When Rāhu Devours the Moon: The Myth of the Birth of Krsna Caitanya¹
Author(s): Tony K. Stewart
Source: International Journal of Hindu Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Aug., 1997), pp. 221-264
Published by: Springer

Much has been written over the last five centuries about the adult experiences of the Bengali religious figure Kṛṣṇa Caitanya (1486-1533 CE), sufficient at least to determine in some detail what the community accepts as his most probable basic biography. The source material for this biographical reconstruction is almost exclusively hagiography, a form of religiously motivated narrative that depends on a twin allegiance to history (in the life events of the subject) and myth (the commitment to promoting a religious ideal created or exemplified by the subject).² Even though this material is heavily theologically conditioned, careful comparison of the recorded details of Caitanya's life reveals intensely human moments, which strongly suggest their basis in a historical life. Often these assurances of factuality occur when even the most pious biographer fails to reconcile inconsistencies in his subject's actions or finds that he cannot override the widely accepted historicity of an event that simply fails to match the reli gious ideal. In short, while few facts prove invulnerable to basic epistemological doubt, a reasonable verification of the outlines of Caitanya's life are within reach. While the facts are not always readily accessible, the struggles of the biographers and their supporting communities often are. These struggles become apparent in the way they construct the biographical images and the way they circulate the texts. Personal and communal concerns surface readily in the way each biographer articulates the nature of Caitanya's divinity and the prominence he gives to various individuals surrounding him. Consequently, two kinds of histories emerge from these hagiographical documents: one of a distantly retrievable subject, Caitanya; the other of a more immediate writer and his community. The latter often emerges most subtly in the descriptions of events for which there exists little historical knowledge and which conform largely to standard mythic constructs.

While all of the biographers seem to agree to the broad outlines of Caitanya's life, there is a noticeable, even considerable, divergence of opinion about that life's significance. In these details can be found evidence of serious communal diversity. Different authors adhere to different theological systems with varying degrees of sophistication and success; and it is precisely in their deviation from the broader acceptable mythologies surrounding Caitanya that historical differences can be identified. That the authors choose to interpret the details of Caitanya's life differently - often diverging in apparently innocuous and seemingly unimportant narratives - suggests that the authors did work under a de facto standard sufficient to make any deviation difficult. This standard would appear to be what defined the community that designated itself Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava. Yet, it is precisely the persistence of their departures from this broad standard that proves the various members of the community did not simply and naively accept what a small group of elite theologians dictated. These diver gences document that the authors (and the spiritual lineages they represented) did give voice to their independent interpretations of Caitanya's life. And those interpretations in turn reveal significant events that might otherwise disappear under the strong impulse to standardize. To illustrate this observation we shall examine Caitanya's birth narratives, which have probably been subjected to more mythic standardizing than any other episode in the hagiographical tradition and for which there is little historically verifiable information. Their detailed analysis will make clear that it is precisely in narratives that invite the least examination - because of the mimesis of the controlling mythic structure - that evidence of independent thought and even communal disharmony can be documented, which reveals more about the vicissitudes of the community than about Caitanya. Real battles can be detected under the smooth surface of simple narratives, belying the image of communal harmony so frequently depicted in contemporary popular histories and hagiographies.


1. A number of people have contributed to parts or all of the argument contained in this article. First is the late A. K. Ramanujan, who read one of the earliest drafts and made numerous helpful suggestions. The comments of Edward C. Dimock, Jr., Charles Orzech, James Sanford, James van der Kam, Katherine P. Ewing, Gordon D. Newby, and Robin C. Rinehart have been partially or completely, but always gratefully incorporated.
2. Generally I follow the distinction made by Frank Reynolds and Walter Capps (1976: Introduction) between hagiography and sacred biography. Hagiography is the life of a 'saint,' that is, an individual who exemplifies or otherwise embodies a preexisting religious ideal, while sacred biography refers to compositions that document the life of a founder or a god, that is, the creator and/or original articulator of a religious ideal. Technically, the compositions devoted to Caitanya are 'sacred biographies,' but for purposes of this essay, the two terms will be used interchangeably, because the tradition itself is not perfectly at ease with the distinction. The concept of the 'biographical image' as the combination of the life (bios) with the myth (ideal) is likewise suggested by the Reynolds and Capps volume.

Keep it coming. This could be interesting.

The Biographies and the Mythic Pattern of Birth

Everyone - scholar and devotee - is in nearly total accord on the paucity of even hearsay, much less more documentably reliable information regarding the early life of Caitanya, his life prior to his momentous experience in the pilgrimage center of Gayā at age twenty-two (Dimock 1989a: 30-32; Majumdāra 1959). This pivotal event is formulated in classical mythic terms of rebirth - entering the cave dwelling of the pious Vaiṣṇava adept, Īśvara Purī, only to emerge a religiously intoxicated devotee of Kṛṣṇa, a prelude and entrée to the religious ecstasy of his well-documented later life. It is generally from the point of this rebirth that the details of Caitanya's experience begin to multiply, that is, when the 'real' biographies begin. Can we, then, ascertain anything of historical import from the sketchy anecdotes of Caitanya's childhood?

There is general consensus among the many biographies to emerge in the century following Caitanya's death (regardless of Bengali or Sanskrit composition) that what is significant in Caitanya's life occurred after that experience in Gayā - when his actions become religiously meaningful and therefore worthy of record. During his life - and this is reflected in every biography - the community concluded that Caitanya was really Kṛṣṇa himself (Majumdāra 1959; Stewart 1985). The nature of and justification for this theological position varied from writer to writer (and, therefore, among the guru-lineages and larger communities they represented): this divinity ranged from generalized Purānic conceptions of Caitanya as a portion (aṃśa) of the sovereign lord Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa or as one of his incarnations or descents (avatāra), more commonly the avatāra of the Kali Age (yuga), to the ingenious dual-incarnation, the androgynous entity of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa combined into a single form (Stewart n.d.). Because of the proliferation of biographies and the increasing complexity of biographical images, we can conclude that not only did each biographer find himself in a position of writing the life story of God-on-earth for a public hungry to relive that great event, but that there was a need for each guru-lineage to articulate its version of Caitanya's life to ensure the 'correct' theological perspective. Even though that final androgynous image came to dominate the rest, all of the biographers apparently felt an obligation to portray Caitanya's childhood; that childhood is present in virtually every work, albeit with considerably different emphases.³ Different emphases suggest different evaluations of significance. Unlike certain other Bengali forms of divinity (for example, Kālī), Caitanya did not appear on earth fully developed in his adult form. Like Kṛṣṇa before him, he took birth within the community he eventually came to lead, and there were many individuals still alive who had shared at least some of that childhood, which is to say that memory of his presence was sufficiently strong that no amount of mythologizing could eliminate the memory of his human experience. Since the community only came to recognize his divinity after he reached adulthood, it is understandable that his youth had not been recorded with the kind of loving observation that characterized his life after his transformative rebirth.⁴

The inescapable fact of Caitanya's childhood - his mother and several other childhood companions were still alive at the writing of the earliest biographies - compelled the biographers to fill that biographical lacuna. In religiously significant tems, however, they had but few anecdotes, so the authors had little choice but to construct an appropriate childhood for their subject. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the biographers 'invented' that early childhood, for that perspective automatically tends to discount its value. It would be closer to the mark to imagine this process as one of establishing within the bounds of devotional reason 'what must have been.' And because Caitanya's life was understood to be for the express purpose of revealing and demonstrating certain theological and devotional verities, his childhood could only have been enacted within certain fairly tightly circumscribed parameters. The sources for this early life are primarily two: the Bhāgavata Purāna and the Sanskrit biography Kṛṣṇa-caitanyacaritāmṛtam [KCC] of Murāri Gupta (459 GA).

Murāri was the only biographer to have known Caitanya as a child and was not only his senior but also his classmate in the Sanskrit school (ṭola) of Gaṅgādāsa Paṇḍita in Navadvīpa. He wrote his book in the form of a story being told to one of his fellow devotees who serves as interlocutor, and includes many reports from those present or at least as he had heard them or witnessed himself. Because of Murāri's seniority, his widely acclaimed status as 'eyewitness' to the early life of Caitanya, and his priority as first biographer (he completed his work in 1533 CE, the year of Caitanya's passing), all subsequent biographers followed his narrative line for Caitanya's life. As the earliest biographer, Murāri held a place equivalent to that of guru to the other biographers, a fact that is acknowledged by a number of the authors (although he is never referred to explicitly by that title), but especially by the last major biographer of the generation, Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja in his monumental Caitanya Caritāmṛta [1369 BS; CC].⁵ In a manner consistent with the traditional methods of transmitting knowledge within a guru-lineage, Murāri's Kṛṣṇacaitanyacaritāmṛtam stood as the Ur-text for the biographical tradition.⁶ It was written in Sanskrit and therefore was not as accessible to the public as the Bengali biographies would prove to be (although most Bengali speakers would have little difficulty following the gist of the narrative, which is in a rather straightforward, unadorned, and lexically and syntactically predictable form of Sanskrit), but it provided the foundation, especially the sequencing of events that lent a structural outline to Caitanya's life. It would seem that, even had he desired to do so, no biographer could subvert Murāri's basic narrative order, for Murāri reports and the tradition accepts that he had written the text with the express permission of Caitanya (KCC 2.4.24-26), and that permission carried an implicit sanction. All of the events described by Murāri were routinely included in the other biographies (one can easily imagine that they had to be in order for a biography to be considered valid); and while those later compositions embellished and added much to the basic narrative in a manner consistent with hagiographies worldwide, from it they did not (or, we might reasonably argue, could not) significantly diverge.⁷

The Kṛṣṇacaitanyacaritāmṛtam was terse and anecdotal. Murāri frequently provided only passing references to events or sketched only the most general outline of an episode, suitable to a sūtra style that could be extrapolated orally. The events he chose to highlight, however, were often filtered through or cast in the direct light of the Bhāgavata Purāna. Because Caitanya was Kṛṣṇa, his actions on earth would, in some fundamental way, mimic those of Kṛṣṇa in the prior age, and when Murāri needed to fill in missing episodes, this is where he would turn. Having established this precedent, others quickly followed suit. Writing only a few years after Murāri, Vṛndāvana Dāsa followed his example very closely and composed Caitanya's early life in a way that drew even more explicit comparison to the stories of Krsna in the Bhāgavata Purāna. Vṛndāvana's biography was eventually given the name Caitanya Bhāgavata (1373 BS),⁸ with the author himself being awarded the title of the Vyāsa of the Caitanya-līlā (e.g., CC 1.8.29-45, 1.8.76-77, 1.11.52, 1.13.46, 2.1.3-9, 3.20. 63-80; and in other biographies), fixing clearly for the auditor of his text a strategy for interpretation by forging this isomorphic relationship to the Bhāgavata Purāna. Following the Kṛṣṇacaitanyacaritāmṛtam, the Caitanya Bhāgavata shaped an elaborate early childhood for Caitanya following the biographical model of the Bhāgavata Purāna and, in so doing, established such a strong connection between Caitanya and Kṛṣṇa that later biographers often simply referred back to that text rather than elaborate. The rest of the tradition appears to be derivative of these two earliest sources, with Murāri providing the foundation.

Clearly history in these texts is understood very differently from contemporary linear conceptions of the unrepeatability of temporal acts, for every significant act could only be a replication of a prior paradigm; but the nature of a paradigm is that it is not limited by historical contingency, and so there can be nothing truly unique about each manifestation of it.⁹ Kṛṣṇa's acts (līlā) are timeless in that all possible activities are taking place simultaneously; for the ordinary human, however, only a small handful of these are observed, and those, by virtue of the limitations of the human condition, must be apprehended in some kind of temporal sequence, that is, be manifest in time. According to this theology, all possible acts are latent at all times, so when Kṛṣṇa appears on earth or to a devotee, he reveals a particular subset of those acts unfolded in a temporal dimension so that they have some bearing on the workings of the world. The extension of this logic is not far to see: when the hagiographer does not have access to the 'facts' of Caitanya's life, he need only supply them from the original paradigm, the life of Kṛṣṇa - for they are not different from each other - and he will be perfectly justified in doing so. But the justification is not just because of the identity of Caitanya with Kṛṣṇa, but because any manifestation of those primal acts automatically makes the subject into Kṛṣṇa.¹⁰ The result is twofold: first, it enables the hagiographer to offer the reader a complete 'life' of Caitanya as it should have been or as it actually was (which amounts to the same thing through these devotional eyes); second, it provides a viable, yet often unstated, strategy to interpret the 'facts' of Caitanya's life that the biographer does possess. The timeless paradigmatic pattern of Kṛṣṇa's acts lends meaning and intelligibility to the historically contingent acts of Caitanya. History repeats itself (a truism in traditional South Asia for events that are generally significant), and Caitanya's acts are Kṛṣṇa's. While this perspective tends to frustrate the contemporary scholar, who in spite of protestations still often labors under the shadow of positivist assumptions about history and subsequent evaluation of hagiographical texts, it is arguably the only meaningful possibility for the devotee.

