Srila Vamsivadana Thakura

Introduction

Srila Vamsivadana Thakura is remembered in Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition less for any single dramatic episode than for a lifetime of quiet, constant service. He was born in Kuliya-grama, on the edge of what is today Navadwip. Gaudiya tradition names him as Krishna's own flute in human form. The source for this is the Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika, the work that records the earlier spiritual identities of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's associates. After Mahaprabhu accepted sannyasa, Vamsivadana Thakura and Ishana Thakura stayed on in Navadwip to look after Sachi Devi and Vishnupriya Devi, the mother and the wife He left behind. By the tradition's own account, this service lasted the rest of both women's very long lives.

Chapter 1

Born as the Lord's Own Flute

A birth Mahaprabhu Himself is said to have witnessed, a house at Kuliya remembered as the place where offenses are forgiven, and tears shed over a boy who would become a great acharya.

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Vamsivadana Thakura's father was Madhava Dasa, also recorded in some sources as Chakadi Chattopadhyaya. He was a brahmana householder of Kuliya-grama, a village that has since become part of the town of Navadwip. He was also a devoted follower of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in His own lifetime. Gaudiya tradition holds that Madhava Dasa's devotion was fully returned. On the full moon day of the month of Chaitra, when his son was born, Mahaprabhu Himself was present in the house, together with Advaita Acharya. The boy was named Vamsivadana. The same tradition that records this birth also gives it a deeper meaning. The Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika is the Gaudiya work that identifies the earlier spiritual identities of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's associates. It names this child as Krishna's own flute, the vamshi of Vraja, in human form.

A House Called the Place Where Offenses Are Forgiven #

By the time Vamsivadana Thakura grew up in Kuliya, the village already had a second, older name. Both Chaitanya-charitamrita and Chaitanya-Bhagavata record how it earned it. Devananda Pandit, a Bhagavatam lecturer in the village, explained the scripture with great learning but without real devotion. Once Srivasa Thakura came to hear him and was moved to tears partway through the lecture. Devananda Pandit's own students could not recognize what they were seeing. They seized Srivasa Thakura and dragged him out of the assembly for disturbing it. Later, when Mahaprabhu visited Navadwip to see His mother, He met Devananda Pandit and did not let the offense pass. Devananda Pandit was freed of it only after he sought forgiveness with the help of Vakresvara Pandit.

After this, Kuliya became known as aparadha-bhanjanera pata, "the place where offenses are forgiven". Gaudiya pilgrimage tradition says that Mahaprabhu stayed at Madhava Dasa's own house during this episode. It was the same household where Vamsivadana Thakura had been born and would live his whole life. No source can say for certain whether this detail comes from the earliest written record or from later local memory. But it is certain that the name has stayed with Kuliya, and with Vamsivadana Thakura's own family home there, ever since. Devotional tradition adds that Devananda Pandit's own teaching changed after this. He gave up the impersonalist explanation of Srimad-Bhagavatam he had been giving, and began instead to explain it in terms of bhakti. This was a second mercy added to the first.

Tears Over a Young Pilgrim #

Gaudiya devotional memory keeps one more episode from these early years. It has fewer details than the others, but it is specific enough to record. A boy on pilgrimage to Mayapura is remembered to have met Vamsivadana Thakura there. The boy was visiting the site of Mahaprabhu's own birth as part of a tour of Navadwip. Vamsivadana Thakura took the boy onto his own lap and wept over him. His tears fell on the child's head, in what tradition describes as ecstatic love of Godhead. That boy grew up to become Shrinivasa Acharya, one of the most important teachers of the generation after the Six Goswamis of Vrindavana. No source gives an exact date for the meeting, or says what, if anything, either man later said about it. It survives as a single remembered moment, not a full story, so it is told here simply, without adding what is not there.

Taken together, these three accounts are most of what Gaudiya tradition preserves about Vamsivadana Thakura's early life. There is a birth that Mahaprabhu Himself is said to have witnessed. There is a household linked with one of Navadwip's own place-names. And there is a single act of blessing toward a boy who would go on to shape the tradition. The story of what came after is told in The Vow at Vishnupriya's Side. It covers the decades Vamsivadana Thakura spent caring for Sachi Devi and Vishnupriya Devi after Mahaprabhu had left Navadwip for good.

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Chapter 2

The Vow at Vishnupriya's Side

A decision to stop eating and drinking in the pain of separation, Mahaprabhu's own appearance to prevent it, and a name carved forever into a Deity's base.

