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 con-
ditioned 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 phi-
losophers 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 there-
fore 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
