Caitanya Mahāprabhu

Caitanya Mahāprabhu (1486–1534), born Viśvambhara Miśra and called Gaurāṅga (“the golden-limbed”), was a Bengali saint and mystic who led an ecstatic devotional movement centred on the chanting and singing of the names of Kṛṣṇa. His followers regarded him as an incarnation of Kṛṣṇa himself — indeed, as Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā united in one body, Kṛṣṇa experiencing Rādhā’s love for him. His movement, Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, transformed the religious culture of Bengal and Odisha, and in the twentieth century spread worldwide as the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement. See The Bhakti Movement.

Life

Born in Navadvīpa, the great centre of Navya-Nyāya logic in Bengal, Viśvambhara was a brilliant young scholar and teacher of grammar and logic. In 1508, on a pilgrimage to Gayā to perform rites for his dead father, he met the ascetic Īśvara Purī and underwent a transformation: he returned to Navadvīpa overwhelmed by love of Kṛṣṇa, weeping, laughing, fainting in ecstasy at the mention of his name. He began leading saṅkīrtan — groups singing and dancing in the streets to drums and cymbals, chanting the names of Kṛṣṇa — open to people of every caste and even Muslims. When the Muslim magistrate of Navadvīpa banned the processions, Caitanya led a huge civil-disobedience procession to his house, and the ban was lifted.

At twenty-four he became a renunciant, took the name Kṛṣṇa Caitanya, and settled at Purī in Odisha, near the temple of Jagannātha, where he spent the rest of his life in ever more intense states of divine love (prema), especially the anguish of separation from Kṛṣṇa (viraha), modelled on Rādhā’s. He sent his disciples — the six Gosvāmīs, among them Rūpa and Sanātana — to Vṛndāvana, where they rediscovered the sites of Kṛṣṇa’s childhood and wrote the theology of the movement. He died at Purī in 1534, in circumstances unknown; legends say he merged into the image of Jagannātha or walked into the sea.

Teaching

Caitanya himself wrote only eight verses, the Śikṣāṣṭaka, which teach that chanting the name of Kṛṣṇa “cleanses the mirror of the heart”, and that the devotee should be “humbler than a blade of grass, more tolerant than a tree”. His followers systematised his theology:

• Kṛṣṇa is the supreme God, not an incarnation of Viṣṇu but the source of all incarnations.
• Acintya-bhedābheda, “inconceivable difference-in-identity”: souls and the world are both one with God and different from him, in a way the mind cannot grasp.
• Prema, ecstatic love of Kṛṣṇa, is the fifth and highest goal of life, above liberation itself.
• Bhakti-rasa: Rūpa Gosvāmī’s Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu adapted the theory of Rasa to devotion — the devotee’s love for Kṛṣṇa is the supreme aesthetic emotion, in five flavours: peace, servitude, friendship, parental love and erotic love (mādhurya), the highest.
• The mahāmantra: Hare Kṛṣṇa Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa Hare Hare / Hare Rāma Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma Hare Hare.

Legacy

Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism shaped Bengali literature, music (kīrtan), and the culture of Vṛndāvana. In 1965, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda sailed to New York and founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON, 1966), which spread Caitanya’s chanting worldwide.