The Prison and the Innkeeper
Sanatana Goswami, roughly 1488 to 1558, was the eldest of the three brothers, the senior of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan, and the one whose life contains the tradition's clearest statement about not destroying yourself.
His position
Sakara Mallik in the government of Alauddin Husain Shah, Sultan of Bengal, in charge of revenue. His younger brother Rupa was Dabir Khas, private secretary.
They were the two most senior Hindu officials in the administration, and the Sultan relied on them.
Leaving
After meeting Chaitanya at Ramakeli in 1514, Sanatana resolved to go, and the practical problem was that he could not simply resign.
What he did: stopped attending court, pleaded illness, and stayed at home studying the Bhagavata with a group of pandits.
What the Sultan did: came to his house.
And found him perfectly well, sitting with scholars.
The exchange, in the accounts: the Sultan said he needed him, that a campaign was planned, and that he could not be spared. Sanatana said he could not do it.
And he was imprisoned.
The escape
He bribed the jailer.
The account gives the amount: seven thousand gold coins, from the money he had deposited with a merchant, and an argument. He told the jailer that he could either take the money and let him go and be well provided for, or keep him and be answerable for a prisoner who would in any case be useless.
The jailer took it, and reported that Sanatana had escaped while being taken to the river.
And Sanatana left with his servant Ishana, into the Jharkhand forest, on foot, heading west.
The innkeeper
The best part of the escape story.
They stopped at a place in the hills where an innkeeper received them with unusual warmth: good food, good treatment, considerable attention.
Sanatana became suspicious, and asked Ishana directly whether he was carrying anything.
Ishana admitted it: he had eight gold coins hidden on him, kept back for emergencies without telling his master.
Why the innkeeper was being so pleasant: he had an astrologer or a reader who had told him the travellers had gold, and he was planning to rob and kill them that night.
What Sanatana did: took the coins and gave them to the innkeeper.
And told him that he now had what he wanted, and asked to be shown the way onward.
And the innkeeper, shamed, escorted them through the forest himself.
Why the story is told: because the danger came from the money, and the solution was to stop having it. It is the same logic as the whole renunciation, applied at the level of a night's lodging.
Varanasi
He reached Varanasi, where Chaitanya was staying at the house of Chandrashekhar.
How he arrived: in torn clothes, unshaven, with matted hair, after months in a forest, and he did not go in. He sat down outside the house, at the door.
Chaitanya came out and embraced him, and the account makes a point of the fact that Sanatana tried to stop him because of the state he was in.
And then he was taught, for two months.
The Sanatana Shiksha is that instruction, and it forms the theological core of the Chaitanya Charitamrita, in the twentieth to twenty third chapters of the Madhya Lila: the constitutional position of the individual self, the analysis of the divine forms, and the sixty four items of devotional practice.
The Sores, and What He Was Told
Content note: this section describes a plan to end one's own life, and the response to it. Helplines are given at the end.
What had happened to him
Somewhere in the prison or on the journey through the forest, he had contracted a skin disease.
The accounts are specific: open, weeping sores, over much of his body, which did not heal.
And he went to Puri.
Chaitanya was living at Jagannath Puri, and Sanatana went there to be with him.
The problem, as he saw it
Chaitanya kept embracing him.
And Sanatana could not bear it, because his body was in the state it was in, and the discharge from the sores got onto Chaitanya every time.
He asked him to stop and was ignored.
What he decided
The Ratha Yatra was coming.
At Puri, the chariots are drawn through the streets by enormous crowds, and they are very large and very heavy, and people have been killed under them.
Sanatana decided to go under the wheels.
His reasoning, and it is worth stating because it was not despair in the ordinary sense: his body was diseased and was contaminating the person he loved; it was of no further use; and dying at the Ratha Yatra, in front of Jagannath, would be the best available death.
He did not tell anybody.
What happened
Chaitanya found out.
The accounts have him confronting Sanatana directly, and what he said is the reason this entry exists.
The argument, in substance:
You have already given this body to me. It is not yours. You cannot destroy something that belongs to somebody else.
