Living at Suryakunda in his mendicant years, Jagannatha Dasa Babaji at one point asked his servant Bihari Dasa to locate a Deity for worship there. Bihari Dasa approached a local zamindar of the weaver caste, who arranged for Deities of Gaura-Nitai to be brought from Dainhata. When installed, the Deities were so beautiful that they appeared, in the words of the tradition, to be made of gold — and this appearance very nearly cost them their existence at Suryakunda altogether.
The Dacoits Who Dropped the Deities #
A band of dacoits, hearing of Deities that looked golden, came to steal them. Jagannatha Dasa Babaji told the robbers plainly that he possessed nothing of value and they were welcome to search the temple themselves. They broke open the door, gathered up everything they could carry — including the Deities — and fled. In their haste they stumbled at the doorstep and dropped the Deities; seeing the sun beginning to rise, and unwilling to be caught in daylight, the dacoits abandoned them there and escaped with the rest of what they had taken. It was, on any reading, a narrow escape, and Jagannatha Dasa Babaji drew the obvious practical conclusion from it.
Sonara Gaura and the Six-Armed Deity #
After the robbery he asked Bihari Dasa to arrange for the Deities to be cared for elsewhere, and Bihari Dasa carried them to Vrindavana, where he placed them, along with a donation of two thousand rupees, in the care of a devotee known as Mother-Goswamini of Gayespur. Those same Deities are still worshipped today at Dhopapada in Gopalbag, under the name by which the incident had marked them: Sonara Gaura, "the golden Gaura."
Some time afterward, Jagannatha Dasa Babaji asked Bihari Dasa to find him another Deity, and Bihari Dasa this time located a six-armed form of Lord Chaitanya that had been kept hidden inside a bag of cattle feed by a Manipuri Vaishnava named Dinu Babaji, near Radhakunda. Bihari Dasa cleaned and dressed the Deity and brought Him to Suryakunda, where Jagannatha Dasa Babaji worshipped Him for ten years. At the end of that decade he told Bihari Dasa he wished to go to Nabadwip, and that his body should ultimately be offered at the lotus feet of Lord Gauranga there — the first clear sign, in the record, of the move toward Bengal that would define the remainder of his life. The six-armed Deity was placed in the care of Narottama Dasaji, head of the Gopalaguru Matha, and is today worshipped in a lane of Nidhuvana in Vrindavana.
The Departure for Nabadwip #
Vaishnava biographers do not dwell long on the journey itself; what mattered to those recording his life was where it led. What followed — the discovery of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's actual birthplace, and Jagannatha Dasa Babaji's part in confirming it — is told in full here.