Chapter 13: The Advent of Lord Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu

Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu, Nityānanda, Advaita Prabhu, Svarūpa Dāmodara, Rūpa Gosvāmī, Raghunātha dāsa and their followers are all accepted by Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja Gosvāmī. Anyone who follows in the footsteps of Kavirāja Gosvāmī also accepts the lotus feet of the above-mentioned lords as his personal property. For a materialistic person, material wealth and opulence are only illusory. Actually they are not possessions but entanglements because by enjoying the material world a conditioned soul becomes more and more entangled by incurring debts for his present enjoyment. Unfortunately, a conditioned soul considers property for which he is in debt to be his own, and he is very busy acquiring such property. But a devotee considers such property not real property but simply an entanglement in the material world. If Lord Kṛṣṇa is very much pleased with a devotee, He takes away his material property, as stated in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam (10.88.8), where Lord Kṛṣṇa says, yasyāham anugṛhṇāmi hariṣye tad-dhanaṁ śanaiḥ: "To show special favor to a devotee, I take away all his material property." Similarly, Narottama dāsa Ṭhākura says:

dhana mora nityānanda,
rādhākṛṣṇa-śrīcaraṇa
sei mora prāṇadhana

"My real riches are Nityānanda Prabhu and the lotus feet of Śrī Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa." He further prays, "O Lord, kindly give me this opulence. I do not want anything but Your lotus feet as my property." Śrīla Narottama dāsa Ṭhākura has sung in many places that his real property is the lotus feet of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. Unfortunately we are interested in unreal property and are neglecting our real property (adhane yatana kari' dhana teyāginu).

Sometimes smārtas consider Raghunātha dāsa Gosvāmī a śūdra. But Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja Gosvāmī here especially mentions svarūpa-rūpa-raghunāthadāsa. Therefore one who considers the lotus feet of Raghunātha dāsa to be transcendental to all divisions of the caste system enjoys the riches of actual spiritual bliss.

Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura has given a summary of this chapter in his Amṛta-pravāha-bhāṣya: "In this Fourteenth Chapter of the Caitanya-caritāmṛta there is a description of how Lord Caitanya Mahāprabhu enjoyed His childhood pastimes, crawling, crying and eating dirt, giving intelligence to His mother, favoring a brāhmaṇa guest, riding on the shoulders of two thieves and misleading them to His own house, and, on the plea of being diseased, taking prasāda in the house of Hiraṇya and Jagadīśa on the Ekādaśī day. The chapter further describes how He displayed Himself as a naughty boy, how when His mother fainted He brought a coconut to her on His head, how He joked with girls of the same age on the banks of the Ganges, how He accepted worshipful paraphernalia from Śrīmatī Lakṣmīdevī, how He sat down in a garbage pit wherefrom He instructed transcendental knowledge, how He left the pit on the order of His mother, and how He dealt with His father with full affection."