Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita summarizes the charge Sanatana carried with him into Vrindavana in a single verse of praise: "In the course of time, the transcendental news of Krishna's pastimes in Vrindavana was almost lost. To enunciate explicitly those transcendental pastimes, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu empowered Srila Rupa Gosvami and Sanatana Gosvami with the nectar of His mercy to carry out this work in Vrindavana." By the early sixteenth century the precise sites of Krishna's childhood and youth had genuinely been lost, overgrown or forgotten after centuries of political upheaval in the region, and it fell to Sanatana and Rupa Gosvami - working sometimes together, sometimes independently - to walk the land, question local memory and tradition, and physically relocate the forests, kunjas and bathing ghats the Bhagavata Purana and other scriptures described. Devotional accounts describe the two brothers in this period sleeping no more than an hour and a half a day under whatever tree or bush was nearest, spending the rest of their time in walking, writing, discussing Krishna's pastimes, and chanting His names.
Begging Wheat for a Bati of Bread #
Sanatana's own manner of sustaining himself in these years became, on its own, a kind of teaching. Accounts describe him begging a small quantity of wheat flour from village to village, working it into a ball with a little water from the Yamuna, and baking it directly in embers to make a plain, saltless bati bread - food simple enough that even the poorest villager could offer it without hesitation. He would not eat this food himself before first offering it to his worshipable Deity, Madana-mohana. There is no grander claim to be made for this detail than the plain one: a man who had commanded the resources of a royal treasury chose, for the last four decades of his life, to eat exactly what he could beg in a single morning and no more.
Discovering the Madana-mohana Deity #
It was during these years of searching that Sanatana became responsible for establishing the worship of Madana-mohana, traditionally remembered as the very first of the great Deity temples founded in Vrindavana by any of the Six Goswomis. Soon after the Deity's worship was established, a wealthy officer in the Mughal army named Krishna Dasa Kapura financed the construction of a proper temple to house Him, a building that in time became recognized as one of Vrindavana's seven principal temples and is known today as the Radha-Madan-Mohan Mandir. In Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita's own theology of the Goswamis, Sanatana's relationship to this particular Deity carries unusual theological importance: Srila Prabhupada, commenting on Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita Adi-lila 1.47, writes, "Srila Sanatana Gosvami is the ideal spiritual master, for he delivers one the shelter of the lotus feet of Madana-mohana," explaining that Madana-mohana represents the sambandha, or foundational relationship with Krishna, that any sincere seeker must first establish before advancing further - which is why Sanatana himself is remembered in the Gaudiya tradition specifically as the sambandha-acharya among the Six Goswamis. In the centuries since, political unrest forced the original Deity to be moved from Vrindavana to Karauli in present-day Rajasthan, where He remains worshiped to this day, while a secondary form continues to be served at the original temple site.
Forty-Three Years Among the Villagers of Vraja #
For roughly forty-three years, by the tradition's own count, Sanatana wandered on foot from village to village throughout Vraja-mandala, and the Vrajavasis are remembered as having cared for him as their own father, bringing him their disputes over crop yields and family quarrels alongside their spiritual questions, and receiving in turn both practical counsel and instruction in bhakti. The Bhakti-ratnakara sums up how his godbrothers remembered him in this period: "Renouncing all worldly pleasures, Sanatana Gosvami was humble, detached, always absorbed in study... As an ocean of love and mercy, Sanatana excelled all other devotees in his compassion toward the suffering souls." Even into old age he kept a personal vow to circle Govardhana Hill and offer 1,008 obeisances daily; when, according to the same tradition, Madana-mohana Himself appeared one day to tell him he was too old for the twenty-four-mile walk and could set the vow aside, Sanatana simply answered, "I will never give up my religious principles," and kept walking - a determination the Deity is said to have honored not by excusing him, but by miraculously imprinting His own footprints onto a flat Govardhana-shila that Sanatana could circumambulate in place of the hill itself, a stone still preserved at the Radha-Damodara temple. His literary output during these same wandering decades, told in Hari-bhakti-vilasa and Other Works, shows that none of this physical hardship slowed the scholarly work Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had originally asked of him.