As old age finally caught up with the punishing pace of his forty-three years of village-to-village wandering, Sanatana Gosvami entrusted the daily service of his beloved Madana-mohana to his disciple Krishna Dasa Brahmachari and moved to spend his final years in bhajana on the banks of the Manasi-Ganga at Govardhana, near the shrine of Chakaleshvara Mahadeva. Even there, well past sixty years of age, he kept to the discipline that had defined his whole life in Vrindavana: daily circumambulation of Govardhana Hill, and a vow of offering 1,008 obeisances each day both to the Hill itself and to any Vaishnava he happened to meet along the way. It is from this final period that the tradition preserves the story, told in Arrival in Vrindavana and Madana-mohana, of Madana-mohana appearing to excuse him from the daily parikrama on account of his age, and of Sanatana's quiet refusal - the last recorded exchange between the Deity he had discovered and the devotee who had served Him for decades.
An Ocean of Love and Mercy #
The Bhakti-ratnakara's summary of how Sanatana was remembered by those who actually lived alongside him in these years is worth recording close to verbatim: "Mahaprabhu often said that Sanatana Gosvami was His favorite devotee. As an ocean of love and mercy, Sanatana excelled all other devotees in his compassion toward the suffering souls." Whatever weight such glowing traditional praise should be given, the more concrete detail preserved alongside them - villagers bringing him disputes over crop yields and family quarrels, receiving in turn both practical guidance and instruction in devotional life - paints a consistent picture of a man whose learning and former administrative experience were, in the end, placed entirely at the service of ordinary people rather than reserved for the scholarly elite he had grown up among.
Disappearance and Samadhi #
Sanatana Gosvami is traditionally said to have disappeared from this world in 1558, at Vrindavana, and his samadhi stands to this day directly behind the Radha-Madana-mohana temple whose worship he had established decades earlier - a final, literal closeness between the Goswami and the Deity around whose service his entire life in Vraja had been organized. In Gaudiya Vaishnava theology, he is remembered as the eternal associate Labanga-manjari (or, in some accounts, Rati-manjari), serving Srimati Vishakha-sakhi within Radha and Krishna's own eternal pastimes - the confidential identity understood to underlie his outward life as a renounced scholar who searched out Vraja's holy places.
What He Left Behind #
The measure of Sanatana's importance to the tradition that followed him is perhaps clearest in how his own godbrother regarded him. By Srila Prabhupada's account, Srila Rupa Gosvami - his own younger brother, and by any ordinary measure his scholarly equal - accepted Sanatana as his spiritual master, opening his own Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu with an offering of respect to him on exactly those terms. Srila Prabhupada elsewhere calls Sanatana "the ideal spiritual master, for he delivers one the shelter of the lotus feet of Madana-mohana," language that places him, within the Gaudiya guru-parampara's own self-understanding, as the very entry point through which a sincere seeker first comes to stand in right relationship with Krishna - the sambandha-acharya without whom, in this reading, the later stages of devotional life have nowhere firm to stand.
His nephew Srila Jiva Gosvami, arriving in Vrindavana as a young scholar after his own father Anupama's death in Bengal, studied directly under both Sanatana and Rupa and carried their combined literary and theological project into its most systematic and expansive phase, drawing openly in his own writings on the groundwork Sanatana had already laid in the Brihad-bhagavatamrita and the Dasama-tippani. Between them - Sanatana laying the foundation in conduct and canon, Rupa in aesthetics and poetics, and Jiva in comprehensive philosophical synthesis - the three Goswamis of this single Bengali family gave Gaudiya Vaishnavism nearly the whole of its scriptural and doctrinal architecture within the span of one generation, built quite literally from nothing but what Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had asked of them and what each was willing to give up in order to carry it out.
Five centuries on, the pattern of that inheritance still holds. Every pilgrim who visits the Radha-Madana-mohana temple behind which Sanatana's samadhi stands is, in the tradition's own understanding, visiting the place where the eldest of the Six Goswamis chose a beggar's bati bread over a minister's table, and where a Deity discovered by a fugitive from Hussain Shah's court became one of Vrindavana's most beloved objects of worship. It is a small circle, in the end, from a young scholar's dream of the Bhagavatam, told in Birth and Early Life in Bengal, to an old man's samadhi beside the very Deity that dream had pointed him toward - a life spent almost entirely in the act of pointing others, as patiently as he had once been pointed himself, toward the same shelter.