Precisely because of this mimicry and reduplication of narrative, contemporary scholars have routinely paid scant attention to the episodes of Caitanya's childhood. It is true that for the Bengali devotee neither Caitanya's nor Kṛṣṇa's childhood is imbued with the theological significance of the later life. The images of divinity that are most popular within the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition emphasize either the sovereign Kṛṣṇa, whose job it is to rid the earth of threatening forces, or the much more popular image of Caitanya the androgyne, the adolescent Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, whose primary activity is amorous play. On the whole, the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas exhibit what almost amounts to a theological aversion to Kṛṣṇa's childhood, which is recognized as the reserve of other Vaiṣṇava communities. A more probable reason for this contemporary discounting, however, is scholarly frustration with the repetitiveness of the narratives under the assumption that this reduplication or mimicry of Kṛṣṇa's exploits makes the narrative historically meaningless, that is, they are fictions or fabrications and therefore to be discounted. Caitanya's reported acts are not viewed as unique and original and are, therefore, of dubious value in most scholastic schemes of evaluation. The obvious patterning of Caitanya's life on Kṛṣṇa's is dismissed, then, as a kind of devotional shortcoming, a necessary evil in dealing with (that is, reading through and dispensing with) 'mythic' materials which are not unique and therefore not historically conditioned. I will argue in the remainder of the essay that these assumptions are not only faulty, but also the dismissal of the material is premature even for the prospects of historical reconstruction. The issue, however, is just what kind of history one actually retrieves from an examination of these obviously mythically-conditioned narratives.


3. Among the extant sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century biographies accepted within the mainstream of the tradition, only the contested Kaḍacā or Karacā of Govindadāsa (1926) focuses on a limited portion of Caitanya's life, his pilgrimage south. For some of the controversy surrounding this questionable manuscript, see the appropriate sections in the standard Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava scholarly reference works and more specifically Anonymous (1332 BS), Janāradana Cakravarti (1390 BS), B. Dasgupta (n.d.), and Yogendramohana Ghoṣa (1332a BS, 1332b BS, 1334 BS).
4. The biographers cannot, obviously, refer to this as a 'conversion,' since he is already Kṛṣṇa, but a revealing or manifesting (prakāśa or, more often, prakaTa) of an identity or reality that was always present, simply latent (aprakaṭa).
5. This edition served as the basis for the translation and commentary by Edward Dimock (n.d). All translations of the Caitanya Caritāmṛta are from the Dimock edition with minor emendations. For an analysis of the relationship of the Kṛṣṇacaitanyacaritāmṛtam to the other biographies, see Stewart (1985: Chapters 5-6,1994).
6. Drawing the analogy with the 'Q' source of the Gospels is certainly appropriate, although Mark may be a better comparison, since the 'Q' source is hypothetical.
7. It would seem to be axiomatic in hagiographical composition that the further removed from the historical life the author is, the more likely he is to add significant details to the narrative, so that the tradition grows dramatically with the passing of time. This growth, however, often follows predictable lines, as we shall see.
8. The story of the renaming of this text can be found in the Prema Vilāsa of Nityānanda Dāsa (1298 BS: 321). The reference is in relation to the Caitanya Maṅgala of Locana Dāsa (Bandyopādhyāya 1373-90 BS, 2: 345-46).
9. I am very much in the debt of Edward Dimock, who first pointed out this tendency, and with whom I have had many long discussions that have shaped my thinking on these and other related issues in the biographies specifically, and the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition more generally.
10. It is noteworthy in this context that the titles of several key biographies are the 'immortal nectar of the acts' (caritāmṛta) rather than the 'acts' (carita or caritra) (Dimock 1976, 1989b).

Myth and History in Religious Biography

It is perhaps fitting that the point of departure for the historically significant (that is, unique) section of the biographies of Caitanya is an event that hinges on a stock mythic image, the emergence from the cave, replete with all the normal associations of symbolic womb and rebirth. That image, which is so com mon to the symbolism of dreams and to mythology more generally, suggests that the interpreter of Caitanya's biographies - and I would argue any religious biography - should be prepared to deal with the presence of preexisting tropes and standardized patterns of events that are themselves independent of the facts of the subject's life; or put another way, stock symbols and mythic paradigms supply a kind of biographical currency that is freely employed by these hagiographers. In short, the narrative assumes a structure at key moments, if not more generally overall, that reflects commonly accepted patterns on which the biographer hangs the extant information about the individual. As noted above, the biographical image is always a mixture of these elements, history, and myth; sometimes the myth is easily identified as just that, and at other times it appears as some version of the religious ideal that is applied to, and thereby stylizes, the life of the subject. Caitanya's early life would, of course, be especially susceptible to this kind of stylization precisely because the 'facts' are so few. Its overt patterning is on that of the childhood of Kṛṣṇa, as already noted. But Kṛṣṇa's life, too, possesses a number of features that are common to mythic heroes in general. The 'hero' myth and its variant 'quest' mythology can be relatively easily applied to the most popular religious figures of virtually any culture. It is just this ubiquity that has caused scholars to turn away, for as soon as they discover a new pattern within a biographical narrative, or more likely glean one that embodies or embellishes a preestablished pan-mythological model such as the hero/quest myth, the inquiry stops, and that project is construed as an end, however dubious, in itself. Many readers will have undoubtedly experi enced or observed the excitement of 'discovering' these patterns for the first time (often as a student), only to have that euphoria quickly fade into frustration over what one can do with this observation. That frustration often gives voice to a resounding 'so what!' of dismissal. The incredible uniformity of this response itself invites analysis.¹¹

One of the great powers of the pattern of myth, especially when it finds its way into ostensibly historical narrative such as biography, is its ability to provide a general structure that identifies 'common' experiences among the protagonists. This commonalty is made into 'universality' by reducing the narrative to its common structure, effectively eliminating all else as secondary, treating these divergences as accidental variables that provide the appearance of difference. The resulting essentialized narrative structure is variously interpreted as a manifestation of collective consciousness, a projection of the psyche, the result of human neurochemistry and biological programing, the embodiment of dramatic or literary form, and so forth. Any of these interpretive strategies tends to reduce the act of narration - in this case, biographical or hagiographical - to processes that are ultimately out of the control of the author, thereby making the production anything but creative. This in turn tends to 'universalize' the individual experience, subjugating the historical moment to larger, uncontrollable human or cultural impulses, which are understood as timeless or at least once removed from a particular historical context, so that the narrative becomes then little more than an assembly of motifs, with predetermined structures that will prevail no matter how hard an author or community tries to diverge from them. Historical facts are reduced to so many variations of some underlying essence; historical narratives assume an ahistorical etiology. Importantly, once a preconceived pattern is identified or even suspected within a narrative, the contemporary academic auditor is very likely to hear only the points of similarity. The structure becomes a datum, a given, and is not construed as the result of a dynamic process or historical contingency. In this search for the datum of commonalty, the differences among myths have been largely ignored. But even these structures of mythology can be shown to have histories; and it is precisely in the comparison of the divergences from their common structures that difference can be registered. This is especially notable in the narratives of Caitanya's early life, which clearly conform to preconceived patterns, yet do so differently in each case.

In the mythology of preliterate societies, where transmission is oral and the context nearly always irretrievable, myths are assumed to have multiple variants, whether they are recorded or not. These variants compose the closest thing to a 'history' of the group, precisely because its members share this form of 'narrative truth' (=myth). But when these fundamental structures of myth are transmitted in other contexts that have demonstrable histories, the variants take on additional significance, for they become a record of the history of the myth itself and by extension provide insight into the groups that promote them. What is common to any shared myth provides continuity and the opportunity for corporate inclusion; but what is different can often be shown to highlight changing historical circumstance. When biographies tell the life history of an important religious figure such as Caitanya the histories are mythically patterned (making the subject anything but unique); yet when a commonly accepted pattern can be shown to vary from one narrative to another, the interpreter has the opportunity to establish difference (possibly historicizing the subject). The differences (which constitute the history of the myth) more readily mark authorial concern than factual information regarding the subject, which is to say that the comparison of the presentations of the data imbedded in fixed structures potentially tells us more about the concerns of the author than about the ostensible subject of the biography and, in our example with Caitanya, more about the community that each author represents. Because of the unifying power of the mythic patterns, these differences often escape unnoticed.

While the structure of what is important in this narrative truth is predictable if not fixed, the differences within that structure or the way it is applied to the life of the subject must bear the burden of individualizing the narrative. Caitanya's early life is structured by the early life of Kṛṣṇa by virtue of their shared identity, and each biographer was constrained to construct that early life according to Murārī' s model in the Kṛṣṇacaitanyacaritāmṛtam. Yet Murārī is relatively unsophisticated in his theology and actually poses an explanation for Caitanya that is later deemed to be insufficient and so is subsequently relegated to a secondary status. How, then, can a biographer adhere to the conventions and expec tations of his reader and acknowledge the narrative of Murārī while portraying the theological preference of his guru and lineage? Perhaps more directly, how can a writer offer an alternate interpretation of Caitanya's life while reproducing the same narrative as the other biographers? I will demonstrate in the following passages that, rather than break with the tradition in open theological conflict, contested issues can be played out in the treatment of stock narrative episodes that retain the structures of their mythic paradigms. What differs is the relationship of the historical act to its mythic pattern, thereby allowing for disagreement without breaking from the community. To illustrate this proposition, I would like to look at the comfortable way in which Caitanya's early life can be interpreted and shown to fit happily into the hero's pattern as variously articulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Georg Von Hahn (1876), Otto Rank (1952a), and Lord Raglan (1934); yet it is precisely in the disagreement over the application of this model that we can confirm significant historical disagreement within the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava community of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is with the birth itself, the special interest of Rank, that I would like to focus.


11. It is interesting to observe how many students are attracted to the mythology of the hero/quest, as evidenced by the popularity of Joseph Campbell's works, especially Hero with a thousand faces (1968). What seems to attract them - the articulation of primary meaning - is precisely what repulses so many academic mythographers, that is, Campbell and others like him do not employ a rigorous methodological analysis (even though it should be noted in Campbell's defense that his comparative method, for all its flaws, ultimately rests on a set of assumptions not too different from Mircea Eliade's morphological approach and Claude Lévi-Strauss' structuralism). A good example of this castigation of Campbell can be found in Robert Segal (1984). Unfortunately, for all of Segal's flamboyant rhetoric, he seems to have missed the point that Campbell is writing more as theologian than folklorist, anthropologist, or historian of religions.

The Pattern of the Hero's Birth

The general hero pattern was established through the early efforts of such schol ars as Von Hahn (1876), Raglan (1934, 1975), Joseph Campbell (1968), Alan Dundes (1980), among others. Transformations of this pattern are usually reconcilable as variants; and subpatterns within the larger structure are likewise observed (Binder 1964; Borman 1962; Brunner-Traut 1960; Cosquin 1908; Holley 1949; Kennedy 1917; Krappe 1933; Levi 1910; Levin 1957; Redford 1967; Thompson 1955-58). The point can be illustrated by looking at the significance of one episode that is common to all of the patterns: the birth narrative.

Perhaps the most creative analysis of the birth narrative has been offered by psychoanalyst Rank in his short monograph titled The myth of the birth of the hero (1952a, see also 1952b; Segal 1990). According to Rank's analysis, the figure himself is not always so important as his parents and other supporting players. The birth often becomes the occasion for presaging or predicting the hero's as-of-yet unrealized greatness. The birth allows the author to situate the hero in a cultural context that lends significance to that life, establishes the requisite situation that demands intervention, and fixes the old order of things in preparation for the new. The birth stories of Caitanya prove to be no exception to this general trend. Comparing Rank with Von Hahn and Raglan, Dundes (1980; see also Segal 1980) summarizes the basic morphological units in the construction of the 'myth of the birth of the hero,' which will guide our examination (Table 1).

If the biographies of Caitanya are taken collectively and read synchronically as if they constituted a single text, it is possible to locate nearly all of the hero pattern (placing Caitanya's narratives very high on Rank's grading scale of pattern conformity). To demonstrate Caitanya's compliance with the structure of Rank's birth narrative, which focuses on the first eight stages of the larger pattern, I have chosen four different versions of Caitanya's birth that stretch across the biographical tradition, including the first, the Sanskrit Kṛṣṇacaitanyacaritāmṛtam of Murāri Gupta, which will be given in toto, with summaries and excerpts from the popular Bengali Caitanya Maṅgala [JCAf] of Jayānanda Miśra (1971), and the last major biography, the Bengali and Sanskrit Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja. To conclude, we will examine in some detail an alternate narrative depicted in the Bengali biography of Caitanya's orthopraxic companion, Advaitācārya, the Advaita Prakāśa [AP] of Īśāna Nāgara (1339 BS). As we examine these first three narratives in the order of their composition, the reader will note that the more distantly the author is temporally removed from the historical life of Caitanya, the more faithfully the narrative replicates the mythic pattern. But it is the differences among them that will prove their historical relation, especially to the last text.

