ŚRI CAITANYA-CARITĀMRTA
It would not be inaccurate to say that Śrī  Caitanya-caritāmrta  is one of the most important works of historical and philosophical literature ever written, in any language. It is the principal work on the life and teachings of Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya, a divine incarnation of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Śrī Caitanya is the pioneer of a great social and religious movement which began in India a little less than five hundred years ago and which has directly and indirectly influenced the subsequent course of religious and philosophical thinking not only in India but in the recent West as well.
At a time when, in the West, man was directing his explorative spirit toward circumnavigating the world in search of new oceans and continents and toward studying the structure of the physical universe, Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya, in the East, was inaugurating and masterminding a revolution directed inward, toward a scientific understanding of the highest knowledge of man's spiritual nature.
Within his lifetime, Śrī Caitanya transformed the face of India in four respects: philosophically, by encountering, defeating and converting the greatest philosophers and thinkers of his day; religiously, by organizing the largest, most widespread theistic movement in India's history; socially, by his strong challenges against the religious inequities of the caste system; politically, by his organization of a massive civil disobedience movement in Bengal, 450 years before Gandhi.
The text is divided into three sections called " lilās ."  Ādi-lilā  (the early period) traces his life from birth through his acceptance of the renounced order,  sannyāsa , at the age of twenty-four. This part includes his childhood miracles, schooling, marriage and early philosophical confrontations, as well as his organization of the widespread  saṅkirtana  movement and his civil disobedience against the repression of the Mohammedan government.
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