Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c6.s2.123

c6.s2.123

period of Caitanya’s life is made up of these small incidents, as well as by the description of his religious ecstasies. His emotions grew in intensity, and became characterised by excesses of stupor, trances and frenzied energy, verging upon hysteria and dementia. To the faithful the last twelve years of his life consist of an orgy of devotional passion, of an exclusive madness of divine love (*premonmāda*). Day by day he became incapable of taking care of himself, but he was watched and tended with loving solicitude by Svarūpa Dāmodara and other intimate disciples. His prolonged emotional experiences of religious rapture must have made extraordinary demands on his highly wrought nervous system, and brought on exhaustion and constant fits of seizure.¹ Under this increasing strain of an impossible emotionalism his physical frame broke down, and he passed away in Āṣāḍha, Śaka 1455 = June, July, 1533 A.D The piety of his followers has drawn a veil of mystery over the manner of his end; but various legends exist of disappearance in the temple and in the image of Jagannātha, as well as of his accidental drowning in the sea during one of the frequent fits of ecstasy, and even of assassination in the Guṇḍicā temple. One of the less authoritative biographies² records perhaps the actual fact of a less sensational but rather common human death by attributing the end to a wound in the left foot, which he received from a stone during one of his usual outbursts of frenzied dancing, and which brought on septic fever resulting in an untimely death.