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When Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu accepted the sannyasa order and left Navadwip, He left behind two women who had built their lives around Him: Sachi Devi, His mother, and Vishnupriya Devi, His young wife. Vamsivadana Thakura, together with a devotee named Ishana Thakura, stayed close to both of them for the rest of their lives. This is one of the clearer facts in a historical record that is otherwise thin. Whatever else is uncertain about Vamsivadana Thakura, his decades of quiet service to Mahaprabhu's mother and wife are described in the same way in all the devotional literature that remembers him at all.

A Vow Neither Woman Could Be Talked Out Of #

All accounts agree that separation from Mahaprabhu was not a grief Vishnupriya Devi could manage. It shaped the whole of the rest of her life. Tradition preserves one specific moment from that grief when Vamsivadana Thakura appears directly at her side. At that time Vishnupriya Devi and Vamsivadana Thakura together decided to stop taking food and water altogether. Separation from Mahaprabhu had already taken away all purpose from their bodies, and they saw no reason to go on keeping them alive. Mahaprabhu Himself, tradition says, would not allow it. He is remembered as appearing before them, asking them not to act so rashly, and telling them to worship a Deity of Himself instead. In this way they could hold on to His presence without giving up their own lives to do it.

According to tradition, that instruction is the origin of a Deity still worshiped today. This Deity is a neem-wood image of Gauranga, carved on Vishnupriya Devi's own instruction after a dream, and now known as Sri Dhameshvara Mahaprabhu. The fuller story of how that Deity came to be carved, and of the pair of Mahaprabhu's own paduka kept and worshiped alongside it, is told on Vishnupriya Devi's own page, in Worship and Legacy. It is not repeated here. This page tells only the part where Vamsivadana Thakura's own life touches it directly.

A Name Carved Into the Deity's Base #

Vishnupriya Devi kept that Deity and those paduka in her own household worship for as long as she lived. By temple tradition, this was roughly eighty years, until her disappearance at about the age of ninety-six. Care of the Deity then passed to a cousin, who kept it at his home on the eastern bank of the Ganges. In time the river wore away the bank and that home was lost. This was a common fate for settlements on that stretch of the Ganges in this period. The family then moved across the river to Kuliya-grama, Vamsivadana Thakura's own village, which by then was known simply as part of Navadwip. According to some accounts, it was here that Vamsivadana Thakura formally established the Deity's worship, at what became its lasting home. One detail from the temple's own tradition has lasted better than almost anything else recorded about him. The name Vamsivadana is carved into the underside of the Deity's base, where ordinary worshipers cannot see it. If the tradition is accurate, it is a signature left by the man who gave the image a permanent place to be served.

Sons, a Grandson, and a Line to Jahnava Mata #

Vamsivadana Thakura lived as a householder, not as a sannyasi. He had two sons, Chaitanya Dasa and Nityananda Dasa. Besides caring for the Dhameshvara Deity, he also installed a Deity of Krishna named Pranavallabha. He also maintained an older, ancestral Deity of Gopinatha in the same household. His grandson, named Ramachandra and known to tradition as Ramai Thakura, was taken in as a disciple by Jahnava Mata, the wife of Nityananda Prabhu. Ramai Thakura went on to discover Deities of Krishna and Balarama as Kanai-Balai, and to establish Their worship at Baghnapara. Vamsivadana Thakura is also remembered as a poet. His songs expressed the grief of Sachi Devi and Vishnupriya Devi on the night Mahaprabhu left for sannyasa. Gaudiya tradition notes that this was fitting work for a devotee identified as Krishna's own flute, the instrument whose every note in Vraja was already a cry of separation. No source preserves enough of any specific song to quote its actual words here.

Vamsivadana Thakura's own descendants still maintain the Dhameshvara Mahaprabhu temple at Navadwip today. By the tradition's own count, this service has now been kept in one family for five centuries. No source records when or how Vamsivadana Thakura's own life ended. Just as his birth year is remembered only approximately, his disappearance goes unrecorded. What survives instead is the service itself. According to every account that names him at all, Vamsivadana Thakura, remembered as Krishna's own flute, did not spend his life performing austerities of his own. He simply stayed close to a grieving mother and a grieving wife, and made sure that what they had left of their Lord had somewhere to be kept.

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Closing

Krishna's Own Flute, Not One of the Twelve Gopalas #

Kavi Karnapura's Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika is also the source for the well-known list of Nityananda Prabhu's twelve gopalas. These are devotees such as Uddharana Datta Thakura and Abhirama Gopala Thakura, each identified with one of Krishna's own cowherd companions in Vraja. Vamsivadana Thakura's name does not appear on that list. Instead, the same text gives him a special identity of his own. He is not a cowherd boy but Krishna's flute itself, the vamshi that never left Krishna's hands in Vraja, now walking the earth as a devotee. Gaudiya tradition sees this as a fitting reason for the mood of longing and separation in the songs he is remembered for composing. It also fits a life spent almost entirely in the company of two women mourning an absent Lord.

