita worshipped at Kashi Mishra's house at Puri after Mahaprabhu's own disappearance, is still worshipped there today at what is now called the Sri Radha-Kanta Matha, or the Gambhira, at Balisahi in Puri - an active Gaudiya Vaishnava pilgrimage site, expanded over the centuries first by Gopala Guru Goswami and later custodians, but resting on the seva Vakresvara Pandita himself first took up. Gopala Guru Goswami's own legacy page on this site describes that temple, and the devotional traditions still connected to it, in fuller detail. For Vakresvara Pandita himself, the tradition's memory is simpler and, in its own way, more striking: a devotee whose dancing was so complete an expression of love for Krishna that Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Himself, watching it, wished aloud that He had two wings like it instead of one.