Of all the words Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakura ever wrote, eight Sanskrit verses composed as a prayer to the spiritual master are the ones a devotee today is most likely to recite. This is true on any given morning, anywhere in the world.
Sri Gurvashtakam #
Sri Gurvashtakam, "Eight Prayers to the Spiritual Master," opens with the well-known line samsara-davanala-lidha-loka. This line compares the spiritual master to a life-giving cloud that puts out the blazing forest fire of material existence. Following the practice Srila Prabhupada established, devotees in ISKCON temples around the world sing Gurvashtakam each morning during mangala-arati, the first arati of the day, held before sunrise. Vishvanatha wrote this prayer several centuries ago. Because it is sung so often, it is now one of the most-recited pieces of Gaudiya Vaishnava literature. Today it perhaps reaches more people in a single week than his commentaries reached in his own lifetime.
Srila Prabhupada quoted individual verses of Gurvashtakam directly in his own teaching on more than one occasion. In a 1972 Bhagavad-gita lecture in Calcutta, he was discussing verse 2.41, on resolute intelligence. He cited the prayer's closing verse, yasya prasadad bhagavat-prasado, "by the mercy of the spiritual master one receives the mercy of Krishna," to show why a devotee's relationship with the guru cannot be separated from the relationship with Krishna Himself. In a letter to an Indian well-wisher, Dr. Channa Reddy, Prabhupada quoted a different verse of the same prayer. This verse describes how the spiritual master, along with his disciples, is always engaged in dressing and worshiping the Deity and maintaining the temple. Prabhupada used it to make a practical point about the standard of temple management ISKCON should keep.
Padavali Songs and Sanskrit Prayer Collections #
Besides Gurvashtakam, Vishvanatha wrote a large body of devotional poetry in Bengali under the pen name Harivallabha Dasa. These poems belong to the padavali tradition of short lyric songs to Radha and Krishna. This tradition had flourished in Bengal since the time of Chandidasa and Vidyapati, and Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Himself is recorded as having loved to hear such songs. Writing devotional poetry under a different name, not his own scholarly name, was itself a familiar Vaishnava custom. It let the same author write both technical Sanskrit commentary and intimate Bengali devotional song, while keeping each kind of writing under its own name.
He also compiled a collection of his own Sanskrit devotional prayers under the title Stavamrita-lahari ("a wave of the nectar of prayer"). Among other works, it includes the Sankalpa-kalpadruma. This work has 104 verses of prayer to Radharani, asking for specific services to Her during each of the eight periods of the day and night in Krishna's eternal Vraja. This structure follows the ashta-kaliya-lila, the "eightfold daily pastimes," which is a standard pattern in later Gaudiya Vaishnava meditation. It is used to picture Krishna's unending day in Goloka Vrindavana. The Stavamrita-lahari also preserves Vishvanatha's other Sanskrit compositions in praise of Radha and Krishna. His longer devotional poem (mahakavya), Sri Krishna-bhavanamrita, is a separate work. Sankalpa-kalpadruma is often republished today as a book of its own, separate from the larger collection that first contained it.
Among Vishvanatha's other works is the Mantrartha-dipika, his explanation of the kama-gayatri mantra. Tradition preserves the story of how it came to be written. Working from the standard scriptural sources, Vishvanatha had concluded that the mantra contained twenty-five full syllables. But when he read Krishnadasa Kaviraja Gosvami's Chaitanya-charitamrita, he found it stated there were only twenty-four and a half. Vishvanatha did not want to conclude that such a respected author had simply made a mistake. But he could find no other way to explain the contradiction. So he decided to fast until the matter was settled, even at the cost of his life. Srimati Radharani is said to have appeared to him in a dream before dawn. She told him that Krishnadasa Kaviraja's figure was correct, and that the syllable vi in the mantra counts as only a half. She also directed him to a text called Varnagama-bhasvat for the full explanation. Vishvanatha found the book, completed his study, and finished the Mantrartha-dipika on that basis.
A Note on Attribution #
Several well-known Gaudiya Vaishnava songs addressed to the spiritual master are sometimes loosely thought of as one group, but not all of them are Vishvanatha's. The Bengali song "Gurudeva! Krpa-bindu diya," widely sung in ISKCON kirtan today, was in fact composed some two centuries later by Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura, as part of his Saranagati collection. It was not written by Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakura. The works reliably credited to Vishvanatha are chiefly Sri Gurvashtakam, the Harivallabha Dasa padavali songs, and the Stavamrita-lahari prayer collection.
Why the Songs Endure #
Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakura gave raganuga-bhakti a clear system, as discussed on a separate page. It is fitting that today he is remembered chiefly through a short prayer, not through his technical treatises. Gurvashtakam is not a philosophical argument. It is eight verses addressed directly and personally to one's own spiritual master. The verses move from the guru's role in delivering the disciple from material suffering to the guru's engagement in Deity worship and scriptural instruction. They end with a closing prayer that whoever recites these verses with attention at the auspicious hour before dawn will attain direct service to Krishna at the time of death. In this sense Gurvashtakam is a short, practical companion to everything Vishvanatha wrote at greater length elsewhere. The same rasika taste that produced page after page of Sarartha-darsini commentary and the ordered stages of the Madhurya-kadambini also produced these eight verses. They are simple and direct enough to be sung, understood and felt by a new devotee on their very first morning in a temple.
