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Hare Krsna

Please accept my humble obeisance. All glories to Srila Prabhupada

namo bhaktivinodaya sac-cid-ananda-namine
gaura-sakti-svarupaya rupanuga-varaya te

"I bow down to Srila Saccidananda Bhaktivinoda Thakura, who is the embodiment of the energy of Sri Gaurasundara [Chaitanya Mahaprabhu] and a great sadhu in the line of the followers of Sri Rupa Gosvami Prabhupada."

Srila Saccidananda Bhaktivinoda Thakura was born with the name  Sri Kedarnath Dutta on September 2, 1838. He appeared in the village of Ula, in the district of Nadia, West Bengal.

He came out of a Chaitanyite background, but rather characteristically for that time and place, he was headed in the direction of English and Western education. He was sent to high school in Calcutta at the Hindu Charitable Institution and later completed his education in Calcutta at a Christian college.

After finishing college, Srila Bhaktivinoda started teaching in Orissa, and he is credited by his biographers as one of the pioneers of English education in that state. But he didn't stay in education for very long. Instead, he studied law, passed his law examinations, and in 1862 took employment as a civil servant with the government of Bengal. Then in 1866 he was appointed a magistrate within the provincial civil service, and he carried on in that service for the rest of his government career, until his retirement in 1894.

For the first thirty years of his life, in fact, he had little contact with the real religious and intellectual core of his own tradition. He was unable even to find a copy of the Chaitanya-caritamrta, which was written in his native Bengali, and he had no acquaintance with either the Srimad-Bhagavatam or the writings of the Six Gosvamis of Vrindavana.

All of this changed in 1868, when he received from a friend a copy of both the Chaitanya-caritamrta and the Srimad-Bhagavatam, or Bhagavata Purana, with the commentary of Sridhara Svami. He plunged into these works, discovered their wealth of religious teaching, and went through a personal transformation. For the first time he realized there was something in the Caitanyite tradition worth preserving-and not only worth preserving, but worth promoting on a public level. This he took as his new obligation.

Srila Bhaktivinoda published some hundred books during his career, most of them devoted to recovering and promoting the tradition of Chaitanya. He was obviously an enormously productive person. His work habits are frightening: He would get up at 4:30 in the morning, bathe, do his bhajana, answer correspondence, and so forth, and then at 9:00 he would go to the court and finish by 5:00, with an hour's break from 1:00 to 2:00. Then he would translate some Sanskrit religious work into Bengali from 5:00 until 7:00, have dinner, take a couple of hours' nap, get up, and write all night from 10:00 until 4:00. Then he would rest a little bit and go through his daily routine. So he was working about eighteen to twenty hours a day, efficiently. That's the way people describe him. And, amazingly, he also found time to raise thirteen children.

Srila Bhaktivinoda wrote his books mostly in Bengali but also in Sanskrit and Urdu, and to make the teachings of Lord Chaitanya appreciable to those outside Bengal and India, he also wrote in English. He wrote his first work, Hari-katha, a book of Bengali verses, in 1850. At a meeting in Calcutta in 1869 he delivered a remarkable speech in English entitled "TheBhagavata: Its Philosophy, Its Ethics, and Its Theology" clearly directed to English-educated Indians who, like himself, had lost contact with their own tradition. Written in marvelously fluent English, it is nonetheless an argument against the inroads of British education and Western cultural values. It is not a total rejection of the West but a plea for reform based on the religious insights and teachings of Chaitanya. In advocating reformation, Bhaktivinoda does what any successful reformer must do: he maintains contact with the current social and intellectual climate and yet carries his message beyond the existing level to a new synthesis.

Other works he wrote in English during this time include "Speech on Gautama," "Reflections" (poems), "Jagannatha Temple of Puri," "Slokas on the Samadhi of Thakura Haridasa," and "Akhadas [Monasteries] of Puri." He composed Kalyana-kalpataru, a collection of Bengali songs, and wrote many other books, among them Sri Chaitanya-siksamrta, Saranagati, Jaiva-dharma and Prema-pradipa (a fiction showing the excellence of bhakti-yoga). Furthermore, he published numerous Bengali translations of important Sanskrit works, such as Srimad Bhagavad-gita (one edition with Sanskrit commentary by Sri Visvanatha Cakravarti and a second with commentary by Sri Baladeva Vidyabhusana), Sri Siksastaka, Manah-siksa, Sri Visnu-sahasra-nama, Sri Chaitanya Upanisad and Sri Isopanisad (with a commentary by Sri Baladeva Vidyabhusana).

In 1881 Srila Bhaktivinoda started a new Vaishnava journal called Sajjana-tosani to disseminate the teachings of Chaitanya that continued through seventeen volumes. At about the same time he also accepted Jagannatha dasa Babaji as his siksa-guru.

In 1887, to promote Chaitanya's movement of devotional service to Krishna, he began work on commentaries in Bengali on the Chaitanya-caritamrta and established a printing press at Bhaktibhavan, his house in Calcutta. Printing and publishing were very early seen as the key to successful promotion of the cause. Thus technology was very early employed by Bhaktivinoda Thakura in pursuit of the religious community, and its use was carried even further by his son, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura, who would refer to the printing press as the brhat mrdanga, "the great mrdanga."

In 1888, Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura discovered the birthplace of Chaitanya, which had been forgotten. Everybody thought it was in Navadvipa, but it turned out to be in the nearby village of Mayapura.

In 1896 Srila Bhaktivinoda published in Sanskrit a little booklet on Chaitanya, to which was attached an English preface called Chaitanya Mahaprabhu: His Life and Precepts. Copies of this little booklet were sent to various places in the West. One of them ended up at McGill University Library and another at the library of the Royal Asiatic Society in London. From these efforts the Krishna consciousness movement won intellectual respectability; after all, McGill and the Royal Asiatic Society had sanctioned it.

Finally, in 1900, near the end of his life, Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura went to Jagannatha Puri and from that point on spent most of his time in seclusion, performing his bhajana incessantly and eventually being initiated as a babaji, a renounced person pursuing his own personal religious activities.

Srila Saccidananda Bhaktivinoda Thakura is a nitya-siddha, an eternal associate of the Lord, and he is indeed the transcendental energy of Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (gaura-sakti-svarupaya). He was sent by Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu to revive Mahaprabhu's message of Krishna consciousness and thus redeem the modern world!