Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal | Page 3

earnest fiery nature of Chaitanya, expanded into a faith which moved and led captive the souls of thousands.
His brother Nityanand was now assumed to be an incarnation of Balaram, and took his place as second-in-command in consequence. The practice of meeting for worship and to celebrate "Sankirtans" was now instituted; the meetings took place in the house of a disciple Sribas, and were quite private. The new religionists met with some opposition, and a good deal of mockery. One night on leaving their rendezvous, they found on the door-step red flowers and goats' blood, emblems of the worship of Durga, and abominations in the eyes of a Vaish.nava. These were put there by a Brahman named Gopal. Chaitanya cursed him for his practical joke, and we are told that he became a leper in consequence. The opposition was to a great extent, however, provoked by the Vaish.navas, who seem to have been very eccentric and extravagant in their conduct. Every thing that K.rish.na had done Chaitanya must do too, thus we read of his dancing on the shoulders of Murari Gupta, one of his adherents; and his followers, like himself, had fits, foamed at the mouth, and went off into convulsions, much after the fashion of some revivalists of modern times. The young students at the Sanskrit schools in Nadiya naturally found all this very amusing, and cracked jokes to their hearts' content on the crazy enthusiasts.
In January 1510, Chaitanya suddenly took it into his head to become a Sanyasi or ascetic, and received initiation at the hands of Keshab Bharati of Katwa. Some say he did this to gain respect and credit as a religious preacher, others say it was done in consequence of a curse laid on him by a Brahman whom he had offended. Be this as it may, his craziness seems now to have reached its height. He wandered off from his home, in the first instance, to Puri to see the shrine of Jagannath. Thence for six years he roamed all over India preaching Vaish.navism, and returned at last to Puri, where he passed the remaining eighteen years of his life and where at length he died in the 48th year of his age in 1534 A.D. His Bengali followers visited him for four months in every year and some of them always kept watch over him, for he was now quite mad. He had starved and preached and sung and raved himself quite out of his senses. On one occasion he imagined that a post in his veranda was Radha, and embraced it so hard as nearly to smash his nose, and to cover himself with blood from scraping all the skin off his forehead; on another he walked into the sea in a fit of abstraction, and was fished up half dead in a net by a fisherman. His friends took it in turns to watch by his side all night lest he should do himself some injury.
The leading principle that underlies the whole of Chaitanya's system is Bhakti or devotion; and the principle is exemplified and?illustrated by the mutual loves of Radha and K.rish.na. In adopting this illustration of his principle, Chaitanya followed the example of the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavat Pura.na, and he was probably also influenced in the sensual tone he gave to the whole by the poems of Jayadeva. The Bhakta or devotee passes through five successive stages, Santa or resigned contemplation of the deity is the first, and from it he passes into Dasya or the practice of worship and service, whence to Sakhya or friendship, which warms into Batsalya_, filial affection, and lastly rises to _Madhurya or earnest, all-engrossing love.
Vaish.navism is singularly like Sufiism, the resemblance has often been noticed, and need here only be briefly traced. [Footnote: Conf. Capt. J. W. Graham's paper 'On Sufiism,' Bombay Literary Soc. Trans. Vol. I. pp. 89 et seqq.; Rajendralala Mittra's valuable introduction to the Chaitanya Chandrodaya (Biblioth. Ind.), pp. ii-iv and xv; also Jones' 'Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindus,' _Asiat. Res._ Vol. III. pp. 165-207; and Leyden, 'On the Rosheniah Sect, &c.,' As. Res. Vol. XI. pp. 363-428.--ED.] With the latter the first degree is nasut or 'humanity' in which man is subject to the law shara_, the second _tarikat, 'the way' of?spiritualism, the third 'aruf or 'knowledge,' and the fourth hakikat or 'the truth.' Some writers give a longer series of grades, thus--talab,_ 'seeking after god;' _'ishk, 'love;' m'arifat_, 'insight;' _istighnah, 'satisfaction;'?tauhid_, 'unity;' _hairat, 'ecstacy;' and lastly?fana, 'absorption.' Dealing as it does with God and Man as two factors of a problem, Vaish.navism necessarily ignores the distinctions of caste, and Chaitanya was perfectly consistent in this respect, admitting men of all castes, including Muhammadans, to his sect. Since his time, however, that strange love of