The Birth of Caitanya According To The First Biographer

Murāri Gupta begins his narrative of Caitanya's birth in the Kṛṣṇacaitanyacaritāmṛtam after the formulaic praise of his master and various lords and only after establishing the requisite conditions for the descent (avatāra) of Viṣṇu-Narāyāna. The narrative is framed by direct address to Murāri's interlocutor. In a statement that is repeated in all the biographies, Murāri reports that Caitanya's birth occurred at an especially auspicious moment: a full lunar eclipse (KCC 1.5.16 17). This moment signifies a special birth as revealed by the symbolic transformation it entails. Rāhu, a demon head sans body - he lost his body in the battle ensuing from the churning of the ocean of milk in search of the nectar of immortality (Agni Purāṇa 3.1-22) - swallows the moon, which in Indian mythology is associated with that elixir, with masculinity, and, by extension, fertility, specifically semen. The moon enters the womb of his mouth only to reemerge from the end of his severed neck. Simultaneously, the child Gauracandra - literally, the Golden Moon - emerges from the womb of his mother, Śacī, the moon's immortality transferred, so says Indra (KCC 1.5.12-14), from the heavens to the earth in the form of Caitanya.

[1] Listen closely, Brāhmaṇa, to the recent appearance Caitanya, Lord of the World, the Ocean of Compassion, the Omnipresent.
[2] When the best of Devarṣis, Jagannātha [Miśra], a Brāhmaṇa priest, had gone back to his own retreat, the supreme bhagavAn, the Imperishable, entered his heart. [3] He deposited his potent seed during her [Śacī's] proper time; his pure and virtuous wife, devoted to her husband, received it within her. [4] Just as the bright Ganga got pregnant with a portion [aṃśa] of Śiva, so [Śacī] received a portion [aṃśa] of Hari in her womb. Her brilliance [tejas] was greater than that of the moon during the bright fortnight. [5] Seeing her possessed of such beauty, radiant like melted gold, Jagannātha [Miśra] was pleased, and he rejoiced that he was endowed with such good fortune. [6] Then, upon seeing the likes of her, the divinities, Brahma and the rest, the celestial musicians, and other immortals, all journeyed through the heavens with Indra. [7] With palms pressed together in respect, heads bowed in obeisance, eyes choked with tears from their joy, they praised and were pleased. [8] (Said Brahmā,] I bow to you who are ever pregnant, Jananī, Mother of Hari, whose womb contains the fiery glow of the sun and the moon, who embodies truth, who makes firm Mother Earth, [9] Source of non-injury to living beings, perfection, the very womb of God, who is simultaneously Hari's own Devakī, Rohinī, and Yaśodā. [10] You bear in your womb him who shall spread the sacrificial ritual which is the praising of God [kIrtana], whose great merit is not obtained by sacrifices. [11] That delight, which is of people like us, gained in half a moment by listening to the kīrtana of Narahari, cannot possibly come about through tens of millions of sacrifices. [12] Ah, in earlier times the immortal nectar was given to me by Hari himself after the churning of the ocean; [13] listening to the glory of Śrī Hari we see that the nectar [rasa] is more than ten million times that.' [14] Having said this, the gods with Indra made obeisance to her. Placing Brahma at the head, they sang the glory of Śrī Hari and then returned to their own citadel. [15] The portion [aṃśa] of the Lord of Śrī [=Nārāyaṇa] was very pleased and was born on the earth. Because of that they praised the fortune of the Kali Age and danced in the agitation of devotional love [prema].

[16] Then, at midnight, under the full moon of the month of Phālguna, at a time of good fortune and excellence of all qualities, when the darkness was endowed with a pure and fragrant breeze, [17] which pleased the minds of the gods and good people, when it was cool like the pure waters of the heavenly Ganga, a son was born, Hari himself [svayam]. [18] [Jagannātha Miśra] perceived his son whose eyes were like lotuses in full bloom, his full moon face shining, who was like gold, and who snuffed out the darkness of the directions by his own effulgence [tejas], [19] One could not reach the opposite shore of the liquid rapture [rasa] of this ocean of delight. Like a poor man presented with the treasure of Kubera, Śrī Jagannātha Miśra Purandara choked with love [prema]. [20] Near the time of his [Caitanya's] birth, Rāhu completely devoured the moon. The moon, overcome with shame, outshone by the lotus face of Kṛṣṇa, took refuge in the mouth of the enemy of the gods [Rāhu]. [21] Then, at that auspicious time, the kīrtana of Narahari was performed by groups of men; worship [pūjā] was performed on the spot; and in the pure waters of the Jāhnavī [River] they bathed, made oblations, and ceremonially cleansed their impurities. [22] Indra, attended by the Lotus Born One [Brahma] and Śiva, in the company of hordes of deities, all were excited. Courtly actors, attended by celestial nymphs intent on their dance, rained down flowers.

[23] Nīlāmbara Cakravartī was thrilled by [Gaura's] birth. He, knowledgeable in all the sacred texts, quickly went to the home of his son-in-law. [24] That wise man summoned Jagannātha [Miara] and Śacī and advised them. Reckoning the time of the birth of his daughter's son, he said, [25] 'Oh! Bṛhaspati has declared that this boy will be a lion among men. He shall be ever the protector of the people. [26] He will be of good disposition, the refuge of all law-abiding men, the best of ascetics, the giver of joy to all beings, like the full moon. [27] He shall for all time hold up both his father's and mother's clans.' When this twice-born pronounced this, everyone was delighted. [28] Hearing what her father had said, the mother [Śacī] was overjoyed. Vatsya [Jagannātha Miśra] put on a great celebration for the birth rituals for his son. [29] He presented betel, sandal, garlands, and scent to Brāhmaṇas. In their proper order he performed the auspicious ceremonies for growing, and so forth.

To underscore the point of this auspicious birth, Murāri explicitly identifies Caitanya with Kṛṣṇa, for bhagavān himself planted the seed into Caitanya's earthly father, Miśra Purandara, who then impregnated Caitanya's earthly mother, Śacī (KCC 1.5.2-5). The nature of this relationship of Caitanya to Kṛṣṇa, however, is metonymic, of a part to the whole, for Caitanya is an aṃśa of bhagavān (KCC 1.5.4, 1.5.15). The biographer emphasizes the majestic (aiśvarya) nature of Kṛṣṇa, which provides, according to Rank's pattern, the fatherly potentate, but not of a worldly order; this in turn makes Caitanya's earthly father a secondary or foster father. Caitanya's mother is mysteriously identical to all of Kṛṣṇa's former mothers, both real and foster (KCC 1.5.9), which creates Rank's predicted incest motif, for Krsna, the celestial king has impregnated his own mother on earth in order to father himself, spelling out the fantasy of the child who wishes to be his own son. There is a prophecy by Caitanya's maternal grandfather that he will be a great man (KCC 1.5.23-27), but there is no prophecy warning against his birth. The conception of Caitanya is, according to Murāri, unusual (KCC 1.5.23-28), but it is not especially difficult, a feature that will emerge in later narratives in conformity with Rank's prediction. Murāri's theology, as it is depicted here and borne out through the text, is relatively straightforward in an older and more traditional Vaiṣṇava mold. Caitanya is an aṃśa of Hari, a part, which is the standard explanation for Purāṇic avatāras. Although later superseded, or more properly, elaborated and embellished, Murāri's theology represents the earliest interpretive strategy to make sense of Caitanya's extraordinary presence. There is nothing to which the devotee can object in this portrayal, which, following its Purāṇic model, successfully attaches Caitanya to the Vaiṣṇava mainstream.

Theological Variation To a Constant Mythic Structure

The basic story remains essentially unchanged for the remaining tradition - the other seven major Sanskrit and Bengali biographies follow Murāri's lead - yet each narrative distinctively embellishes it. The narrative, while filling out missing elements of the hero pattern, becomes a vehicle for theological posturing: the overt structure remains constant, while the details emphasize differences in theological interpretation. The popular, relatively unsophisticated - both in theology and literary form - Caitanya Maṅgala of Jayānanda Miśra, provides good evidence of this trend. Jayānanda more elaborately describes Caitanya's birth than any of his predecessors, and he identifies Caitanya with a theologically specific and regionally popular form of Krsna: Jagannātha. The style of this text is one of pālā-gāna, a popular, publicly performed musical, and was probably composed between 1550 and 1560 CE somewhere in Bengal, probably in the district adjacent to Nadīyā where Jayānanda lived (Majumdāra 1959: 229 31).

...[10] When each of Śacī's eight daughters emerged from her womb, accord ing to the arrangement of fate, each in succession died within a few days.... [17] Suddenly a great fear of the king possessed Navadvīpa; the king seized Brāhmaṇas, taking their lives or their caste. [18] In whose Navadvīpa house the sound of the conch was heard, his wealth and life were taken, or caste destroyed. [19] On whose forehead the tilaka marking was seen or on whose shoulder a sacrificial thread, his door was broken down and his house looted, while he was shackled in bands of iron. [20] As temples and shrines were destroyed and tulasī plants uprooted, the inhabitants of Navadvīpa trembled, fearing for their lives. [21] Bathing in the Gaṅgā was forbidden, closed were the markets and ghāts, and hundreds of pīpal and jackfruit trees were uselessly leveled. [22] A great many Muslims [Yavana] lived in the village of Piralyā,¹² and they desecrated [the castes] of many Navadvīpa Brāhmaṇas. [23] For many ages there had been controversy between the Brāhmaṇas and the Muslims. Some hostile Piralyā villagers living in the vicinity of Navadvīpa [24] gave false evidence in the presence of the king of Gauḍa: 'The Brāhmaṇas of Navadvīpa will cause you danger, [25] for they believe that there will be a Brāhmaṇa king of Gauḍa. Do not stay here without care, for danger is near. [26] A Brāhmaṇa will certainly be king in Navadvīpa; it is written by the Gandharvas that the king will be skilled with the bow.' [27] These false words stuck in the mind of the king, and he gave the order: 'Destroy Nadīyā!'...

[1] Understand that the endeavors of fate are not rendered easily countered. In Navadvīpa the signs of pregnancy again appeared on Śacī. [2] The sounds 'glory, glory!' resounded throughout the universe. Gauracandra entered her womb at an auspicious time. [3] The southern breeze wafted sweetly without lull. The cool spotless waters flowed along the Suranadī [River]. [4] The earth, who was unable to bear her burden [of unrighteous beings] was gladdened. In NavadvIpa the celestials and deities could be heard speaking. [5] A great many heavenly musicians, such as Tilottamā and others, musical instruments in hand, paraded throughout Nadīyā city. [6] For one, two, three, four, five, six months the deities and celestials sang praises to him [Caitanya] and told the good news. [7] 'You are Brahmā, you are Viṣṇu, you are Maheśvara, you are the waters and the earth, you are the sun and the moon. [8] As the Lord of the Triple World you have taken up residence in a womb. Reveal yourself to your loving servants! [9] Charming the world under the guise of human birth, you manifest the dharma of the age from region to region.' [10] The deities sang his praises and retired to their heavenly city. The city of Nadīyā was radiant that autumn. [11] Seven, eight, nine, ten [months] elapsed.¹³ One day, knowing her womb had come to full term, Śacī Ṭhākurāṇī dreamed: [12] 'The city of Nadīyā lay on the banks of an ocean. Nīlācala [Purī] was seen at the base of an indestructible banyan tree. [13] There were ponds, called Garuḍa, Rohinī, and Mārkaṇḍeyaśvara; there was also the Guṇḍicā Maṇḍapa and Indradyumna Lake. [14] [At] Konāraka and Bhuvaneśvara lived [the goddess] Vimalā. Also there [in Nīlācala] were Jagannātha, Balarāma, Subhadrā, and Kamalā. [15] While inside the dance pavilion Śacī Ṭhākurāṇī looked on Jagannātha's face and heard divine words. [16] Jagannātha looked at Śacī Ṭhākurāṇī and, extending his hand, entered Śacī's womb.' [17] Śacī Ṭhākurāṇī witnessed carefully this dream and then recounted it to Miśra Jagannātha. [18] Hearing the dream he thrilled with the bliss of devotional love [prema]. He revealed his feelings as he spoke to her in a broken voice. [19] 'Some great being has come and taken shelter in your womb. In our house Jagannātha himself will be made manifest [prakāśa].'

