Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c6.s2.37

c6.s2.37

father's Śrāddha at the holy place. What exactly happened there is not known, but the sacred surroundings must have strangely stirred the hidden springs of his religious emotion. He himself could hardly express what he found at Gayā to work a wonderful change¹; but the principal factor in the transformation, which his biographers also emphasise, was his meeting there with Īśvara Purī,² the emotional ascetic, who had on a previous occasion tried fruitlessly to win him over to devout life, but who was now voluntarily accepted as a spiritual guide. Īśvara Purī gave him the Kṛṣṇa-Mantra of ten syllables (*daśākṣara*), but the sudden religious awakening in him could hardly be satisfied by such formal initiation. Of the intensity and transforming quality of his religious experience there can be no doubt. The pride of learning was humbled; his love of finery, to which frequent allusions are made by his biographers,³ and care for personal appearance were gone; scholastic pursuits and worldly concerns lost their interest⁴ He had seen one of those mystic visions which turn secularly minded men into god-intoxicated devotees. People said he had come back a mad man, and he certainly behaved as such. When he taught his pupils, the subject of his discourse was Kṛṣṇa, and very soon he had to close his school. Wrapped in mystic and emotional experience, he laughed and wept, raved in abstraction, incessantly shouted Kṛṣṇa's name, and went into those mystic trances which from this time became a striking feature of his religious experience. The change in him became the talk of the town¹ and a matter of anxiety to his relatives; but the small group of Vaiṣṇava devotees, headed by Advaita, saw in him something more than symptoms of lunacy² and welcomed him with hope and joy.