Lord Chaitanya, The Original Personality of Godhead
163
kind that He accepted all of them, and delivered to them the most important factor of life: love of God.
To fulfill the mission of the Lord, bestowing love of God upon the conditioned souls, He devised many methods to accept all those disinterested in the matter of love of God. After He accepted the renounced order, all agnostics and critics, atheists and mental speculators became the students and followers of Lord Chaitanya. Even many of those who were not Hindus or the followers of the Vedic principles of life also accepted Lord Chaitanya as the Supreme Teacher.
Those Sannyasis who were known as the Mayavadi philosophers of Benares were the only persons who avoided the mercy of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. The plight of the Mayavadi philosophers is described as follows by Sri Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Goswami: “The Mayavadi philosophers of Benares are less intelligent because they want to measure everything by direct perception. But everything they have is a calculation of material perception. The Absolute Truth is transcendence, but according to them there is no variegatedness in transcendence, because they say that anything which is full of variegatedness is Maya.”
During Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s time there were other philosophers, known as the Mayavadi philosophers of Sarnatha. Sarnatha is a place near Benares where Buddhist philosophers were residing, and even today there are many Stupas of the Buddhist Mayavadi. The Mayavadi philosophers of Sarnatha are different from the impersonalists who believe in the impersonal manifestation of Brahman. According to the Sarnatha philosophers there is no spiritual existence. Spiritually, both the Mayavadi philosophers of Benares and the philosophers of Sarnatha are entrapped by the material Nature. None of them actually knows the nature of the Absolute Transcendence. The philosophers of Benares, although accepting the Vedic principles superficially and accepting themselves as transcendentalists, do not agree to accept spiritual variegatedness. They have no information about devotional service, and therefore they are called “non-devotees,” or against the devotional service of Lord Krishna.
The impersonalists speculate on the Supreme Personality of Godhead and His devotees, subjected to the direct perception of knowledge. The Lord and His devotee and His devotional service, however, are not subject to direct perception. In other words, spiritual variegatedness is unknown to the Mayavadi philosophy, and therefore all the Mayavadi philosophers and Sannyasis began to criticize Him because He was conducting the Samkirtan