[1] Kṛṣṇa assumed a unique form in the womb of Śacī. In Phālguna month he came and entered. [2] During the month of Phālguna, an auspicious full moon endured a total lunar eclipse for the zodiacal period of three hours [prahara]. [3] At twilight sounded the sweet noise of assorted conches. Various natural events occurred indicative of impending beneficence. [4] The sound and rhythms of numerous instruments accompanied the celestial musicians' songs. The pleasingly redolent southern breeze blew. [5] Hearing the sweet call of the kokila bird and the humming of bees, the Brahmā-egg of creation was rent with the tumult of joy. [6] Innumerable heavenly dancers [vidyādharīs] pranced under various guises, torches and lamps in hand, lined up, row upon row.[7] Śacī Ṭhākurāṇī blossomed doubly beautiful. Knowing the exact moment of auspiciousness for his birth, Nārāyaṇa appeared, [8] and at precisely that same moment the moon went into eclipse. Old men, boys, and young men rushed to the mouth of the Gaṅgā. [9] Hundreds upon hundreds of cows followed suit, lowing; the dust raised from the cows hooves blotted out the sky. [10] Just at that instant Mahendra appeared - Śacī Ṭhākurāṇī gave birth to Gauracandra. [11] Gauracandra took birth at a most auspicious time. There were no limits to the bliss that overwhelmed the city of Nadīyā. [12] The world split asunder with the sound of 'Victory! Victory!' The glory of Vaikuṇṭha [heaven] swelled the happiness of Nadīyā. [13] The incredible joy of these times is impossible to describe. From all directions did bliss rain on Nadīyā.

[1] Sanaka, Sanātana, Tamburu, Nārada - all commented on the good fortune that swelled in Nadīyā. [2] The deities Indracandra, Śaṅkara, Viriñci - all assumed human bodies and danced in kīrtana. [3] Envision Gauracandra's advent! The pleasure of the orb of earth swelled. [4] Accompanied by friends and relatives and his complement of weapons, he [Gaura] was born from Śacī's auspiciously marked belly. [5] Caring not for distinctions between feminine or masculine gender, he capped the Vedas as the incarnation [avatāra] for the fulfillment of the age. [6] Upon seeing him, Miśra Purandara delighted; he listened to the music of the celestial musicians surrounding the house. [7] Hundreds of thousands of men and women, peering within the delivery room, saw the two-armed, six-armed, and four-armed forms [of Viṣṇu]. [8] In Navadvīpa, during the eclipse of the moon, the discipline of devotion [bhakti] to Viṣṇu and Śacī's son appeared yoked together. [9] As the eclipse progressed the city filled with joy. With whom and where people danced and sang I cannot begin to write. [10] Birds, beasts, creeping vines, insects, worms, and even moths were thrilled when they heard the news. [11] Everyone, from the lowest caṇḍala up, is destined to be rescued [nistĀra]. Thanks to this, the earth was relieved of her heavy burden [of unrighteousness]. [12] The wives of celestial courtiers, heavenly yak-tail whisks in hand, arrived at the home of Miśra Purandara. [13] All of creation resounded with the jubilant cry of 'Glory! Victory!' The earth rejoiced for the crest-jewel Gaurāṅga. [14] Miśra Jagannātha enjoyed the rousing company of twice-born men, whose pleasures grew great upon hearing of the birth of a son. [15] Having bathed, he entered into the delivery room on the premises and, at the precise auspicious moment, performed the birth rites for Gaurāṅga. [16] He spelled out the initial base mantra and brought in ghī and honey, which he placed on Gaurāṅga's tongue, as witnessed by [the midwife] Nārāyaṇī. [17] At the proper time, Sūta and Māgadha singers, through so many songs of praise, aired the jubilant music of weal. [18] The sword, spade, bunches of grass, and so forth - all eight ritual items were placed upon the stone in order inside the delivery room. [19] With cowdung, cow's urine, Gaṅgā water, and water from the grindstone, the midwife cut the umbilical cord attached to [Gaurāṅga's] tummy. [20] The midwife, Nārāyaṇī, and all the Vaiṣṇava women, brought nīm leaves and placed the tilaka mark on the eight parts of his body.

Jayānanda constructs the background and context for Caitanya's birth in a way that enhances conformity to the hero pattern. The political conflict between Muslims and Hindus (JCM 2,4.17-27) provides the threat to the hero's birth that is commonly attributed to royal fathers. In this case, however, the narrative splits the royal father image into two: the king of Gauḍa who poses a threat to the young Viśvāmbhara, and the Lord of the Universe, Jagannātha. Jayānanda exploits the opportunity to establish the theological identity of Caitanya with Jagannātha, who is Kṛṣṇa.¹⁴ Jagannātha was the most prominent and popular temple-based Vaiṣṇava divinity in northeast India in the sixteenth century and was intimately connected with the last major Hindu royal dynasty, the Gajapati, which stood as sole challenge to the near complete Muslim dominance of the region. Jagannātha is the ultimate in celestial sovereignty, but being that ultimate divinity, he cannot precipitate his own son's demise - what would be a rather insidious form of theodicy - so an earthly counterpart, the foreign (Muslim) ruler, can be called upon to fill the function. Theological necessity and historical opportunity combine to further develop the hero pattern; or more probably, the hero pattern provided for Jayānanda a convenient and understandable framework for pitching his historical narrative. Considering the relationship of the king to the establishment of moral order in the Hindu traditions, the threat to Caitanya is extremely significant in that it crystallizes the perceived challenge to the legitimacy of Muslim rule in Bengal at the time, a position that would be potentially popular among the crowds Jayānanda was addressing in this musical performance and consistent with Jayānanda' s theology, which sees in Caitanya the avatāra destined to save the world. Significantly, at the time Jayānanda composed his text, the last vestiges of Hindu sovereignty were being effaced from northeast India; the Gajapati dynasty ended in 1556, and over the next two decades the Mughals consolidated control throughout the region, which had been suffering from relentless fighting since the end of the Ḥusain Shāh's dynasty some twenty years earlier (Eaton 1993; Majumdar 1973). It is probably no coincidence that Jayānanda portrays these conflicts so vividly.

The celestial festivities heralding this cosmic descent are, in Jayānanda's text, carried out in extenso for the full ten months of Śacī's pregnancy, simply expanding what Murāri had established as the appropriate heavenly response to the avatāra of Kṛṣṇa. And that avatāra, again in conformity to Murāri and others, includes the role of yuga-avatāra, the descent of Krsna in the Kali Age. Jayānanda does not fail to report that Śacī had been pregnant with eight daughters, none of whom lived beyond the first few days (JCM 1.4.10). It is impossible to determine if this is historically accurate, although given the hero myth's more common preference for virgins, it seems unlikely that this is gratuitous information; and it is confirmed by several other biographies. History, it would seem, intrudes into the narrative structure. Śacī's severe inability to maintain a viable fetus or newborn suggests, however, an extremely difficult conception, which does help fit Caitanya's birth into the hero pattern somewhat more neatly. It should also be noted that Caitanya is the second male, not the first, which again means his mother cannot possibly be the virgin required for the hero and represents a historical fact that cannot be effaced, but which can be easily accommodated by the believer because of Caitanya's parallel identity with Kṛṣṇa, who had an older brother, Balarāma.¹⁵ History, it now seems, has been rescued by the priority of the dominant mythology of Kṛṣṇa.

The explanation of Caitanya's conception is revealed in a dream (JCM 1.5.11 19):¹⁶ Śacī was impregnated by Jagannātha himself as she visited the pilgrimage centers of Konāraka and Purī, the latter being the home of Jagannātha and the residence of Caitanya for the last half of his life. There is an appropriate miraculous quality to this event, however, for Jagannātha is notable for not having any hands, only stubs for arms. In Śacī's dream Jagannātha thrusts his obviously phallic arm/hand deep into her womb to inseminate her.¹⁷ The actual birth, however, shows to onlookers the two-, four-, and six-armed forms of Viṣṇu (JCM 1.7.7), again emphasizing the sovereign (aiśvarya) quality of divinity rather than the loving sweetness (mādhurya) that marks the later, eventually mainstream interpretation. The episode ends with Jagannātha Miśra performing the various fatherly rituals proper to the rites of passage for his son. The midwife, Nārāyaṇī, follows this by performing her functions to sever the boy Viśvāvambhara from his mother and to ensure his continued good health. Jayānanda's text increases the quality and degree of conformity to the hero's birth pattern, especially by introducing the vital foil of prophecy to and threat by the king. Because the medium is an oral musical composition based on Purāṇic mythology, this increase in conformity should not surprise anyone, and the theological positioning suggests a popular understanding of Caitanya's divinity, a fact that is borne out in the remainder of the text, which proposes a Bengali everyman's style of Vaiṣṇavism.


12. Some texts refer to jealous Piralyā Brāhmaṇas as the source of this caste's destruction by falsely accusing the Brāhmaṇas of Navadvīpa.
13. The pregnancy is measured in the traditional Indian manner of ten lunar months.
14. It is convenient that Caitanya's father is also named Jagannātha, thereby lending a certain identification by verbal association that is never explicit, but one which on occasion makes the narrative mildly ambiguous.
15. Caitanya's older brother plays a surprisingly minimal role in the Caitanya biographies. He abandons the householder's world for that of the ascetic saṃnyāsin at a very early age and then disappears never to be seen again.
16. Dreams are of course seen as a means of interacting with the gods and other celestial figures and for extracting information from them. Note again the conflation of identities, supra n.19.
17. The word for hand is hātha, but it really refers to the arm and hand from the elbow down, which is appropriate here. For the story of the shape of the Jagannātha image, which is also the only major wooden temple icon in north India, see Jagannātha Maṅgala of Viśvāmbhara Dāsa (1313 BS: especially Section 3, Kṣetra Khaṇḍa).

A very similar analysis was presented by Bimal Bihari Majumdar in his Lord Chaitanya: A Biographical Critique. The original Bengali version appeared in 1938.

The first English edition thereof appeared in 1997 in 3 volumes, by K. P. Bagchi.

In it, Majumdar analyses the attitudes of Chaitanya's biographers and important dates relating to his life. Then he digs into:

- Murari Gupta's Karcha.
- Govinda dasa's Karcha.
- The Chaitanya Chadradoya by Kavi Karnapura.
- The Gaura-ganodesha-dipika by Kavi Karnapura.
- The works of the 5(!) gosvamis of Vrindavan.
- The Chaitanya Chandramrta.
- The Chaitanya Bhagavat.
- The Chaitanya Mangala by Jayananda.
- The Chaitanya Mangala by Lochana.
- The Chaitanya Vilasa by Madhava.
- The Chaitanya Charitamrta.

It shows a surprising amount of polemics, politics, strife, and myth-making that took place during the era that these works were created.

True, and I couldn't help wondering those things myself when I was reading the texts. It kind of made me fantasies about going back in time and nudging Krsnadasa Kaviraja (or whoever) and tell him, "Look, you're kinda overstating your point here. Tone it down a little bit?"

Stylizing The Embellishments: Constructing The Dominant Variant

The Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja remains the most authoritative of the mainstream versions of Caitanya's life, and the birth story - just as it did for Murāri and Jayānanda - hinges on often subtle theological distinctions that can find expression within the broad structure of the hero pattern, but without violating it. The Caitanya Caritāmṛta was finished sometime between 1600 and 1612 (Dimock n.d.: Introduction, part 2, section 3) and serves as the effective end of the creative period of Caitanya biography. The text is theologically sophisticated, composite in its narrative structure, and extremely erudite in its supporting citations and arguments. In brief, as portrayed by Kṛṣṇadāsa, Caitanya is not an incarnation (avatāra) or part (aṃśa) of Kṛṣṇa, but is the complete god head itself, svayaṃ bhagavān, whose innate and natural form is the two-armed, loving Govinda, cowherd, and charmer of the postpubescent gopī maidens. The story of his birth elaborates the divine nature proclaimed by Murāri and Jayānanda, while the complete narrative is the most elaborate within the tradition, conforming to the general observation regarding the growth of hagiographical traditions and the expansion of detail in direct proportion to the distance from the event.


...[7] Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya was incarnated at Navadvīpa, and for forty-eight years his sport was apparent. [8] 1407 of the Śaka era [=1486 CE] witnessed his birth, and in 1455 he disappeared. [9] For twenty-four years Prabhu [Caitanya] lived as a householder, always praising Kṛṣṇa. [10] At the end of twenty-four years he took saṃnyāsa, and for twenty-four years he lived at Nīlācala. [11] Of this, six years [were spent] in wandering, sometimes in the south, sometimes in Gauḍa, sometimes to Vṛndāvana. [12] For eighteen years he remained at Nīlācala and caused all to float in the nectar of name and prema of Kṛṣṇa....

[sloka 2:] I greet the full moon night of Phālguna, full of all excellent qualities, when with the names of Kṛṣṇa, Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya was incarnated.

