Author — Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja Gosvāmī (c. 1615)
Translator & commentator — A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda (1974–75)
Original file — RAW/books/Sri_Caitanya_caritamrta_1975_Edition.pdf
Source type — Bengali hagiography and theological treatise, with twentieth-century sectarian commentary
Structure — 62 chapters in three parts: Ādi-līlā (17), Madhya-līlā (25), Antya-līlā (20)
Scale — 5,407 pages; 9.28M characters raw; 2.07M characters of verse translation
Caitanya Mahāprabhu (1486–1534) was not a devotee of Kṛṣṇa but Kṛṣṇa himself, returned in the emotional condition and golden complexion of Rādhārāṇī, in order to taste from the inside the love he had only ever received from the outside. Everything else in the book — the biography, the debates, the travels, the discipline cases, the twelve years of madness at Jagannātha Purī — is arranged as evidence for that single claim.
This file contains two sources, and they do not always agree. Every claim drawn from it must be attributed to the correct layer.
Layer A — Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, c. 1615. The Bengali verse and its translation. Primary-text authority for what Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism held four centuries ago, and already a partisan document that says so: it is built from Svarūpa Dāmodara's notebook as memorised by Raghunātha dāsa Gosvāmī, written in Vṛndāvana under the Gosvāmīs' supervision, by an author who states outright that the Madana-mohana Deity ordered him to write it. He also states, at Antya 14, that the bodily transformations he is about to describe appear in no scripture, are generally disbelieved, and rest on one eyewitness — and affirms them anyway.
Layer B — the Bhaktivedanta purports, 1974–75. Devotional-institutional commentary composed by the founder of a movement in rapid expansion. 🚩 MOTIVATED REASONING applies structurally here, not occasionally. The purports routinely convert a sixteenth-century episode into an operating instruction for a twentieth-century organisation. The clearest instance is Antya 2, where a disciple's expulsion and suicide is glossed as having "set the standard for ācāryas, or the heads of institutions propagating the Caitanya cult," and given a deterrence rationale — that otherwise "pseudo-devotees" would cite the case to justify illicit sex — that appears nowhere in the verse.
Layer C — Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura's Amṛta-pravāha-bhāṣya, quoted as a chapter précis at the head of most chapters. A third voice, nineteenth century.
🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY. The text quotes Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, Bhagavad-gītā, Brahma-saṁhitā and Rūpa Gosvāmī constantly and often loosely. Any claim resting on one of those quotations is cited as this text quoting X, never as X.
⚠️ Hostile polemic about a living tradition. Two extended passages — the Chand Kazi debate (Ādi 17) and the Pāṭhān conversion (Madhya 18) — put a Vaiṣṇava reading of the Koran into Muslim mouths and have those speakers concede that their own scholars misunderstand their scripture. These are claims this text makes about Islam, composed by a partisan of the other side, and are never to be cited as facts about the Koran or about what any Muslim believed.
Filed primary-text rather than practitioner or scholarly. Layer A is a seventeenth-century composition treated as scripture by its own tradition and is the object of study, not a report about one. The commentary layer would classify as practitioner on its own; it is carried here as an annotation on the primary text rather than as a separate stub, because in this edition the two are physically inseparable and the risk to guard against is exactly their conflation.
Claims traceable to the verse text carry no special tag beyond ordinary primary-text caution. Claims traceable only to the purports are tagged [LAYER B] on the page that uses them, in the body and not merely in a footnote. Structural findings the vault itself makes about this corpus — recurring formulae, compositional devices, patterns across chapters — carry the sample-size tags ([n=1 OBSERVED], [n=2 SUGGESTIVE], [n≥3 PATTERN]) rather than confidence tags, since they are the vault's assertions and not the source's.
Read method. All 62 chapters read at full text in the translation layer, with the word-by-word synonym glossaries stripped and the verse translations extracted separately from the purports, so that Layer A and Layer B could be held apart while reading rather than reconciled afterwards.