Twilight of the Sultanate c18.s5.17

c18.s5.17

For Chaitanya to strive to be near Him and to completely surrender to Him (*prapatti*) was the way to salvation. In relation to God, reason was useless. The Bhakta passes through five successive stages in his goal of salvation. The first is *Santī*, or resigned contemplation; the second *Dasya* or service and servitude to Him. In the third the devotee reaches a stage of *Sākhya* or friendship which warms into the fourth stage of *Vātsalya* or love like that of a child for its parents. The last stage is of *Mādhurya*, earnest and all-engrossing love, love of a woman for her lover. Chaitanya’s biographers claim that he had experienced this last stage of love and combined in himself the unique blending of the two aspects of God—God the lover and God the beloved—represented in Vaishnava literature as Krishna and Radha.