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Updated: June 22, 2025
But he was too generous to succeed in trade and a famine, in which one of his two wives died, brought him to poverty. Thenceforth he devoted himself to praying and preaching. He developed a great aptitude for composing rhyming songs in irregular metre, and like Caitanya he held services consisting of discourses interspersed with such songs, prepared or extempore.
Translated into English Prose from the Original Sanskrit Text by Kisari Mohan Ganguli Scanned and Proofed by Mantra Caitanya. Additional proofing and formatting at sacred-texts.com, by J. B. Hare, October 2003. Om! Having bowed down unto Narayana and Nara, the foremost of male beings, and unto the goddess Sarasvati, must the word Jaya be uttered.
It has been generally assumed that his age has been exaggerated but that the date of his death is correct. If it can be proved, as contended, that he was preaching in 1505, there would be no difficulty in admitting that he was independent of Caitanya and belonged to an earlier phase of the Vishnuite movement which produced the activity of Vallabha and the poetry of Vidyâpati.
Sometimes religion and caste are in opposition, for many modern religious leaders have begun by declaring that among believers there are no social distinctions. This is true not only of teachers whose orthodoxy is dubious, such as Nânak, the founder of the Sikhs, and Basava, the founder of the Lingâyats, but also of Vallabhâcârya and Caitanya. But in nearly all cases caste reasserts itself.
They worship Kṛishṇa and Râdhâ and faith in Kṛishṇa is said to be the only way to salvation. Kṛishṇa was the deity of the earliest bhakti-sects. Then in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was a reaction in favour of Râma as a more spiritual deity, but subsequently Vallabha and Caitanya again made the worship of Kṛishṇa popular.
In the opinion of so competent a judge as Dinesh Chandra Sen, Bengali was raised to the status of a literary language by the Vishnuite hymn-writers just as Pali was by the Buddhists. Such hymns were written before the time of Caitanya but after him they became extremely numerous and their tone and style are said to change.
Although the teaching of Caitanya is not so objectionable morally as the doctrines of the Vallabhis, it follows the same line of making religion easy and emotional and it is not difficult to understand how his preaching, set forth with the eloquence which he possessed, won converts from the lower classes by thousands.
To him God is the lover himself: the sweet flowers, the fresh grass, the gay sound heard in the woods are direct messages and tokens of love to his soul, bringing to his mind at every instant that loving God whom he pictures as ever anxious to win the human heart." Caitanya was born at Nadia in 1485 and came under the influence of the Mâdhva sect.
Like the Vallabhis, this sect deifies its leaders. Six of Caitanya's disciples known as the six Gosains are also greatly venerated and even ordinary religious teachers still receive an almost idolatrous respect. Though Caitanya was not a writer himself he exercised a great influence on the literature of Bengal.
Translated into English Prose from the Original Sanskrit Text by Kisari Mohan Ganguli Scanned and Proofed by Mantra Caitanya. Additional proofing and formatting at sacred-texts.com, by J. B. Hare, October 2003. Om! Having bowed down unto Narayana, and Nara the most exalted of male beings, and unto the goddess Sarasvati, must the word Jaya be uttered!
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