[18] So in the evening of the full-moon night in Phālguna, Prabhu was born. At that time, by divine power, there was an eclipse of the moon. [19] The people were greatly delighted and called out 'Hari Hari!' Then Caitanya Prabhu was born, giving birth [also] to the Name.... [49] Thus let me write the sūtras of the Ādi Līlā; hear O bhaktasl I write in brief; it cannot all be written. [50] Vrajendrakumāra, for the fulfillment of a certain wish, decided to become incarnated. [51] First he caused to be incarnated those who were his elders; let me mention them in brief - writing in detail is not possible. [52] Śrī Śacī and Jagannātha, Śrī Mādhava Purī, Keśava Bhāratī, and Śrī Īśvara Purī, [53] Advaitācārya, and Śrīvāsa Paṇḍita, Ācāryanidhi, Vidyānidhi, and Haridāsa Ṭhākura. [54] And there was Śrī Upendra Miśra, the dweller in Śrīhaṭṭa, a Vaiṣṇava, a paṇḍita, a wealthy man, and the foremost in all virtues of truth. [55] The seven Miśras his sons were seven lords among rṣis: Kaṃsāri, Paramānanda, Padmanābha, Sarveśvara, [56] Jagannātha, Janārdana, and Trailokyanātha. [Caitanya's father] Jagannātha settled in Nadīyā, by the banks of the Ganga. [57] Jagannātha, the best of Miśras, whose title was Purandara, was an ocean of good qualities, in the form of Nanda and Vasudeva. [58] His wife's name was Śacī, a true wife, a pativratā, whose father was a Cakravartī named Nīlāmbara. [59] Ṭhākura Nityānanda was born in Rāḍha. And Gaṅgādāsa Paṇḍita, Murāri Gupta, and Mukunda, [60] and uncounted bhaktas he made to descend; and finally Vrajendrakumāra descended.

[61] Before the appearance of Caitanya, many bhaktas came to the place of Advaitācārya. [62] Ācārya Gosvāmī would speak on the [Bhagavad] Gītā and Bhāgavata [Purāna], expounding the greatness of bhakti and condemning the [paths of] jñāna and karma. [63] In all the śāstras, he said, Kṛṣṇa-bhakti is explained; people respect neither jñāna-yoga nor karma-yoga. [64] And the Vaiṣṇavas who were with him were much pleased with his stories of Kṛṣṇa, his worship of Kṛṣṇa, and his public recitation of the name [nāma-saṃkīrtana]. [65] But seeing all the people with faces averted from Kṛṣṇa, seeing people immersed in worldly affairs, he was very sorrowful. [66] He reflected on a source of salvation for the people, how all these people could be saved. [67] 'If Kṛṣṇa himself descends and propagates bhakti, then the people will be saved.' [68] So the Ācārya prayed that Kṛṣṇa himself appear; he performed Kṛṣṇa-pūjā, with tulasī and Gaṅgā-water. [69] He summoned Kṛṣṇa with a loud outcry, and Vrajendrakumāra was attracted by the shout. [70] In the womb of Śacī, the wife of Jagannātha Miśra, eight daughters had been born in succession, and all had died at birth. [71] In virāha for his children, Miśra's heart was very sad, and he prayed at the feet of Viṣṇu for a son. [72] So a son was born and named Viśvarūpa; he was possessed of all great virtues, the divine receptacle of Baladeva [Kṛṣṇa's brother]. [73] The prakāśa [form] of Baladeva was Saṃkarṣaṇa in Paravyoma, and he is the cause both efficient and material of the universe.¹⁸ [74] We see nothing else but him in the universe, thus Viśvarūpa was his name.

[śloka 3; Bhāgavata Purāna 10.15.35:] Nothing is surprising in the eternal bhagavān, the lord of the universe, on whom this universe is woven, warp, and woof like the threads of a piece of cloth.

[75] Thus Prabhu called him 'elder brother'; Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma, these two are Caitanya and Nitāi [Nityānanda]. [76] So getting a son, the hearts of the husband and wife were greatly delighted, and they especially served the feet of Govinda. [77] In 1406 Śaka, at the end of the month of Māgha, Kṛṣṇa entered into the bodies of Jagannātha and Śacī. [78] Miśra said to Śacī, 'I see other than the usual things, [79] your body is full of light, [as if] Lakṣmī has settled there. [80] Everyone around pays great respect, [81] and to the house they send wealth, and clothing, and food.' [82] Śacī said, 'I see, above in the sky, [83] people in the forms of the gods, praising.' [84] Jagannātha Miśra said, 'I saw a dream; a container of radiance entered into my heart. [85] From my heart it went to your heart, and now I understand, that some greatly-to-be revered person will be born.' [86] Saying these things, the two remained, greatly pleased in their hearts, and they made special service to the śālagrāma [stone]. [87] Time went on and on, and the pregnancy was in the thirteenth month; but there was still no delivery, and Miśra was apprehensive. [88] Nīlāmbara Cakravartī calculated, 'In this month, at an auspicious moment, a son will be born.' [89] In 1407 Śaka, in the month of Phālguna, on the night of the full moon, in the evening, that auspicious moment came. [90] It was at the sign of the Lion, the entrance of the sun into the sign of the Lion, and the planets were on the ascendant, and in the sixth and eighth houses, with all signs auspicious, [91] the stainless Gaura, the golden moon, appeared; was there any need for an ordinary moon with its stains? [92] Realizing this, Rāhu swallowed the moon, and the three worlds were filled with the [sounds of the] name 'Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa, Hari!' [93] Filling the world, the people called out 'Hari, Hari!,' and at that moment the golden Kṛṣṇa himself descended to the earth. [94] Delighted were the hearts of all the people of the world, and Yavanas laughed together with the Hindus, saying 'Hari.' [95] Crying 'Hari!.' the women gave the hulāhuli sound, and the gods in heaven, in great joy, danced and sang. [96] The ten directions were bright, and the water of the rivers pure, and all things moving and unmoving were transported with joy.

[97] In Nadīyā Udayagiri,
the full-moon Gaurahari
by his mercy has appeared.
Sin and darkness were destroyed,
the three worlds rejoiced,
and earth filled with the sound of Hari's name.
[98] At that time, in his own house, Advaita Rāya rose up
and danced, his heart filled with joy.
With Haridāsa, he shouted out in an ecstasy of kīrtana;
why they danced, nobody could tell.
[99] Seeing the eclipse, they laughed,
and quickly ran to the Gaṅgā's ghāt,
and in joy bathed in the river.
On the pretext of the eclipse,
in the happiness of their own hearts, they distributed many gifts to Brāhmaṇas.

Kṛṣṇadāsa continues the description of the visitors, celestial and earthly, to Navadvīpa to celebrate the birth (CC 1.13.100-123). Various gods and goddesses pay their respects, bestowing fabulous wealth on the family, as do local Vaiṣṇavas and other genteel folk. Notable among them is the wife of Advaitācārya, Sītā Ṭhākurāṇī, who at the direct command of her husband, provided numerous gold and conch ornaments, silks, and auspicious unguents for the child Gaurāṅga (CC 1.13.110-17). That Kṛṣṇadāsa has stylized his narrative is immediately apparent in the opening verses. Caitanya's life itself is divided into two conveniently symmetrical units of twenty-four years, each divided into smaller segments in multiples of six. The auspicious time is calculated much more precisely (CC 1.13.18-19, 1.13.89-93) than in other versions, but in accord with them. The birth, however, is preceded by the incarnation of Kṛṣṇa's entire dhāman, the realm and retinue of Kṛṣṇa, which prepares the world for his appearance.¹⁹ Thus all those Vaiṣṇava devotees in Nadīyā, Caitanya's family and friends, are descended from heaven to aid Caitanya in his mission of salvation (CC 1.13.51-60). This sacralization, indeed divinization, of the entire Vaiṣṇava community significantly changes how the tradition interprets their actions, for they must be understood, according to this doctrine, as extensions of god. And the form of Kṛṣṇa that this doctrine implies is the complete svayaṃ bhagavān; the dhāman does not appear in toto for partial incarnations, but only for svayaṃ bhagavān. This position is today the theologically dominant one, what has become for most Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas the orthodox. The ramifications for those involved are significant, for the closer they are to Caitanya, clearly the higher their status not only as devotees but also in the eternal realm of heavenly Vṛndāvana.

Significant among these incarnated dhāman figures is Advaitācārya, who, in Kṛṣṇādāsa's narrative, precipitates Kṛṣṇa's descent by calling him down to earth after performing the appropriate pūjā and so forth (CC 1.13.61-69). From the standpoint of the hero's birth pattern, this transformation makes Advaita the agent of Caitanya's birth, therefore his father. It is by Advaita's call to Kṛṣṇa, by his bellowing of the potent Sanskrit seed mantra, that Kṛṣṇa is awakened from his complacent repose in heaven and forced to earth. But as ersatz father, he is not a king, rather he represents the ultimate in Hindu orthopraxy, the Brāhmaṇa paṇḍita, and as such the religious counter to the Muslim ruler. Significantly, the extreme orthopraxy of Advaita is consistent with the strict observances of ritual, and so on, appropriate to Kṛṣṇa's aiśvarya or sovereign identity as universal monarch. So, by a second splitting of fatherhood, the hero now has not two, but three fathers: Jagannātha Miśra, Advaitācārya, and Kṛṣṇa, the latter representing celestial royalty, the second the religious counterpart as embodied in orthopraxy, and the first the somewhat more lowly but morally righteous parent who raises Caitanya. For the first time in the narratives, Advaitācārya's wife, Sītā Ṭhākurāṇī, plays a major role: she visits Caitanya bearing many gifts. The magnitude of this wealth is staggering, and Kṛṣṇadāsa devotes eight strophes (in the elaborate tripadi meter) to its description (CC 1.13.110-17). In addition to furnishing the auspicious and preferred items to complete the various postpartum rituals to ensure the young Viśvāmbhara's health and prosperity, Sītā christens the baby Nimāi (CC 1.13.116). The name is a diminutive from the nīm leaf, whose properties are medicinal, but whose taste is bitter, chosen in an attempt to confuse demons and ghouls who would not dare to consume the child for fear of his bitter taste. This 'blessing' and bestowal of wealth seem to signify a proper maternalism, complementing Advaita's paternal role. Caitanya, it would seem, has now gained an ersatz mother. The additional significance of Kṛṣṇadāsa's portrayal of Advaita's and Sītā's deference to Caitanya will be important in interpreting the last text below.

In the Caitanya Caritāmṛta (1.13.70), Kṛṣṇadāsa depicts the conception of the baby Caitanya as difficult; just as Jayānanda described it in the Caitanya Maṅgala, eight daughters are stillborn. Śacī's pregnancy with Caitanya is vividly and elegantly described, certainly befitting a god, but Kṛṣṇādāsa modifies Caitanya's conception so that it mirrors both Murāri's story of the light entering Śacī's womb from god via Jagannātha Miśra and Jayānanda's version of the dream revelation (CC 1.13.77-86). From Śacī's dream we learn that the convoluted incest that is inherent in Kṛṣṇa's fathering of himself remains intact and the biological fatherhood of Jagannātha Miśra is preserved (unlike in Jayānanda's story). Importantly, the account of the birth of Caitanya's older brother Viśvarūpa unequivocally identifies him with Balarāma, Kṛṣṇa's older brother (CC 1.13.71 76). By this identification Kṛṣṇadāsa makes explicit what was only implied in earlier texts. Kṛṣṇadāsa tends to be much more self-consciously deliberate and comprehensive than other authors, especially with regard to the delicate social posturing inherent in this Bengali religious community, so it should come as no surprise that he includes this information, even though Viśvarūpa himself plays no more than a minor role in the biography. But what is significant here is that earlier in the text (CC 1.6) Kṛṣṇadāsa identified Nityānanda, Caitanya's 'left-hand' man, as Viśvarūpa, Caitanya's brother. Theologically, according to the dhāman-incarnation doctrine, Nityānanda is Balarāma and thus Caitanya's surrogate brother; and this role is actively acknowledged by Caitanya's mother Śacī herself (CC 1.1.śl.7-11, 1.5.111-27, 1.13.72-75). Because Kṛṣṇadāsa carefully prepares the reader to think of Nityānanda when he speaks of Caitanya's brother, he implies a set of relationships that are socially and theologically germane to the entire Vaiṣṇava community. The message is clear: Advaita, as the 'father' of Caitanya, represents the conservative, unassailably orthopraxic Brāhmaṇa foundation of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism; Nityānanda, as 'brother' of Caitanya and ascetic avadhūta, personifies the playful relationship of intimacy to Caitanya. This latter emotional relationship (sakhya) is higher than that associated with Advaita in this text, although neither one represents the epitome of the basic forms of love. It is always the intimate kinds of love, Kṛṣṇadāsa iterates repeatedly in the Caitanya Caritāmṛta, that Kṛṣṇa prefers. Advaita's followers are proper Brāhmaṇas who, by their conservative nature, will naturally inculcate a devotion that tends toward the majestic and sovereign dimension of Kṛṣṇa's personality, his aiśvarya, and which can border on or even cross over into the formless realm of Vedānta. Nityānanda's intimacy, however, will foster a love for Kṛṣṇa that is directed toward his sweetness, his mādhurya, and which will eschew rigid ritual formalities in its eagerness and zeal. This latter love will eradicate caste distinctions and in the process embrace a wide audience - and it became so as Nityānanda's followers far outnumbered those of any other lineage - and they joined from all social classes. The two guru-lineages are represented prominentiy in Kṛṣṇadāsa's narrative, but only one demonstrates a truly intimate access, while the other must remain at least nominally distant.²⁰ The significance of this particular distinction, however, will become even more apparent when we examine the final narrative in our sampling of Caitanya's birth stories, a tale which is found not in a biography of Caitanya, but in an ancillary biography of Advaitācārya.


