video credit: Radhadhanya
Sri Caitanya Caritamrita, Foreword
Sri Caitanya-caritamrita, by Srila Krishnadasa Kaviraja Gosvami, is the principal work on the life and teachings of Sri Krishna Caitanya Mahaprabhu. Caitanya Mahaprabhu is the pioneer of a great social and religious movement that began in India about five hundred years ago and that has directly and indirectly influenced the subsequent course of religious and philosophical thinking not only in India but throughout the world.
That Sri Krishna Caitanya’s influence has spread so far is due in large part to the efforts of His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the present work’s translator and commentator and the founder and acarya (spiritual guide) of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
Caitanya Mahaprabhu is thus a figure of great historical significance. However, our conventional method of historical analysis-that of seeing a man as a product of his times-fails here, for Sri Krishna Caitanya is a personality who transcends the limited scope of historical settings.
At a time when, in the West, man was directing his explorative spirit toward studying the structure of the physical universe and circumnavigating the world in search of new oceans and continents, Sri Krishna Caitanya, in the East, was inaugurating and masterminding a revolution directed toward a scientific understanding of the highest knowledge of man’s spiritual nature.
The chief historical sources for the life of Sri Krishna Caitanya are the kadacas (diaries) kept by Murari Gupta and Svarupa Damodara Gosvami. Murari Gupta, a physician and close associate of Sri Krishna Caitanya’s, recorded extensive notes on the first twenty-four years of His life, culminating in His initiation into the renounced order, sannyasa. The events of the rest of Caitanya Mahaprabhu’s forty-eight years wererecorded in the diary of Svarupa Damodara Gosvami, another of His inimate associates. Full Foreword
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