Chaitanya's Life and Teachings : from His Contemporary Bengali
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CD BL 124-5 V36 K7713I 1922 I . KOKIL & CO., ORIENTAL ROOK SELL 49, Mohammed Ah BOMBAY.40000X CHAITANYA S LIFE AND TEACHINGS From his contemporary Bengali biography the Chaitanya-charit-amrita : Translated into English BY JADUNATH SARKAR, M.A., I.E.S. SECOND EDITION, Revised and enlarged, with topographical notes. 1922 M. C. SARKAR & SONS, CALCUTTA, LUZAC & Co., LONDON. Rs. 2. PUBLISHED BY S. C. L$ARKAR M. C. Sarkar & Sons, 90/2A, Harrison Road, Calcutta. PRINTER : S. C. MAZUMDAR SRI GOURANGA PRESS Calcutta. 71/1, Mirzapur Street, 1481/21. TO Professor RAJA GOPALACHARIAR, M.A., B.L., WHO HAS DONE SO MUCH TO MAKE THE VAISHNAV SAINTS OF THE SOUTH KNOWN TO US, I DEDICATE THIS ATTEMPT TO PLACE THE ORIGINAL LIFE OF CHAITANYA THE GREATEST VAISHNAV TEACHER OF THE NORTH WITHIN THE REACH OF ALL READERS OF ENGLISH WHO KNOW NOT THE BENGALI TONGUE. PATNA COLLEGE, THE AUTHOR AND HIS BOOK Krishna-das Kaviraj, the author of the Chaitanya- chari^dmrita, was born in the Vaidya caste, at Jhamatpur, a village of the Katwa sub-division of the Burdwan district in Bengal, (1496 A.D.) Having lost his parents in early life, h was brought up by his late father s sister. He read Persian at the village school, and then began to study Sanskrit in order to qualify himself for practising Hindu medicine, the profession of his caste. Every part of his great poem bears evidence to his profound mastery of Sanskrit literature, particularly of the Bhdgabat Purdn. The young orphan, while still unmarried, was converted to Vaishnavism by Nityananda, and begged his way on foot to Brindaban, where he spent the remainder of his long life in religious study, meditation and worship. He was initiated as a Vaishnav monk by Raghunath-das, who along with Swarup Damodar had been body-servants to Chaitanya during that saint s stay at Jagannath. From his guru, Krishna- das learned the particulars of Chaitanya s life and teaching which he has embodied in the present biography. His first efforts at authorship were in Sanskrit and dealt with the mysteries of bhakti and the service of Krishna. The great work of his life was the composition -of his old age, and was undertaken at the request of the faithful. Every evening the Bengali Vaishnavs of Brindaban used to gather together and hear the acts of their Master read out from his poetical biography, the Chaitanya Bhdgbat composed by Brindaban-das. But vi CHAITANYA this book dealt with the saint s last years in too meagre and concise a fashion to satisfy the curiosity of his follow ers. They, therefore, led by Haridas Pandit, the chief servitor of the Govindaji temple, pressed Krishna-das to- write a new and fuller life of the Master. The poet was old and infirm, but he regarded the request as a solemn charge which he was not free to decline. That very evening he prayed to the image of Madanmohan, and the god s approbation was shown by a sign, a garland of flowers slipping down from his neck at the end of the prayer ! On the bank of the Rddha-kunda tank, the aged Krishna-das completed his Chaitanya-charit-dmrita in 1582 after nine years of unremitting toil. It is divided into three Books, the Adi Lild, the Madhya Lild, and the Antya Lild, dealing respectively with the three stages of Chaitanya s life, viz., (i) the 24 years from his birth to the time of his entering the monastic order, (ii) the six years of his pilgrimage, and (iii) the last eighteen years of his life, which were spent in residence at Puri. In spite of its epic length, prolixity, and repetitions, the Chaitanya-charit-dmrita is a masterpiece of early Bengali literature, and has the further merit of making the subtle doctrines of the Vaishnav faith intelligible to ordinary people. Indeed, the older school of Vaishnav Fathers, as represented by Jiv Goswami, had at first objected to its publication, lest the merits and completeness of this vernacular work should cause the learned Sanskrit treatises on bhakti exegetics to be neglected by the public ! The author s manuscript is still preserved in the Radha- Damodar temple of Brindaban, and worshipped as a holy relic. The Second Book (Madhya Lild), which is the longest BIOGRAPHIES OF CHAITANYA Vll ,and most detailed of the three and the foremost authority on Chaitanya s teachings, life and character, and contains the clearest and fullest exposition of Vaishnav philosophy, has been here translated into English for the first time. Third In the second edition, many long extracts from the the Book (Antya Lild) have been added, to complete story of Chaitanya s doings and sayings at Puri till his death. Readers to whom the