18. Prakāśa is a technical term in the avatāra theory of Kṛṣṇādāsa Kavirāja and the Gosvāmins, which refers to the second division of the category of 'God Himself in his Innate Form' (svayaṃ rūpa). Prakāśa is further divided into two: many forms with a single body (for example, Kṛṣṇa in the rasa-līlā with the gopīs), and the same body appearing in different forms (for example, Balarāma).
19. Evidence for this dhāman-incarnation theory had been appearing somewhat piecemeal until the composition of the Gauragaṇoddeśadīpika of the biographer of Caitanya, Kavikarṇapūra (1329 BS), in 1576. This short composition lists over two hundred of the leading members of Caitanya's entourage and explicitly identifies them with figures in Kṛṣṇa's dhāman. Rebecca Manring (1989) has prepared a (nearly) critical edition, based on a selection of the oldest and most complete manuscripts and has included a translation, with extensive notes.
20. The Caitanya Caritāmṛta played a major role in fixing the internal structure of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava movement when it was circulated in Bengal by the three 'missionaries' of the 'second generation': Śrīnivāsa, Narottama Dāsa, and Śyāmānanda, the men responsible for coalescing the increasingly disparate communities into a loosely unified but coherent body of believers.

Reconstructions From The Mainstream Mythology

The Advaita Prakāśa of Īśana Nāgara is a biography of Caitanya's disciple, Advaitācārya by one of the latter's less prominent followers. Scholars question the authorship and date, which is declared in the text to be 1569, but, as we shall see, it is probably much later. That the narrative is long, even in this truncated form, is itself suggestive of the authorial manipulation, which warrants a close scrutiny of the details.

...One day Advaita was bathing in the Gaṅgā when with a booming roar he bellowed out 'Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa!' He worried to himself, 'When will Caitanya, the Golden Moon, be born? When will he infuse a body with life breath and join us?' Then, with earnest devotion, he offered flowers and tulasī petals, and in the name of Kṛṣṇa's feet, he offered Gaṅgā water. Advaita's roar broke Kṛṣṇa's reverie, and desiring a flower offering, he was drawn [to Advaita], When Advaita saw the flower offering go upstream, he recognized the grace of Kṛṣṇa and hurried off to his friends [to proclaim the news].... At that crucial moment Miśra's wife, who is the very image of [Kṛṣṇa's mother] Yaśodā, named Śacī Ṭhākurāṇī, went to bathe in the Gaṅgā. She was pregnant. The flower offering floated up and stuck to her body. Śacī fretted that this event was inauspicious, so she quickly brushed the flowers off her arms. Śacī then quickly finished her bath and headed for the bank. Overcome with emotion, Advaita reflected on the mother of Kṛṣṇa. Looking at the signs on [Śacī's] belly, Advaita suddenly realized that it was from this very womb that the Moon Kṛṣṇa would be born. Under the import of this vision he made obeisance to that womb - an act that usually causes the womb to abort. This distressed Śacī extremely, and she quickly finished her bath and retreated to her home.... The fetuses in Miśra's wife, Śacī, were aborted each in turn by the obeisance of Advaita. After the systematic abortion of eight fetuses, Śacī was beside herself with grief and cried bitterly as she complained to Miśra. 'By Advaita's obeisance everything has been lost! How will our lineage be sustained? May fate intervene!' Listening to her, the usually calm and restrained best of twice-born, Miśra, raged like a tiger and rushed to the lord Advaita....
Miśra then respectfully requests Advaita to come to his aid and ensure the birthof a son. Advaita imparts instruction to Miśra, and when he visits Miśra the next day he is treated royally:

...Then Śacī came forward and bowed in obeisance. Advaita said, 'My dear child, may you bear a son.' The king of twice-born, Miśra, heard with great joy and replied, 'The words are bound to come true!' Advaita replied, 'You will receive a mantra in a dream. Both of you accept and practice this particular mantra with devotion. Then all inauspiciousness is certain to be neutralized, and [the child] will develop a divine body and become an accomplished paṇḍita.' Having listened to these instructions, the couple went to bathe, while Advaita performed the pūjā to Lord Nārāyaṇa according to the prescribed injunctions. To the two of them Advaita imparted the mantra - the four syllable Gauragopāla mahāmantra. Upon receipt of the mantra the couple were overwhelmed with emotion. They bowed to Advaita and praised him with appropriate humility. With the words, 'May your mind remain fixed on Kṛṣṇa,' Advaita blessed them. He ate and then returned home.
Some days later Śacī conceives a son, Viśvarūpa, who is Balarāma, Kṛṣṇa's older brother:
Now I will tell of the coming down of Caitanya, which, by simply hearing, guarantees great reward for any living being. At the finish of Kṛṣṇa-pūjā, which is enjoined by the scriptures, Advaita yelled out, 'May the Golden Kṛṣṇa, Gaurahari, descend!' and emitted a roar. Advaita's roar reached Kṛṣṇa's ear as a mahāmantra and disturbed him [from his sleep]. Previously, out of the compassion of his heart, Kṛṣṇa had promised that in the city of Nadīyā he would come down. Then Ācārya realized that Śacī's body was radiant because the rising moon, Gaura, was [resting] on the ocean of milk that was Śacī's womb. Later Advaita sat in a cave along the Gaṅgā performing pūjā to Kṛṣṇa, with tulasī, sandal, and flowers. Assigning the image of Kṛṣṇa to the Gaṅgā..., he dropped three offerings of flowers into the Gaṅgā and floated them away. By the will of Kṛṣṇa, the flower offerings sped quickly away and precisely as before stuck to the limbs of Śacī. Having this happen yet again, Śacī was distraught, 'Who could have thrown these flowers that have again stuck to my body?' Quickly she brushed the flowers off and jumped up on the bank muttering, 'Rāma! Nārāyaṇa! Hari!'... Seeing this, Advaita's extraordinary devotion erupted, and he yelled 'Gaura hari,' then emitted a loud roar. Then Advaita circumambulated mother Śacī and made obeisance to her womb. Śacī cried, 'Please wait, stop! Advaitācārya, or this is bound to precipitate severe misfortune. I aborted before when you made obeisance. Explain, master, why again you have bowed to my child.' Saying this Śacī bowed down to him. Blessing Śacī, Advaita spoke to her. 'Have no fear, my sweet mother. Listen to these words of truth. In your womb will appear a boy equal to Kṛṣṇa.' Hearing this Śacī returned home thrilled. Drunk on divine love, Advaita began yelling out 'Kṛṣṇa! Kṛṣṇa!'...
Īśāna describes the pregnancy of Śacī and the prophecy by her grandfather and then makes explicit Caitanya's nature as avatāra of Kṛṣṇa:
Just as the Man-Lion [Narasiṃha] incarnation had emerged from the crystalline pillar, so did Caitanya appear from Śacī's womb. There is no trace of physical matter in the Supreme Lord, svayaṃ bhagavān, who is that jewel-mine of love, the blessed son of Śacī. He, who in human form had previously taken Vṛndāvana as his place of residence in order to rescue living beings, his mother and father, and the rest of his friends became fully sensate. Then everyone in his retinue was filled with the bliss of truth. When he assumed the dharma appropriate to a living being, he would be plunged into human suffering; nonetheless, Kṛṣṇa manifested himself in order to reveal himself to the world. Śrī Nandanandana made three wishes; and so he assumed the effulgence [kānti] of Śrī Rādhā's emotional state. In the unique gold form he descended to Nadīyā. All of creation benefited as he distributed his pure love [prema]. On pūrṇimā of the month of Phālguna in 1407 Saka the demon Rāhu devoured the full moon. Fixed at the most auspicious moment under the sign of the Lion, with the Lion ascending, the earth thrilled from love when Kṛṣṇa appeared. In the twilight the name of Hari was made to resound. Lord Kṛṣṇa had manifest himself as Gaurāṅga, the Golden Limbed One, Caitanya. The joy on earth was identical to that which is felt during the swinging festival of Kṛṣṇa. And the greatest of joys was experienced precisely at that moment when the moon was consumed [by Rāhu, that is, the eclipse]. Some danced, some sang 'Hari! Hari!' At the time of Caitanya's appearance, the blessed master Nityānanda was in Rāḍha, bellowing like a raincloud thick with liquid love. Caitanya's golden limbs shone more brightly than the rays of the moon; the delivery room was awash in the effulgence of a golden moonlight....[T]he Moon Caitanya spread his magic, and from it both of his parents came to believe that they had borne a human baby boy....
Everyone sings Caitanya's praise, and the world rejoices at his birth, but he proves to be even more different than they realized, for he sat like a great yogin, eyes squinted, no tears or cries for milk. His parents entreat Advaita, who just arrived, to intervene. Advaita promises that all will be well, and so he:
...entered the delivery room. Grasping the master's feet, Śacī began to weep bitterly. Advaita consoled her, 'O Mother, don't cry. Move aside. Your son will be fine.' At the command of guru, Mother Śacī withdrew a short distance. Prabhu [Advaita] approached Mahāprabhu. Seeing Advaita, [Mahāprabhu's] limbs became suffused with love [prema]. Śrī Govinda in that golden form jumped up and began to laugh. Seeing that Kṛṣṇa himself had come down in this unique form, Ācārya was immersed in a state of pure devotion. From time to time Śrī Advaita would lose consciousness. Then he would stretch out in obeisance with his palms pressed together in respect. 'O Fate! I am fifty-two years old, and on account of you did this servant come to the realm of earth. The world is filled with sin, darkness, calumny, and because of it I see fear encircling. One glance [darśana] at you, and this angst is consumed. Ease this anxiety in your own abode. From region to region I searched for you, high and low. Because of my own shortcoming, I never caught a glimpse [of you], but now my heart's wish is, after such a long interval, fulfilled. The moon of Gokūla [Vṛndāvana] has risen in Navadvīpa.' Caitanya replied, 'I have been for ages completely under the control of my devotees. Whether manifest or unmanifest I am the subordinate of my devotees.' Advaita asked, 'Since you have come to this house, tell me why you will not drink [your mother's] milk!' Caitanya replied, 'Listen Five Faced One [Śiva]. Having become intoxicated with her passion, she has forgotten the injunctions. First give her the mantra which bestows the name of Kṛṣṇa, and by the power of the perfected name her ear will become purified. If her ear is impure when she takes the mahāmantra, then the initiation will be incomplete. Understand this clearly! Until my mother receives initiation and hears the name of Kṛṣṇa, I cannot drink her milk.' Prabhu [Advaita] requested, 'Tell me the proper way to say the name of Kṛṣṇa.' Caitanya then told him the sixteen name mahāmantra: Hare, Kṛṣṇa, Hare, Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa, Hare, Hare; Hare, Rāma, Hare, Rāma, Rāma, Rāma, Hare, Hare. Even though Advaita well knew this sixteen name [mantra], when he heard it emerge from Caitanya's own mouth he was overwhelmed with divine love. Then, with Advaita showing the utmost respect, he placed the baby Caitanya on his hip and gently carried him to the foot of the nīm tree. He laid Caitanya down, repeating the name 'Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa.' At the touch of Caitanya's feet the tree gained immediate salvation. Advaita imparted the name of Kṛṣṇa to mother Śacī and made her repeat it. He then made her memorize the previously imparted mantra. Then Advaita brought Caitanya and placed him in Śacī's lap. The baby Caitanya drank greedily of the nectar which was his mother's milk. With this experience Śacīmātā was drowning in bliss. Miśra and the others present let fly the name of Hari in a cacophonous thrill. The twice-born and the wives of the same gave their blessings. Prabhu [Advaita] said, 'His name is now Nimāi.' Then Sītanātha [Advaita] let fly a roaring huṃkāra, accompanied by repetitions of the name of Hari. Everyone exclaimed that this old man was himself the lord of physicians [vaidya]. Prabhu [Advaita] responded, 'Nonsense! Why are you praising me? This child has been cured by the properties inherent to the nīm tree. Who can enumerate all the wondrous properties of the nīm tree, whose shade alone is enough to cure a living being of all diseases, whose aroma causes demons and ghouls to flee, at whose foot reigns the Lord-who-wields-the-disc [Viṣṇu].' Having said this, Sītanātha gathered the devotees and passed the entire night singing saṃkīrtana. To see this activity was to benefit the greatest of devotees. Whoever wished to see it was the most blessed. The merit which accrued by witnessing this initial play only by the grace of Kṛṣṇa could not be seen in a ten millions of births....

