Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c6.s1.t7.4

c6.s1.t7.4

by the refusal of orthodox recognition for its unconventional contents and its unorthodox picture of Caitanya, but by the fact that, though no particular motive for the alleged forgery is suggested, the original manuscript or manuscripts have disappeared, that no other manuscript is forthcoming, and that the printed text has undoubtedly been modified and modernised¹ (probably, as suggested, by the well intentioned but entirely misdirected zeal of its first editor) and presents an appearance of modernity. The probability of interpolation is also not excluded; as a matter of fact there are some passages which have almost identical phrasing with those in Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja's work, and look suspiciously like direct incorporation.² It is difficult to pronounce a definite judgment, but it seems probable that some of the matter it contains is old; and this internal evidence itself, in the absence of other proofs, makes the genuineness of the general substance of the work extremely plausible. The other extant biographies of Caitanya are indeed vague and meagre in information regarding his South and West Indian pilgrimage, which¹ was possibly not so well known from direct evidence; but this work supplies a fairly large amount of hitherto unknown details,² which appear to have been drawn from direct evidence or experience. It certainly contains much new, but plausible, information, which has the characteristic of not being inspired by devotional propagandism, but which was probably the result of vivid personal knowledge. The work is incomplete and contains a record of barely two years' wanderings in the South and West of India, and its genuineness or otherwise would not very seriously affect the general story of Caitanya's life; but it certainly gives a most human picture of one who has been so often and so grotesquely¹ deified, and presents a plain and vivid narrative by a sincere lover of the Master, who was dominated neither by learned dogmatics nor by excessive fanatical devotion.