Chaitanya's Devotional Prayer

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 4 pages

Four pages giving the devotional prayer of Chaitanya Mahāprabhu in the translation by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, with an editorial footnote on the author and a closing page of suggested reading.

The prayer is built around the chanting of the divine name. It opens with the name chanted unceasingly so that the mirror of the heart may be wiped clean and the forest fire of worldly lust raging within may be quenched, and asks the name to stream down like moonlight on the lotus heart so that it opens its cup to knowledge. The name is called various in each of its forms with power residing in every one, needing no set times and no rites — from which the speaker draws the reproach against himself, that so vast a mercy makes his own empty life and heart the more wretched for having no devotion in them. The instruction to the mind is the passage most often quoted: to be humbler than a blade of grass, patient and forbearing like the tree, to take no honour to itself and give honour to all. What is asked for is explicitly not wealth or retinue, the playthings of lust or the toys of fame, but a steadfast love through as many rebirths as may come. The closing stanzas ask neither for the embrace of God's arms nor for freedom from bewailing his absence, but simply to remain prostrate in unwavering devotion. The footnote identifies Chaitanya (1486–1534) as a social reformer of Bengal and Orissa and a proponent of the Vaishnava school of Bhakti yoga, notes the names Gaura and Nimai, and points out that in Sanskrit chaitanya means consciousness or living spirit.

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