For one full year after his first meeting with Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu at Santipura, Raghunatha Dasa did exactly as he had been told, running his father's affairs and giving no outward sign of what he intended. The next year, resolve overcame patience, and he simply got up one night and left. His father caught him at a distance and brought him home. It happened again, and then again, until it became, in the words of Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita itself, almost a daily affair — his mother, at her wits' end, told her husband to bind their son with ropes. Govardhana Majumadara's reply has survived as one of the more moving lines in the whole account: no rope, he said, could hold a boy on whom Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's mercy had already fallen.
The Blessing of Nityananda Prabhu at Panihati #
Unable to leave directly for Puri, Raghunatha went instead to see Nityananda Prabhu, who was staying at Panihati on the bank of the Ganges surrounded by kirtana performers and devotees. When Raghunatha offered his obeisances from a respectful distance, Nityananda Prabhu called out, laughing, that he was a thief who had finally come to be punished — and ordered him, as that punishment, to hold a festival distributing chipped rice mixed with yogurt to everyone present. Raghunatha threw himself into the task, buying out the food stocks of several villages and providing hundreds of earthen pots of chipped rice for a crowd that kept growing through the day. In the middle of the feast, Nityananda Prabhu brought Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu to the spot in meditation, and the two brothers ate together on the riverbank surrounded by devotees chanting the holy names — an event still celebrated among Gaudiya Vaishnavas as the chida-dadhi-mahotsava, or Panihati festival, to this day.
Afterward, Nityananda Prabhu called Raghunatha near, placed His feet on his head, and told him plainly that all obstacles to his shelter at Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's feet were now removed — and that when he reached the Lord, he would be placed in the personal care of Svarupa Damodara Gosvami.
The Priest Who Helped Him Vanish #
Even with that blessing, escape from his own household took cunning. Raghunatha had by then taken to sleeping outside the inner rooms of the house, watched over by alert guards, and for some time could find no way past them. The opening came from an unexpected quarter: Yadunandana Acharya, the family priest who had formally initiated Raghunatha and was himself a disciple of Advaita Acharya, came to the house late one night saying he needed help persuading a brahmana to resume his temple service. Walking Raghunatha out through the sleeping household on that pretext, Yadunandana Acharya let him go the rest of the way alone — after Raghunatha, halfway there, respectfully asked leave to finish the errand by himself and never returned.
Twelve Days to Jagannatha Puri #
What followed was a forced march through back roads and jungle paths rather than the well-travelled route, precisely so that the famous devotees also journeying to Puri that season would not draw attention to him. Some days he covered thirty miles on foot; in twelve days total he reached Jagannatha Puri, having managed to eat only three times along the entire way. His father, learning where he had gone, sent ten men to intercept him and a letter to the Bengali devotee Sivananda Sena begging for his return — but by the time the men caught up with Sivananda Sena's party at Jhankara, Raghunatha was already well ahead of them, and Sivananda Sena, whether by ignorance or discretion, told them simply that he had not come that way.
Thin, dirty and exhausted from the journey, Raghunatha Dasa arrived at last at the courtyard where Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu sat surrounded by His devotees — the beginning of the life described in Service Under Svarupa Damodara at Puri.
Already Famous by the Time He Arrived #
News of what Raghunatha Dasa had given up travelled ahead of him. Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita records that the Bengali poet Kavi-karnapura, in his own separate work Sri Chaitanya-candrodaya-nataka, already described him as an "ocean of renunciation" whose example every resident of Jagannatha Puri recognized on sight — praise from someone who had never needed to witness the escape itself to understand what it had cost. When Raghunatha's father later sent money and servants to Puri to check on his son, the Bengali devotee Sivananda Sena had to explain that he was asking after a man the whole Vaishnava community there already knew well: someone who chanted the entire day, never left Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's side even for a moment, and lived on whatever came to him at the temple gate.