A proud young logician from Bengal traded debate for dancing in the streets
Nimai Pandit was a star teacher of logic in Nabadwip who loved beating senior scholars in argument. After a trip to Gaya around 1508, he shut his school and threw himself into ecstatic group chanting of Krishna's names. As Chaitanya, he founded Gaudiya Vaishnavism and popularised the Hare Krishna mantra.
Born Vishvambhara in February 1486 during a lunar eclipse, he was the tenth child of a Brahmin couple whose eight daughters had died in infancy. Neighbours nicknamed him Nimai, since he was born under a neem tree, and Gaura for his golden complexion. Stories paint a mischievous boy who stole milk and rice, teased girls at the river and supposedly bewildered two kidnappers into carrying him home. He mastered Sanskrit grammar and neo-logic so fast that, by sixteen, he ran his own school.
Legend says he drowned a brilliant logic commentary in the Ganges so as not to outshine a friend. His first wife died of snakebite while he toured East Bengal debating for money. Travelling to Gaya to perform funeral rites for his father, he met the ascetic Ishvara Puri, took initiation, and came back transformed, falling into trances and crying out for God. When the local ruler, the Chand Kazi, banned congregational chanting, Chaitanya led thousands in a peaceful march to his house, and the ruler reportedly came round.
At twenty-four, in 1510, he took monastic vows at Katwa and settled, at his mother's wish, in Puri in Odisha. He won over the celebrated monist Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya, spent about two years touring south India, and refused to meet King Prataparudra as a worldly man until he saw the king sweeping the road before the festival chariot. Visiting Vrindavan around 1515, he instructed the brothers Rupa and Sanatana, former ministers of the Bengal sultan, whose writings shaped the tradition. He spent his last two decades in Puri and died sometime between 1528 and 1534.
The eight-verse Shikshashtakam is the only work accepted as his. His theology, later systematised by Jiva Goswami, holds that the soul and God are both different and not different in a way beyond understanding. The historian Dinesh Chandra Sen stressed his claim that love of God erases the line between Brahmin and Sudra. Everything known about him comes from devotional biographies that treat him as Krishna himself.
Source: Chaitanya Mahaprabhu