And he went further: that Sanatana had work to do that nobody else could do, that he was being sent to Vrindavan for it, and that ending his life would be theft of an instrument that had been handed over.
And on the disease itself: that Chaitanya embraced him because he wanted to, that the sores were of no consequence to him, and that Sanatana's disgust at his own body was Sanatana's problem and not a fact about the situation.
Why this matters
Because it is the tradition addressing the question directly, and getting it right.
This series has had to note repeatedly that hagiographic accounts of saints' deaths are not models: Jnaneshwar sealing himself into a chamber, Ramprasad walking into the Ganga, Eknath's jal samadhi. Those are described and then carefully qualified.
This one is different. Here a saint plans to end his life, for reasons that seemed good to him, and the tradition's central figure tells him no, and gives an argument.
And the argument is usable: the body is not private property to be disposed of; other people have a claim on you; the reasoning that seems compelling from inside the illness is not reliable; and the disgust you feel at your own condition is not shared by the people who love you.
What must be said
If any of this is live for you:
- Thoughts of ending your life are a symptom, they are common, and they respond to help
- The reasoning that accompanies them, including the reasoning that other people would be better off, is produced by the state and is not accurate
- In India, Tele MANAS is 14416, free, 24 hours, in many languages, and answered by people trained for exactly that conversation
- Emergency services 112
- Chronic illness, disfigurement and chronic pain substantially raise the risk, and there is treatment for the psychological side as well as the physical
- Tell one person. That is the whole first step
Sanatana lived another forty years and wrote most of what he wrote after this.
The Stone
Govardhan
Govardhan is the hill Krishna lifted, in the Braj country, around twenty two kilometres from Mathura.
The parikrama: the circuit around it, on foot, is around twenty one kilometres, and it is one of the principal practices of Braj. People do it barefoot. Some do it in dandavat, prostrating the full length of the body, standing, marking the spot, prostrating again, which takes weeks.
What Sanatana did: the parikrama, daily, for years.
Twenty one kilometres a day, in Braj, in the heat, on foot, into old age.
What happened
He got old, and he could not do it.
The accounts describe him continuing past the point where it was reasonable, and then reaching the point where it was not possible.
And the distress that caused him. The practice had been the shape of his day for decades and his body had stopped being able to.
What the tradition says happened next
Krishna came to him, in the form of a cowherd boy, and gave him a stone from Govardhan, with a footprint on it.
And told him to walk round the stone instead.
Four times round the stone counts as the full parikrama, and that is what he did for the rest of his life.
What the story is doing
It is a story about adapting a practice to a body that has changed, and the tradition treats the adaptation as authorised at the highest level.
Note what it does not say.
It does not say he should have pushed harder. It does not say the reduced practice is a lesser practice. It does not say he had failed.
It says the practice was never the twenty one kilometres. The walking was the form the thing had taken while he was able, and when he was not, the form changed and the thing did not.
Why this is worth having
Because this is the most common practical problem in devotional life and almost nothing addresses it.
People get old. People get ill. People become disabled, or become carers, or start doing shift work, or have a child, and the practice they had built no longer fits the life they now have.
And the usual responses are bad ones: give it up entirely, or continue at a level that damages you, or continue and feel like a failure.
The Govardhan stone is the third option, and it is authorised by the tradition's own central story about one of its most rigorous practitioners.
The Govardhan shila
The practice continues. Govardhan shilas, stones from the hill, are kept and worshipped, and circumambulating one is an accepted substitute for the parikrama for people who cannot do it.
And a related note on Govardhan itself: the hill is protected, and taking stones from it is now restricted, because the erosion from pilgrims removing pieces became a real problem. Stones are given, in the tradition, rather than taken.
Madan Mohan
His temple at Vrindavan, and the story attached is a good one.
He was living on the bank of the Yamuna with the deity Madan Mohan in a hut, in poverty.
