Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c7.s1.1

c7.s1.1

If Caitanya did not concern himself actively in the work of organising his followers, still less did he take upon himself the work of a thinker or writer. However much intellectual pride he is reported to have possessed in his youth, he gave up his scholastic pursuits almost entirely after his return from Gayā. A man of his great emotional capacity was hardly ever fit for serious or sustained intellectual effort, for which he never showed any particular bent, and which became more and more impossible as years went on. To him spiritual realisation was not a matter of speculative discussion; and on one occasion he confessed to Raghunātha-dāsa¹ that his follower Svarūpa Dāmodara knew more about theology than he himself did. In spite of the fact that some of his scholastic biographers delight in depicting Caitanya as a trained theorist expounding with precision² a whole theological system, we are not sure that he had any settled system in his mind, or ever relished mere theological discourses. The theology that is attributed to him by Kṛṣṇadāsa is clearly the theology of a later day, in which Kṛṣṇadāsa himself was severely trained. This is, however, not the impression given by Murāri-gupta, Vṛndāvana-dāsa and other biographers of the Navadvīpa circle, who avoid the exaggerated scholastic colouring and enlarge more upon Caitanya's ecstatic devotion and power of working miracles. It must not also be forgotten that the significance of Caitanya's teaching lies not so much in his special interpretation of this or that text, but in the reality and force of his inner spiritual experience, which gave him an extraordinary power over the minds of men. The whole trend, indeed, of Caitanya's life was against his being an exact scholar or thinker, and his practice of a highly wrought emotionalism stood in the way of serious intellectual pursuits. When Caitanya closed his *tol* after his return from Gayā, he shut up his books and said to his pupils that for him lessons were finished from that day.¹ The words became almost literally prophetic, for in after-years he hardly ever opened a book for serious study, and hardly ever wrote anything. The scholarly pursuits of a Pandit, the pride of learning, the zest for dialectic disputations—all passed out of his life, which now began to move in a new atmosphere of entirely different interests. Outside the *Śrīmad-bhāgavata*, the newly discovered *Brahma-saṃhitā*, the *Saṃgita-nāṭaka* of Rāmānanda, and the devotional lyrics of Līlāśuka, Jayadeva, Vidyāpati and Caṇḍīdāsa,² he appears to have relished next to nothing.³ It is misdirected zeal which invests him with the false glory of scholastic eminence; his true greatness lies in other directions, and his power over men came from other sources.