Of everything Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakura wrote, the Sarartha-darsini has left the deepest mark on how the Srimad-Bhagavatam is read and taught in the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition today. Indirectly, it has also shaped how Srila Prabhupada explained the Bhagavatam to the modern world.
A Commentary Built Verse by Verse #
Tradition holds that Vishvanatha did not simply decide to write this commentary. He was told to write it. According to this tradition, Lord Krishna appeared to him in a dream and directly ordered him to write commentaries on the Gosvamis' books. After this, Vishvanatha began writing with unusual intensity. The same tradition tells of two signs that were taken to confirm this order. Clouds would shade him from the sun whenever he sat down to write. And once, while he was working on his Bhagavatam commentary, a heavy downpour flooded the area around him, but not a single drop touched Vishvanatha or his manuscript.
The Sarartha-darsini ("that which reveals the essential meaning") is Vishvanatha's commentary on the Srimad-Bhagavatam. It is especially celebrated for its explanation of the Tenth Canto, the canto about Krishna's birth and His pastimes in Vrindavana and Dvaraka. Going verse by verse, Vishvanatha explained not only the plain meaning of the Bhagavatam's Sanskrit but also the feelings and teachings that lie beneath it. He explained why a particular gopi might have spoken in a particular way. He explained what a specific word showed about a person's state of mind. He also showed how a detail that seems minor was connected to the deeper devotional mood (rasa) of the scene. He wrote a companion commentary, the Sararthavarsini, on the Bhagavad-gita. In a 1974 conversation in Paris with the French scholar of Indian thought Olivier Lacombe, Srila Prabhupada listed it among about ten major Sanskrit commentaries on the Gita.
A Constant Presence in Srila Prabhupada's Purports #
Anyone who reads Srila Prabhupada's Bhagavatam purports closely will meet Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakura again and again. He is usually introduced with some form of the phrase "Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakura comments." Sometimes the reference explains a single Sanskrit word. For instance, Prabhupada notes that Vishvanatha explained the word anvaha in Bhagavatam 8.1.8 to mean that Svayambhuva Manu murmured his austerities to himself instead of addressing anyone. At other times the reference explains a finer point about devotional feelings. Bhagavatam 10.22.12 describes the gopis bathing in the Yamuna. There Prabhupada draws on Vishvanatha's explanation of exactly why the modest, respectable gopis stayed in the water instead of at once facing Krishna about their stolen clothing. From Vishvanatha's brief note, Prabhupada builds up a whole imagined conversation between the gopis and the Lord.
This pattern repeats across every canto of the Bhagavatam that Prabhupada translated. In a 1970 conversation in Indore, Prabhupada relies on Vishvanatha's particular reading of the death of the sinful Ajamila. In Vishvanatha's reading, Ajamila, at the moment of death, truly remembered Lord Narayana. He did not merely say his son's name by chance. Prabhupada treats this difference as an important point of teaching, and he credits it directly to "the remark of Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakura." At Bhagavatam 6.13.2, in the story of Indra's return from killing Vritrasura, Prabhupada quotes Vishvanatha's own Sanskrit note word for word. It explains why Indra alone, among the returning demigods, did not go home immediately. This is a fine point in the story that the plain text of the verse does not itself spell out.
Vanipedia has collected Prabhupada's references to Vishvanatha. Its list gives dozens of further examples from across his purports and lectures. One is why the night of the rasa-lila dance felt endless to the gopis, even though it took up only a portion of Brahma's cosmic night. Others are the confidential reason why the Yadu dynasty was destroyed in the end, and the exact definition of a ghost and other technical Sanskrit terms. Another is the nature of offenses against Vaishnavas (vaishnava-aparadha), one of the two great obstacles to progress in devotional service.
An Incomplete Companion Commentary #
Vishvanatha also began a Sanskrit commentary on Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita itself, Krishnadasa Kaviraja Gosvami's biography of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, though, as later scholars note, he did not live to complete it. Even unfinished, it became one of the works later commentators and translators consulted directly.
Taken together, the Sarartha-darsini and its companion commentaries are Vishvanatha's most lasting service to the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. He did not bring a new philosophy. Instead, as a rasika, he listened closely to each line of the scriptures that earlier acharyas had established. In this way he brought out details of mood and meaning. Later readers would draw on these for the next three centuries, and Srila Prabhupada was very much one of them.
Still in Print #
The Sarartha-darsini has not remained a mere curiosity from history, kept only in old manuscripts. Complete English translations of the commentary on the later cantos of the Bhagavatam, including the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth, are still published and studied by Gaudiya Vaishnava scholars today, with the Sanskrit written in English letters. Translations of Vishvanatha's other tikas are published alongside them. These tikas are on the works of Rupa Gosvami, on the Gopala-tapani Upanishad, and, tradition adds, on works of Kavi Karnapura and Narottama Dasa Thakura as well. A whole tradition of commentary has grown up around one seventeenth-century Bengali Brahmana's line-by-line notes on scripture. Three hundred years later, it is still being actively translated and printed. This itself shows how central his particular way of reading the Bhagavatam has become to the wider Gaudiya Vaishnava world.
