Caitanya

Viśvambhara Miśra, later called Kṛṣṇa Caitanya, was born in 1486 at Navadvīpa in Bengal, into a Brahmin family. He became a brilliant young scholar of Sanskrit grammar and logic. On a visit to Gayā in his early twenties he underwent a conversion to intense devotion to Krishna, and on his return led his followers in kīrtana, ecstatic group singing of the names of God, through the streets of Navadvīpa.

At twenty-four he took the vows of a renunciant. He spent most of his remaining years at Purī, in Orissa, near the temple of Jagannātha, absorbed in states of ecstatic love, and travelled through South India and to Vrindavan, the land of Krishna’s childhood. He died at Purī in 1534.

Caitanya himself wrote almost nothing; eight verses of instruction, the Śikṣāṣṭaka, are attributed to him. His followers, especially the Gosvāmīs of Vrindavan, developed a theology of devotion around his life, and his biographers, notably Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja in the Caitanya Caritāmṛta, presented him as Krishna and Rādhā in one body. The movement he inspired is the source of the modern International Society for Krishna Consciousness.