(continued)

Advaitācārya is made to assume many roles in Īśāna's narrative. By making obeisance to the pregnant womb of Śacī, Advaita is the effective cause of the abortion or stillbirth of her eight daughters, thereby complicating the conception of Caitanya. By imparting the special mantra - again note the seed imagery of that sacred speech - Advaita enables the couple of Śacī and Jagannātha to conceive not one son, but two, an action that parallels his previous pūjā by which he awakened Kṛṣṇa from his cosmic slumber and prompted him to descend to earth. But Advaita endangers the embryo of Caitanya when he performs pūjā in the waters of the Gaṅgā and loses the flower petals from his offering (añjali), which stick to the body of the then-pregnant Śacī. By these overtly inauspicious actions he becomes the covert father of both of Śacī's sons, Viśvarūpa and Viśvambhara, and simultaneously assumes the role of threat to the young hero, recombining those elements of the mythic pattern which had been previously separated. The action in the river introduces for the first time in the narratives of Caitanya's birth the missing heroic element of the child being cast upon the waters - Rank's symbolic expression of birth - albeit here transformed. The symbolism is obvious: the sperm-like petals swim upstream and stick to the body of Śacī, 'impregnating' her. The child is of course in the box or coffin of Śacī's womb and is 'recovered' by the lowly natural parents, Jagannātha and Śacī. In an interesting duplication, the image of Kṛṣṇa is also found in the waters of the Gaṅgā at that time - both Caitanya and Kṛṣṇa in the waters of the womb.

Advaitācārya prophecies Caitanya's greatness and, in effect, usurps the role of Nīlāmbara, Caitanya's astrologer and maternal grandfather. By implication, Advaita has by this substitution become Viśvambhara's ersatz grandfather. Īśāna confirms this when Jagannātha Miśra and Śacī Ṭhākurāṇī both are made disciples of Advaitācārya, making Advaita the young Caitanya's spiritual grandfather. But in an inversion, Advaita also becomes Caitanya's first disciple. When Caitanya refuses to suckle, Advaita is summoned. That the orthopraxic Advaita would want to or consent to enter, much less be allowed into, the polluted, private domain of the new mother is notable for its irregularity. That he could command her to step aside can only signify his status as the true, noble father of Caitanya. The newborn Caitanya explains to Advaita that he must reinitiate Śacī with the proper mantra, and so, feigning ignorance, Advaita asks that Gaura tell him what that mantra is. When Caitanya whispers the mantra in the ear of Advaita, the latter is initiated as Caitanya's first student. With this mahāmantra Advaita subsequently impregnates Śacī's ear - another self-fathering transformation - which allows her, to the relief of all, to give suck to the child. Through these substitutions, Advaita assumes the role of Caitanya's grandfather, father, and son. And Śacī, Caitanya's natural mother, is shown by stark contrast only to be the humble parent who is privileged to nurture the hero with her breasts' milk, thereby maintaining Rank's prediction of high- and low born parents.

Advaita also appropriates other of Śacī's maternal roles. As noted, the child is able to suckle only by his intervention. Advaita carries Caitanya outside the house for the first time - an act reserved only for close relatives, generally a parent - but does so with the child 'on his hip,' the way that women carry children. Finally, Advaita christens the child with a protective nickname, again a woman's prerogative. The etiology of the name Nimāi differs from that found in other narratives and reflects back onto Advaita the credit for saving the young boy's life: Advaita is the world's foremost physician, healing the woes that afflict humankind. Of course, this is exactly why Kṛṣṇa himself has descended to earth. To Advaita's other roles, then, Īśāna has added that of mother, or at least midwife and nurse, if not in substitution for the incarnation of Kṛṣṇa himself. For Advaita did after all save the avatāra. He performed his inseminating pūjā from within a cave - an obvious second womb - in the primal womb of the river's waters. It was Advaita who was in the river already when he dropped the flower petals - the exposure in the river representing birth. It would seem that Īśāna is, perhaps unwittingly, attempting to substitute Advaita for Caitanya or at least convey the idea that they are the same or at least exist in symbiosis, for, if we read these statements properly, the two are born together. At the very least, Advaita is made into one of Caitanya's gurus, a point that is symbolically but covertly stated through the replication of the cave/womb imagery in Caitanya's initiatory experience many years later. Nor would it seem to be a coincidence that Īśāna points out that while this was going on, Advaita's competitor, Nityānanda, was miles away in the region of Rāḍha. The message is unmistakable: if you have Caitanya-bhakti, then you must thank Advaitācārya for it; and you probably do not even need Caitanya to be saved. Advaita in his every action demonstrates exemplary devotion and, appropriate to that ideal, remains humble in his refusal to take any credit for the event, even though it was only through his deliberate intervention that the dhāman descended. So it remained for his follower, Īśāna Nāgara, to make it public as it 'really' happened.

Ha ha. Those Gaudiya theology/rasa meanders with their double or triple meaning do have charm. Even if they border on being self-indulgent at times.


Interesting...

Deploying The Text To Political Advantage: The Myth of History

The first three narratives by Murāri, Jayānanda, and Kṛṣṇadāsa make clear that the narrative structure is stable and that their differences do not diverge in any terribly significant way. Rather, what differences there are tend only to highlight certain theological preferences and the author's positioning of the birth in the light of antecedent birth narratives. But the version by Īśāna significantly restructures the basic plot of the myth itself. This restructuring so thoroughly favors his lineage master, Advaitācārya, that it must be explained. The unmistakable message of the Advaita Prakāśa - the importance of and need to elevate Advaitācārya - emerges more clearly by analyzing the changing patterns of the hero myth within the biographical tradition. While no one should be surprised that a hagiography dedicated to Advaita would send such a strong message of support, it is very surprising that Īśāna feels the need to make the point with such a heavy hand. Why, we might ask, would Īśāna feel compelled to trumpet his guru's accomplishments so many years after Caitanya's passing, when the Vaisnava community already knew well and attested Advaita's centrality? Without going into a tedious and extended analysis of the theology and history of the Advaita Prakāśa, I would propose that this small episode can serve as an indicator of a trend of very self-conscious response by Īśāna to a very real or perceived threat, that is, a challenge to the authority of Advaita and his lineage.²¹ That Īśāna must promote his guru so vigorously suggests that Advaita's position in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava community at the time of this composition was not as secure as one might casually surmise, given the eulogies heaped on Advaita's head in both the vernacular and Sanskrit writings of the movement's first decades in the early sixteenth century. Advaita, who was by most measures Caitanya's 'right-hand' man, had only one competitor for rank and seniority among the Vaisnavas of Bengal: Nityānanda, the avadhūta ascetic and probable Tantric, whom scholars have indirectly characterized as Caitanya's 'left-hand.' Judging from the pointed statements in the Advaita Prakāśa, Nityānanda's popularity may well be the primary stimulus for Īśāna's mission. Yet by relying on the basic structure of the original myth, the 'rewriting' serves to minimize the confrontational nature of the counter-attack, which is another way of saying that Īśāna can disagree without having to break with the community altogether. This tack would seem to be prudent, since the most likely intertextual opponent is the Caitanya Caritāmṛta, the dominant biographical narrative to this day. It is the Caitanya Caritāmṛta that first actively questions Advaita's authority and even demotes him to a position of secondary theological relevance and social standing. None of the other biographies criticize Advaita or his lineage. Yet, the Caitanya Caritāmṛta was written much later than the purported date of the Advaita Prakāśa.

The two senior devotees, Advaita and Nityānanda, could hardly have been any more different; and it is clear, based on the numerous references in the biographies, that they were on occasion downright antagonistic towards each other. Their interaction was often marked by pointed exchanges. For example, much is made of how Nityānanda, in the throes of ecstasy, deliberately defiled Advaita's Brāhmaṇical purity in a seemingly juvenile food-fight (CC 2.3.76-99, 2.12. 185-93). In Īśāna's retelling of Caitanya's birth, it seems highly predictable that Nityānanda's absence would be prominently noted: Nityānanda was in the region of Rāḍha, miles away from the locus of this important action. That deliberate point - Nityānanda is the only other disciple of Caitanya to be singled out in this episode, save the converted Muslim Haridāsa, whose humility and social position prevented him from having his own disciples - seems to quicken the real tension. A glance at the literature of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas reveals that no devotee from this period has written a hagiography exclusively devoted to Nityānanda; his biography is presented solely in connection with the life of Caitanya.²² Advaita, on the other hand, stands apart as the only devotee of Caitanya's generation to be the subject of his own hagiography; there are several in Bengali, including the Advaita Maṅgala of Haricarana Dāsa (1373 BS), Narahari Dāsa's Advaita Vilāsa (H. Dāsa 471 GA), Janāika Kṛṣṇadāsa's Advaitasūtra Kaḍacā (Bhattacharjee 1978), and Īśāna Nāgara's Advaita Prakāśa, and one in Sanskrit depicting his early years, the Bālyalīlāsūtra of Lāuḍīya Kṛṣṇadāsa (1332 BS), among reports of others.²³ Unlike the biographies of Caitanya, which began to circulate perhaps as early as the last years of his life, Advaita's biographies do not appear until decades later. That they appear at all suggests that Advaita had achieved an independent status of his own quite apart from Caitanya or, read conversely, that his eminence was seen to have been tarnished to the point that his followers felt the need to rehabilitate him. In fact, both seem to be the case.

The two longest and easily the most popular biographies of Caitanya, Vṛndāvana Dāsa's Caitanya Bhāgavata and Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja's Caitanya Caritāmṛta, have become the sanctioned standards for interpreting the master's life. They represent the beginning and the end of that tradition by their respective emphases on the early and later parts of Caitanya's life and in their mirror-like structures. They also bracket the biographical tradition in their dates of composition: the Caitanya Bhāgavata composed in the 1540s shortly after Caitanya's death, and the Caitanya Caritāmṛta no later than 1612. Kṛṣṇadāsa is largely responsible for creating this expectation in a series of metaphors that pair the two texts (CC 1.8.29-45, 1.8.76-77, 1.11.52, 1.13.46, 2.1.3-9, 3.20.63-82) as the most fundamental formulations of Caitanya's life (Stewart 1994: 244-48). What Kṛṣṇadāsa does not stress, however, is the fact that both of these texts and their authors fall within Nityānanda's spiritual lineage. Significantly, none of Caitanya's biographers are in Advaita's lineage. And the portrayal of Advaita in these biographies, while on the whole complimentary, is not devoid of its denigrating side, a point that comes to a head in the Caitanya Caritāmṛta, the most influential of all. It is often the case that Advaita is shown to be absent at critical junctures, especially theologically significant ones; the sole exception being the birth, for which he is given hearty credit by all. It is, in fact, one of the few opportunities for Advaita to appear without supporting cast, and for this reason, it is no surprise that Īśāna would seize the opportunity. In the opening passages of the Caitanya Caritāmṛta, Kṛṣṇadāsa, however, establishes very quickly the superior place of his guru, Nityānanda, relative to that of Advaita, by delineating their respective relationships to Caitanya and then elaborately describing their disciplic lineages. Nityānanda's theological relevance is second only to Caitanya (CC 1.5) and shown to be considerably greater than Advaita's (CC 1.6) by this hierarchical ranking. Nityānanda's social presence is greater still, judging from the numbers of followers who are so painstakingly described by Kṛṣṇadāsa (CC 1.11-12). Advaita is relegated to a respectable but distant third position on both counts. Kṛṣṇadāsa gets more personal, however, when he recounts a story that points an accusing finger at Advaita and some of his disciples. Advaita and some of his closest associates, it would seem, had at one point apparently lapsed in their devotional stand and apparently revived the prior perspective of Vedāntin (as Advaita's name implies) and ritual pūjakā. This monistic stance is repugnant to theists generally and especially so to Kṛṣṇadāsa and the Gosvāmin community whose writings he so carefully followed. In the theological explanation of Advaita's place, Kṛṣṇadāsa points out that Advaita's disciples do not gain the more satisfying place in heavenly Vṛndāvana next to Kṛṣṇa, but gain the inferior sarūpya mukti which leads to an unthinkable loss of personal identity in siddhaloka (CC 1.6.28).²⁴ Advaita, says Kṛṣṇadāsa, not only studied the way of knowledge (jñāna) but also actively taught it (CC 1.12.37-38, 1.17.62-64) and managed to entice a number of his disciples to accept it over bhakti; or at least sufficient numbers broke away serving to split his following (CC 1.12.1-9, 1.12.64-70). Finally, Kṛṣṇadāsa deftly places the accusation in the mouth of his guru, Nityānanda. It was during one of the group feasts, when Caitanya was serving all of the devotees, that Nityānanda took the opportunity to raise the issue to Advaita's face (CC 2.12.190-93):

[190] Nityānanda said, 'You are Advaita Ācārya; the practice of pure bhakti is hindered by the advaita doctrine of nondualism. [191] Whoever is associated with your doctrine knows no duality, only the singular component of oneness. [192] I am eating in the same place with the likes of you; I do not know of what sort is my fate for associating with you.' [193] In this way the two argued....