The verse is short, and it calls him by another of his names, Vamsidasa Thakura:

vaṁśī kṛṣṇa-priyā yāsīt sā vaṁśīdāsa-ṭhakkuraḥ

"Lord Krsna's favorite flute appeared as Vamsidasa Thakura." (Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika 179)

Scripture calls Krishna's flute so fortunate that even the gopis envy it. In the Venu-gita of Srimad-Bhagavatam, the gopis say, "My dear gopis, what auspicious activities must the flute have performed to enjoy the nectar of Krishna's lips independently and leave only a taste for us gopis, for whom that nectar is actually meant! The forefathers of the flute, the bamboo trees, shed tears of pleasure. His mother, the river on whose bank the bamboo was born, feels jubilation, and therefore her blooming lotus flowers are standing like hair on her body" (Srimad-Bhagavatam 10.21.9; the same translation is quoted in Srila Prabhupada's Chaitanya-charitamrita, Antya-lila 16.140). Vamsivadana Thakura is identified as this same flute in human form, so close to Krishna and so dear to Him.

A Birth Mahaprabhu Himself Witnessed #

Vamsivadana Thakura's father, Madhava Dasa (also recorded as Chakadi Chattopadhyaya), was a devoted follower of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in Kuliya. Tradition holds that Mahaprabhu and Advaita Acharya were both present in Madhava Dasa's house on the day his son was born, on the full moon of the month of Chaitra. Kuliya itself had a special name in Chaitanya-charitamrita and Chaitanya-Bhagavata, long before Vamsivadana Thakura became known. It was called aparadha-bhanjanera pata, "the place where offenses are forgiven," because of Mahaprabhu's own mercy toward Devananda Pandit there. Devananda Pandit was a Bhagavatam lecturer whose students had once dragged Srivasa Thakura out of an assembly. He was freed of that offense only after Mahaprabhu told him to seek forgiveness through Vakresvara Pandit. Local Gaudiya tradition says that Mahaprabhu stayed at Madhava Dasa's own house during that reconciliation. It was the same household where his son was born and would spend his life. Years later, tradition also remembers Vamsivadana Thakura receiving a much younger pilgrim on his own lap: the boy who would grow up to become Shrinivasa Acharya. During the boy's visit to Mahaprabhu's birthplace, Vamsivadana Thakura wet his head with tears of ecstatic devotion.

Sons, a Grandson, and a Song of Separation #

Vamsivadana Thakura lived as a householder, not a sannyasi, and had two sons, Chaitanya Dasa and Nityananda Dasa. His grandson, named Ramachandra and known to tradition as Ramai Thakura, was adopted as a disciple by Jahnava Mata, the wife of Nityananda Prabhu. Ramai Thakura went on to establish Deity worship of his own at Baghnapara. In this way the family line carried Vamsivadana Thakura's devotion forward by another generation. Vamsivadana Thakura is also remembered as a poet. He composed songs on the grief of Sachi Devi and Vishnupriya Devi at Mahaprabhu's sannyasa. But no source preserves the actual words of any particular song well enough to quote it here.

What the Record Leaves Unanswered #

It is best to say plainly what is known and what is not known. Vamsivadana Thakura is not named in Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami's Chaitanya-charitamrita, in Vrindavana Dasa Thakura's Chaitanya-Bhagavata, or in Murari Gupta's early biographical karcha. These are the accounts closest to Mahaprabhu's own lifetime. What is known comes instead from later sources. The main ones are the Vamsi-shiksha, a devotional work (compiled in 1716, two centuries after his life), and the continuing oral and temple tradition centered on the Dhameshvara Mahaprabhu temple at Kuliya. His own descendants still maintain that temple today. Sources also differ on his birth year by roughly a decade, and no source records a disappearance date, place, or age at all.

One more point should be made clear. Some accounts of Gaudiya Vaishnava history pair various associates of Mahaprabhu with Ramachandra Puri, the godbrother of Ishvara Puri. Ramachandra Puri is remembered in the Antya-lila of Chaitanya-charitamrita for his fault-finding. But no episode connecting Ramachandra Puri to Vamsivadana Thakura appears in Chaitanya-charitamrita itself, or in any of the devotional biographies of Vamsivadana Thakura, even though a search was made specifically for that connection. The one real test of his life that Gaudiya tradition does preserve is quite different. It was not a critic's harsh words. It was the vow that he and Vishnupriya Devi made to stop living rather than go on without Mahaprabhu, and the Lord's own appearance to turn that grief toward worship instead.