"chvsp10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Beames John)

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_