Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c5.s2.27

c5.s2.27

It appears probable, on the other hand, that Mādhavendra Purī and his disciple Īśvara Purī were Śaṃkarite Saṃnyāsins of the same type as Śrīdhara Svāmin,³ who in his great commentary on the Śrīmad-bhāgavata attempted to combine the Advaita teachings of Śaṃkara with the emotionalism of the Bhāgavatas. Devotion to Nārāyaṇa or Kṛṣṇa was never considered inconsistent with one's belonging to the Śaṃkara Sampradāya, and many a Śaṃkarite ascetic has taught that the stage of Advaita realisation can be reached through the devotional worship of a particular deity as a person or as a symbol. It is said that the tutelary deity of Śaṃkara himself was Śrīkṛṣṇa, while tradition alleges that his chief disciple Padmapāda, like Śrīdhara himself, was a worshipper of Nṛsiṃha. It would seem that about the time of Śrīdhara there must have grown a tendency of tempering the severe monistic idealism of Advaita Vedānta with the devotional worship of a personal god. Śrīdhara appears to give a definite expression to this tendency in his well known commentaries on the Viṣṇu-purāṇa, the Bhagavad-gītā and the Śrīmad-bhāgavata, in which he acknowledges Śaṃkara's teachings as authoritative, but considers Bhakti as the best means of Advaita Mukti.¹ Whatever may be the value of this attempt at reconciling Jñāna and Bhakti, tradition alleges that Śrīdhara's interpretation caused a great sensation in his Sampradāya at Benares, but that it ultimately came to prevail through divine intervention. From his time a class of mystic-emotional Saṃnyāsins seems to have grown up, who found nothing inconsistent in their practices of Bhakti with their belief in Advaita Vedānta. An Advaita Saṃnyāsin of this type must have been Viṣṇu Purī of Tirhut, who is often mistakenly described as a Mādhava ascetic². Following the tradition of Śrīdhara, he composed a *Bhāgavata-bhakti-ratnāvali* in which some of the finest passages of the *Śrīmad-bhāgavata* were selected and arranged in "thirteen strings" according to their subject-matter. One of the closing verses of this work apologises for any departure the compiler might have made from the writings of the great Śrīdhara³; and there can be no doubt about Śrīdhara's influence on this work. Some of Viṣṇu Purī's original verses are cited in the *Padyāvalī* of Rūpa Gosvāmin, and no one can mistake their devotional fervour¹. Mādhavendra Purī and Īśvara Purī were probably devotional Śaṃkarites of the same type, and the descriptions given of their religious attitude in the earlier Bengali Vaiṣṇava works, which however never call them Mādhava ascetics, fully bear out their emotional predilections. Caitanya himself was probably initiated as a Saṃnyāsin of this type, although his own religious experiences made him go a long way into the extreme emotional attitude of Bhakti, for which he is reported to have been ridiculed by the Saṃnyāsins of Benares. We shall see presently that his belonging to a particular Sampradāya hardly made any difference to his personal religious consciousness, that the movement he inaugurated had nothing to do with the strict