This small example illustrates the sensitivity of these texts to their social and theological climes and their overt and deliberate use as political tools; Kṛṣṇadāsa made it abundantly clear that he was trying to correct what he and his gurus perceived to be as mistakes and misapprehensions on the part of the practicing community. Kṛṣṇadāsa wrote at the behest of the Gosvāmins in Vṛndāvana, and using their theology he wrote with a mission. His charge was one of guiding the Bengali-speaking community to the path of proper devotion as the Gosvāmins knew it. His zeal apparently irritated some devotees as much as it pleased others. At the beginning of the second book (Madhya Līlā), Kṛṣṇadāsa takes the opportunity to answer certain detractors who had apparently read with some dismay the heavily Sanskritized theological sections of the opening book (Ādi Līlā). He defends his blatantly didactic procedure as one that captures more closely the reality of Caitanya's appearance on this earth (CC 2.2.74-77). But in the middle of this passage (v. 75) he lets slip the following disclaimer: 'I have no quarrel with anyone, I have no ax to grind. I describe the matters simply...' That he would feel compelled to deny that he was involved in a political crusade or that he had singled out individual texts or the groups that supported them as targets for his teaching, suggests that he was very consciously using the writing of this biography for overtly political ends (and that he probably was guilty as charged). From this and other comments, it becomes clear that he was acutely aware of the use to which texts such as his own could be put in the power struggles within the community. And it is to this pointed appraisal that the theology and narrative priority given to Advaita in the Advaita Prakāśa seem to respond - yet the dates are not reconcilable as reported.

The Advaita Prakāśa attests to its composition in 1569, a good forty years prior to the completion of the Caitanya Caritāmṛta. How then might we argue that the Advaita Prakāśa is answering the Caitanya Caritāmṛrta? The heavy handedness of Īśāna's narrative gives us the first clue, for the stature of Advaita, and any concern over his possible relapse into the throes of jñāna, does not occupy any of the other biographers of the sixteenth century. This kind of positioning does, however, occupy many authors in the generations of the seven teenth and later centuries, especially the late nineteenth and twentieth. With this suspicion raised, and knowing how these documents can and were used to make political claims, a rereading of the portions of the birth narrative that do not conform to the hero pattern gives us a second corroborative clue. The statement occurs in the explanation of the reasons for Caitanya's descent:

When he assumed the dharma appropriate to a living being, he would be plunged into human suffering; nonetheless, Kṛṣṇa manifested himself in order to reveal himself to the world. Śrī Nandanandana made three wishes; and so he assumed the effulgence [kānti] of Śrī Rādhā's emotional state. In the unique gold form he descended to Nadīyā (AP p. 42).

The three wishes can only refer to the three primary reasons for Kṛṣṇa's incarnation according to the theory of the androgynous descent. This theory, which is found articulated exclusively in Kṛṣṇadāsa's Caitanya Caritāmṛta (1.4; and confirmed in 2.8) goes like this: Kṛṣṇa, whose love play with Rādhā produced an ever-spiraling increase in pleasure, realized that he was not able to have the highest experience of love; that was reserved exclusively for Rādhā, because she tasted his love directly and he is svayaṃ bhagavān, the ultimate devotional object. So he resolved to remedy the situation that frustrated him. There are, says Kṛṣṇadāsa, three things Kṛṣṇa sought to discover. First, Kṛṣṇa wanted to know just how great was Rādhā's love (CC 1.4.89-92); second, how great was his own sweetness (1.4.119-35); and third, and most significant, how great was Rādhā's happiness and pleasure resulting from her experience of Kṛṣṇa (1.4.136-78) (Stewart n.d.: Introduction, part 1, section 6.2). Kṛṣṇa concludes that he simply must take on the identity of Rādhā herself and yet retain his own identity if he is to satisfy his desires, so he does precisely that (CC 1.4.179-82). The result is the now-standard androgyne, the dual-incarnation of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa fused in a single form.

The significance of this statement for our argument is, of course, the fact that no other biographer or theologian is known to have articulated this theory in writing. Kṛṣṇadāsa himself credits Svarūpa Dāmodara, Caitanya's personal amanuensis during his years in Purī. But manuscripts of Svarūpa's text, if it was indeed a written text at all, have never been located; and what we know of it comes exclusively through Kṛṣṇadāsa's own reconstruction based on first-hand information from Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmin, who was Svarūpa's favored student and Kṛṣṇadāsa's śikṣa-guru. Not even the prolific Kavikarṇapūra, who composed two biographical and several related theological works devoted to Caitanya, mentions this theory, even though he knew Svarūpa well enough to utilize some of his other theological speculation. Whether Svarūpa was responsible for the theory of the dual-incarnation or not - and there is no reason to think that he was not the originator of the theory - it appears not to have been circulated as common knowledge until after the writing of the Caitanya Caritāmṛta. Had it been popular earlier, it seems highly unlikely that no other biographer would have stated it, for each author is forced to articulate a theological position, no matter how trivial or unsophisticated it may be. The Advaita Prakāśa would then appear to have been composed considerably later than it claims. The possibility that the Advaita Prakāśa was composed in direct response to the Caitanya Caritāmṛta and in the context of the subsequent devaluation of the Advaitācārya lineage - as detected by examining the differences in the treatment of the standard heroic pattern of birth and the corroboration of overt theological statements imbedded in that narrative - becomes much more certain, if not factually assertable. Īśāna's attempt to rehabilitate Advaita by revising the history of the movement quite conceivably came as a direct response to the communal synthesis that was taking place under the auspices of the so-called three missionaries - Śrīnivāsācārya, Narottama Dāsa, and Śyāmānanda - who used copies of the Caitanya Caritāmṛta to standardize belief and create what has become the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava movement.²⁵

Had the narrative of Caitanya's birth in the Advaita Prakāśa been examined only from the perspective of how it fit positively into the pattern of the hero myth, we would probably have failed to observe this subtle use of biographical narrative to contest social and political position. But by examining the differences - those aspects of the narrative that do not conform - we gain access to primary authorial concern, which may have little or nothing to do with the ostensible subject of the narrative itself. Indeed the handling of this mythology gives us not only a secondary confirmation of relevant concerns, but can also serve as a primary indicator of issues that may have previously escaped notice. Close readings of the mythic paradigms - here the basic hero myth - reveal differences in theological and other interpretations; these differences, in turn, have historical ramifications that reveal much about the author's conception and use of the text as political tool, the author's sense of his work as a document of history. At the same time, this advocacy of the basic paradigm mitigates and dilutes the strength of any challenge to the prevailing authority. By charting the way the mythic pattern of the hero develops in these biographical texts, it becomes clear that the pattern itself has a history, and the more mythicized the pattern becomes, the more historical facts are revealed about the people who wrote and read about the figure of Kṛṣṇa Caitanya. The myth, with its ahistorical patterns, then, becomes another effective tool for historical reconstruction. And in what can only be seen as the ultimate irony, Advaita remains significant not independently, but in his orbit around Caitanya; and while his disciples would have it otherwise, his ascendancy is very much on the order of Rāhu's, who having swallowed the moon, cannot eclipse it permanently, but will forever enjoy from it that touch of immortality.



21. According to Bruce Lincoln (1989: Chapter 2, 3, and especially 9), historical problems are in fact often vetted through the restructuring of myth (or the rewriting of history), but in ways that do not overtly challenge the status quo, rather covertly or subtly undermine it. This is accomplished by reshaping the expectation of the auditor or reader by inverting the old order. The narrative of the Advaita Prakāśa may well be an example of just this kind of inversion. It should be noted that Lincoln's distinctions of myth and history are not quite as useful in this particular context, even though his general observations on the nature of this discourse are.
22. The alleged Nityānanda Caritāmṛta is in fact nothing more than excerpts taken verbatim from Vṛndāvana Dāsa's Caitanya Bhāgavata. Considerably later the lineage produces a vaṃṣāvali and related genealogical works outlining the guru-parāṃparās.
23. For a detailed study of the biographical tradition of Advaitācārya, see Manring (1995). Manring has also included accounts of Lokanātha Dāsa's Śītācaritra, Devakīnandana Dāsa's Advaitoddeśadīpikā, Kānudeva Gosvāmī's Advaitasvarūpāmṛta, numerous manuscripts titled Advaitasūtra Kaḍacā, the unattributed Nitāi Advaita Tattva, and two different Advaita Vilāsa compositions.
24. For the four types of mukti, see Caitanya Caritāmṛta 1.3.15-16, 1.4.śl.36-37, 1.5.26, 2.6.239-43, 2.19.śl.24,2.24.śl.66, 3.3.śl.12. Mukti in any form is considered by most Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas and certainly by Kṛṣṇadāsa to be the result of lower-order vidhi bhakti (CC 1.4.15, 2.25.29.57.2-3), which fits Advaita's position as ritualist. It is rejected as selfish (CC 1.4.172) and generally equal to gaining hell (CC 2.9.243-44).
25. Six months after this essay was submitted, and just prior to its final correction, Manring shared with me a suspicion that Acyutacaraṇa Caudhurī personally composed nearly the entire corpus of Advaita lineage hagiography, including the Advaita Prakāśa, Bālyalīlāsūtra, and the Śītācaritra, in the early twentieth century. All of these texts are, of course, attributed to historical figures from the Advaita-vaṃśa. Her argument is based on close textual analyses, examination of extant manuscripts (many of which are 'missing'), and interviews with other Vaiṣṇavas regarding the life of Acyutacaraṇa (who was not surprisingly a pious Vaiṣṇava from Sylhet and himself in Advaita's lineage), especially his receipt of the honorary title 'Tattvanidhi,' which was awarded for Vaiṣṇava scholarship. These preliminary observations were presented in an unpublished paper at the Pacific Northwest Regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion (Manring 1996). This of course corroborates this paper's conclusion that the Advaita Prakāśa could not possibly have been composed when it claimed. This is also seconded by her observation that unlike any other Advaita hagiographical material, the Advaita Prakāśa contains many strange and unusual tales and far more detail regarding events which had been glossed in earlier works - an indirect confirmation of its later dating by virtue of the principle suggested above in n.7. Our independently reached conclusions about authorship subsequently led to a collaborative article (Stewart and Manring 1996 97).

Well, that's the entire paper. Copy-pasting from an extremely poor quality PDF meant that I had to practically rewrite the whole thing here as well as sanskritize words using the HK convention, so I hope everyone enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! I won't bother putting up the references used for this paper as I'm attaching the file to this post and interested people can look at it themselves if they like.

Really interesting paper. One of the initial thoughts I had was that, despite mentioning the Caitanya Bhagavata in several places, why did Stewart not use it for his analysis of the birth myth? As I recall, CB was an especially beautiful (read: gushy) text with plenty of Rahu-type symbolisms when describing the environment and political context that Caitanya was born into. These contexts seemed to be somewhat overplayed in trying to match the birth of Caitanya with the descriptions of Krishna's birth in the Srimad-Bhagavata (SB), I thought so because I remember thinking that that the author Vrindavan das Thakur didn't do a very good job. Krishna's birth is highly mythical while seeming to be realistic and historical in terms of bygone ages, but the circumstances of Caitanya's birth are very much in the present-day and can rely on even more 'realistic' storytellings. I'll have to read it again to be sure but as I recall, the devotees were in constant grief over being persecuted for their devotional practices from both the ruling (Muslim) government as well as their hostile neighbours, who protested at their uninterrupted chanting and kirtan taking place all day and night.

Funnily enough even as a devotee I thought this hostility was somewhat justified; it's one thing if you do it during the day but quite another throughout the night, no one likes to have their sleep disturbed. The portrayals in the text, far from presenting them as a persecuted community, ends up making them look like a constantly whining and crying bunch with Advaita Acarya quietly raging at the hostility and swearing to bring about the descent of Krishna as Caitanya.

In any case, I used to love reading the CB because the descriptions of the incidents there were told in an extremely vivid way and sometimes I felt as if I was watching a movie rather than reading a book.

I might have more to say but one thing I loved about this paper is how, through analysing the differences in the birth myths in the various biographies, a lot of strong and subtle hints of community politics becomes uncovered. Some of these themes are carried on to the present-day through the current adherents of such communities. In any case one thing becomes clear; these texts say more about themselves and the ways/circumstances they were written than they reveal of themselves being of "sacred origin".

Any thoughts?

I only just copy and pasted your work into a Word file and haven't read it yet. I would like an e-reader (can anyone recommend one?).

Thanks for all the work you put into this, Brainiac !