Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c6.s2.113

c6.s2.113

Surrounded as he always was by a big crowd, Caitanya now prepared to leave for Vṛndāvana. But the frank and incisive criticism of his new follower Sanātana that it was not proper for a devotee to start on a pilgrimage accompanied by a million men.¹ made him abandon his project and return to Puri. Soon after, within a few months, he set out once more at about Saka 1436 (=1514 A.D.), but this time he stole away with only one follower accompanying him. His northern tour was not so extensive as his southern and western pilgrimage. We need not linger over the scenes of devotional ecstasy which the sacred associations of Vṛndāvana naturally produced on a devotee of his emotional capacity; but the visit to Vṛndāvana is otherwise devoid of any striking external incident. On his way back he spent a few days at the Kumbha Melā, the great bathing festival, at Prayāga (Allahabad) where he must have met many saintly ascetics and scholars. Here he appears to have met a Vaidika Brahman named Vallabha Bhaṭṭa, who cannot be the famous Vallabhācārya, and a Vaiṣṇava scholar of Tirhut, named Raghupati Upādhyāya, some of whose devotional verses are cited in the *Padyāvalī*² and in the *Caitanya-caritāmṛta* of Kṛṣṇadāsa.³ He was also joined by one of his two new Bengal recruits, Rūpa, who had now, with his younger brother Anupama (*alias* Vallabha), left home to follow him. Rūpa's elder brother Sanātana came to meet Caitanya later on at Benares. With the exeption of the so-called conversion of a leading Vedāntist, Prakāśānanda¹. Caitanya's presence at Benares does not appear to have been very fruitful, and made little impression in that great centre of Śiva-worship and Advaita Vedānta.² At Benares, as well as at Puri, Caitanya is represented by Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja as giving elaborate instruction to Sanātana and Rūpa in the dogmas and doctrines of the cult, but the six long chapters of the biography which are devoted to this detailed theological exposition merely give a direct summary, with free quotations, of the learned works which the two brothers themselves composed later on.³