The Six Gosvamis of Vrindavan
The Six Gosvamis are a group of scholars and renunciants who lived in Vrindavan in the sixteenth century, sent there or inspired by Chaitanya. In a few decades they produced the Sanskrit literature that defines Gaudiya Vaishnava theology, ritual and aesthetics, and helped transform a region of forests and villages into one of India's great pilgrimage centres.
Who they were
- Sanatana Gosvami (c. 1488–1558) and his younger brother Rupa Gosvami (c. 1489–1564) had been senior officials of Sultan Alauddin Husain Shah of Bengal. They met Chaitanya, resigned their posts and went to Vrindavan. Sanatana is associated with the ritual code Hari-bhakti-vilasa and with the Brihad-bhagavatamrita; Rupa with the Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu, the Ujjvala-nilamani and plays on Krishna's life.
- Jiva Gosvami (c. 1513–1598), their nephew, wrote the philosophical Sat-sandarbha and became the senior authority after their deaths.
- Gopala Bhatta Gosvami, from a family of South Indian Brahmins whom Chaitanya had met at Srirangam, is associated with the Hari-bhakti-vilasa and founded the Radharamana temple in Vrindavan.
- Raghunatha Bhatta Gosvami, son of a Varanasi devotee, was known for his recitation of the Bhagavata Purana.
- Raghunatha Dasa Gosvami (c. 1495–1586), son of a wealthy landholder of Bengal, left his family to join Chaitanya in Puri, lived with Svarupa Damodara and later spent decades at Radha-kunda, writing devotional poetry in Sanskrit.
The title "Gosvami", literally "master of the senses" or "master of cows", was used for these renunciants and later became a hereditary title of families who served the temples they founded.
A division of labour
Read together, their works form a coherent programme. Sanatana's Hari-bhakti-vilasa, compiled with Gopala Bhatta, set out the daily rituals, festivals and rules of conduct for Vaishnavas, giving the community a code independent of the smarta Brahmins of Bengal. Rupa's treatises defined devotion and its emotions and described Krishna's companions. Jiva's Sat-sandarbha gave the system a philosophical foundation on the basis of the Bhagavata Purana. Raghunatha Dasa's prayers expressed the inner life of devotion as the tradition imagined it. Scholars sometimes call this body of work the Vrindavan theology, to distinguish it from the more ecstatic and popular movement in Bengal.
Building Vrindavan
When the Gosvamis arrived, Vrindavan was a modest settlement among woods along the Yamuna. They identified sites associated with Krishna's childhood, recovered or installed images and founded temples: Madana-mohana (Sanatana), Govinda (Rupa), Radha-Damodara (Jiva), Radharamana (Gopala Bhatta). Rajput nobles in Mughal service financed monumental temples for some of these images, of which Govindadeva, completed in 1590, survives in part. Later, when the images were moved to Rajasthan in the late seventeenth century to protect them, copies or replacements were installed in Vrindavan. The process is described in our article on the Vraja-mandala parikrama.
Transmission to Bengal and Odisha
The Gosvamis' works were written in Sanskrit for a learned audience. Their transmission eastward was organised at the end of the century, when Jiva sent manuscripts with Shrinivasa Acharya, Narottama Dasa and Shyamananda. The festival at Kheturi, organised by Narottama around 1580, adopted the Vrindavan theology for the communities of Bengal, and Narottama's Bengali songs, such as Shri Rupa-manjari-pada, made its ideas accessible to ordinary devotees. Krishnadasa Kaviraja's Chaitanya-charitamrita joined the Bengali biography of Chaitanya to the Gosvamis' theology.
Their tombs and memory
The tombs (samadhis) of the Gosvamis are in Vrindavan and at Radha-kunda and are visited by pilgrims. A Sanskrit hymn of eight verses in their praise, attributed to Shrinivasa Acharya, is sung in Gaudiya temples. In twentieth-century missions the Six Gosvamis became the model of the scholar-renunciant, cited by teachers such as Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati to justify a celibate preaching order devoted to study and writing.
What historians say
Modern scholarship, from S.K. De's pioneering history to more recent work by David Haberman, Tony Stewart and Ravi Gupta, regards the Gosvamis as among the most productive religious intellectuals of early modern India. Their works combine classical Sanskrit learning with a new devotional vision, and their temples are milestones in the architecture of north India. Questions remain about precise dates, attributions and the relations between the Vrindavan community and the Bengali followers of Chaitanya, which historians continue to debate.
Meeting Chaitanya
The stories of how the Gosvamis came to Chaitanya are among the most told in the tradition. According to the Chaitanya-charitamrita, Rupa and Sanatana first met him secretly at Ramakeli, near the Bengal capital of Gauda, in 1514, while still in the sultan's service. Rupa left soon afterwards with his younger brother Anupama, Jiva's father, and met Chaitanya at Prayaga, where Chaitanya instructed him for ten days on devotion. Sanatana, imprisoned by the sultan for neglecting his duties, bribed his jailer and escaped, reaching Chaitanya at Varanasi, where he received two months of teaching on the nature of God, the soul and devotion. These instructions, as reported in the biography, are read as the seeds of the Gosvamis' later books.
Gopala Bhatta's family hosted Chaitanya at Srirangam during the rainy season of his South Indian journey; Raghunatha Bhatta's father, Tapana Mishra, had known him in Bengal and hosted him in Varanasi; Raghunatha Dasa ran away from his rich family several times before being allowed to join Chaitanya in Puri. Each story emphasises renunciation of wealth, status or home, a theme that defines the Gosvamis' image.
Life in Vrindavan
The biographies describe the Gosvamis as living with extreme simplicity, sleeping under trees, begging for food and spending most of the day writing, chanting and worshipping. Rupa and Sanatana are said to have moved from grove to grove, never staying long in one place. This ideal of austerity coexisted with practical activity: they negotiated with patrons, supervised temple building and corresponded with followers in Bengal and Odisha. Historians read these accounts as both devotional ideals and evidence of a well-organised community.
Further reading on this site
Individual articles cover Jiva Gosvami, Rupa's Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu and the Vraja pilgrimage. The life of the man who inspired them is told in our article on Chaitanya.
Sources and further reading
- S.K. De, Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, 2nd ed., Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1961.
- David L. Haberman, Acting as a Way of Salvation, Oxford University Press, 1988.
- Ravi M. Gupta, The Caitanya Vaisnava Vedanta of Jiva Gosvami, Routledge, 2007.
- Alan W. Entwistle, Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage, Egbert Forsten, 1987.
- Wikipedia, "Six Goswamis of Vrindavan" (orientation): en.wikipedia.org.