Bengali tongue is unknown, will here find an unvarnished account of Chaitanya as his contemporaries knew him, without any modern gloss, is literal in interpolation or criticism. My version ; only, all certain places needless details have been curtailed, texts so repetitions have been avoided, and the freely have quoted by our author from the Sanskrit scriptures been indicated by reference to chapter and verse, instead of being done into English. The word Prabhu, applied by the author to Chaitanya, has been rendered by me as Master. There are three other contemporary lives of Chaitanya in old Bengali. The earliest of them is the Chaitanya Bhdgabat, composed in 1535 A.D., by the Brahman Brindaban-das, a sister s son of Shribas Pandit of of Navadwip. This author (b. 1507, d. 1589) was a votary to was God as incarnate in Nityananda ; him Chaitanya almost a secondary object of adoration. His poem is encumbered with miracles and digressions, and far inferior to Krishna-das s work in wealth of philosophic exposition and description of men and events. Trilochan-das (born 1523) wrote the Chaitanya- Mangal at the age of fourteen ! It is full of marvellous incidents and should be classed with romances rather than with sober histories. Its text is still sung by wandering Vlll CHAITANYA minstrels and is appreciated by the lower ranks of the Vaishnav community. Jayananda Mishra (b. about 1511) wrote his Chaitanya- Mangal about 1568, and his poem gives us much new information about the saint and his family. He is our only authority for the narrative of Chaitanya s death, which I have translated at the end of this work. * * * * In the second edition parts of two chapters of the first edition, viz., xviii. pp. 254-269 and xxii. pp. 290-303, have been omitted, as they can be understood only by very learned Sanskrit scholars, the remaining part of ch. xxii has been incorporated with ch. xxi, while ch. xxiii has been renumbered as xxii. In the present edition, all the chapters from xxiii to the end are taken from the Antya Lild. In preparing the second edition, the translation has been carefully compared with the text and minutely revised. Many mistakes have been detected and cor rected of ; some them came no doubt from the manuscript from which the first edition was printed, but most of the others were due to the inefficiency and carelessness of the press. In going through the original a second time I have in a few places modified my interpretation of the text made twelve years ago. A long and important appendix has now been added, giving the exact situation and some description of the various holy places visited by Chaitanya, (with references to the best and most modern sources of information, such as Gazetteers and maps). A SHORT, LIFE OF CHAITANYA Navadwip, a town in the Nadia district of Bengal, situated on the river Ganges, 75 miles north of Calcutta, was a great trading centre and seat of Hindu learning in the i5th century. Sanskrit logic (nydy) for which Bengal is most famous among all the provinces of India, was very highly developed and studied here, and the fame of its scholars was unsurpassed in the land. But, if we may believe the biographers of Chaitanya, the atmosphere of the town was sceptical and unspiritual. There was a lack of true religious fervour and sincere devotion. Proud of their intellectuality, proud of the vast wealth they acquired by gifts from rich Hindus, the local pandits des pised bhakti or devotion as weak and vulgar, and engaged in idle ceremonies or idler amusements. Vedantism formed the of conversation of topic the cultured few ; wine and goat s meat were taken to kindly by the majority of the people, and such Shakta rites as were accompanied by the offering of this drink and food to the goddess and their subsequent consumption by her votaries, were per formed with zeal and enthusiasm. Jagannath Mishra, surnamed Purandar, a Brahman of the Vaidik sub-caste, had emigrated from his ancestral home in Sylhet and settled here in order to live on the bank of the holy Ganges. His wife was Shachi, a daughter of the scholar Nilambar Chakravarti. One evening in February or March, 1485 A.D., when there was a lunar eclipse at the same time as full moon, a son was born to this couple. It was their tenth child ; the first eight, X CHAITANYA all daughters, had died in infancy, and the ninth, a lad named Vishwarup, had abandoned the world at the age of sixteen when pressed to marry, and had entered a monastery in the Madras presidency. The new-born child was named Vishwambhar. But the women, seeing that his mother had lost so many children before him, gave him the disparaging name of Nimdi or short-lived/ in order to propitiate Nemesis.