The life and times of Lord Chaitanya

Lord Chaitanya, discovered, was considered an especially confidential and esoteric incarnation of God by the orthodox Gaudiya Vaishnavas, who base their conclusion on prophecies from the ancient Vedic scriptures. These scriptures foretold that God Himself would descend in the current age as a perfect devotee, and that He would start a movement based upon the chanting of the holy name of the Lord. The prediction, in fact, came to pass, for Lord Chaitanya spearheaded a spiritual renaissance in sixteenth-century India that had as its foundation the chanting of the Hare Krishna maha-mantra.

🔹To be sure, there have been great religious reformations and spiritual uprisings in the Western world. But to my mind, the depth and profundity of the tradition that was revitalized by Lord Chaitanya is incomparable to anything before or since. And Shrila Prabhupada represented the tenth generation of perfect masters in an esoteric line of disciplic succession (parampara) from the Lord Himself.² (See chart on page xzz.) Enthusiastic if also unqualified to become part of that prestigious disciplic chain, I was initiated by Shrila Prabhupada in July 1975.

🔹As I continued my research, I found that Lord Chaitanya's achievements were not simply abstract or philosophical. Five hundred years before Gandhi, this remarkable personality inaugurated a massive nonviolent civil-disobedience movement against the Islamic occupational government in India. He swept aside many of the stifling restrictions of the hereditary caste system and made it possible for all people to transcend social barriers and achieve the highest platform of spiritual enlightenment.

🔹In doing so, He freed India's religious life from the stranglehold of a proud, intellectual elite. Superseding popular but outmoded rituals and superficial formulas, He introduced a revolutionary spiritual movement based on the world's oldest and most comprehensive religious scriptures, the Vedas. This movement, He taught, would have universal appeal because it was based upon the Absolute Truth, which transcends sectarian notions of race or creed. Lord Chaitanya's theory has today been proven; His movement has been spread to every nation of the world by Shrila Prabhupada and his International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

Steven J. Rosen