A merchant, Krishnadas Kapoor, was moving a boat of salt down the river and it ran aground on a sandbank. Nothing worked. He came ashore, met Sanatana, was told to pray about it, did, and the boat came free.
And he funded the temple out of the profits.
The Madan Mohan temple stands on the ridge above the Yamuna at Vrindavan and it is the oldest of the Goswami foundations. Sanatana's samadhi is there.
His works
- Brihad Bhagavatamrita, in two parts: the first a narrative in which a search is conducted for the greatest devotee, moving up a chain of candidates, and the second on the destinations. It is the most readable of the Goswami works
- Hari Bhakti Vilasa, the ritual manual of the tradition, compiled with Gopala Bhatta Goswami and credited to both
- Brihad Vaishnava Toshani, his commentary on the tenth book of the Bhagavata
- Lila Stava, also called Dasama Charita, a listing of Krishna's acts
What to Take From Him
One. The body is not yours to destroy.
This is the most important thing in the entry and it is the tradition speaking directly.
A man with a disfiguring illness, who had reasoned his way carefully to the conclusion that his death would be best for everybody, was told that his reasoning did not hold, that other people had a claim on him, and that he had work left.
And he lived another forty years and wrote most of his books after that conversation.
If this is live for you: Tele MANAS 14416 in India, free, 24 hours, many languages. Emergency 112. The reasoning that comes with the state is produced by the state. Tell one person.
Two. The stone.
He walked twenty one kilometres a day for years and then could not, and the tradition's answer was not to try harder and not to give up.
Four times round a stone counts as the full circuit.
Applied: whatever practice you have built, when the body or the life changes, the form changes and the thing does not. That is authorised at the highest level in this tradition and it is worth remembering when you are ill, exhausted, caring for somebody, or simply older than you were.
Three. He gave the money to the man who was going to kill him for it.
The innkeeper was planning to rob and murder them for eight gold coins that Sanatana did not even know his servant was carrying.
His solution was to hand them over and ask for directions.
The danger was in the money. Not having it removed the danger, and the man who was going to kill him ended up escorting him through the forest.
Four. He sat outside the door.
He arrived at Varanasi after months in a forest, in torn clothes, diseased, and did not go in. He sat down outside, on the assumption that he was not fit to be received.
And Chaitanya came out.
This is the same shape as Kanaka Dasa at Udupi, Chokhamela at the step, and Kanhopatra at the door: somebody stops outside because they believe they are not eligible, and the tradition's answer is that the door was never the question.
Five. He was a revenue minister.
The theology of a devotional movement was written by two men who had run the finances of a sultanate. Rupa settled his accounts before leaving; Sanatana negotiated his own release from prison on a cost benefit argument.
Administrative competence and devotional depth are not opposites, and this series keeps finding people who had both.
A daily practice from this entry:
- Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare
- The Brihad Bhagavatamrita, which is the most readable of the Goswami works and exists in translation
- The Govardhan parikrama if you are in Braj and able; four times round a Govardhan shila if you are not, which is the same thing
- And the sentence, kept for when it is needed: it is not yours to destroy
A closing thought
The revenue minister of the Sultanate of Bengal pretended to be ill so that he could study at home, was found out, was imprisoned, bought his way out with seven thousand gold coins and an argument, and walked west into a forest with one servant.
On the road he worked out that the innkeeper being so kind to them intended to murder them for the coins his servant had hidden, so he gave the man the coins and asked to be shown the road, and the man walked them through the forest himself.
He reached Varanasi ill, filthy and covered in open sores, and sat down outside the house rather than go in, and was embraced anyway.
At Puri he decided to put himself under the wheels of the chariot, because his body was contaminating the person he loved and was of no further use, and he was told that he had given it away and it was not his to destroy.
He lived forty more years, walked round a hill every day until he could not, and then walked round a stone.
The Short Version
Who: Sanatana Goswami, roughly 1488 to 1558, eldest of the three brothers and the senior of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan. He was Sakara Mallik in charge of revenue in the government of Alauddin Husain Shah, Sultan of Bengal, while his younger brother Rupa was Dabir Khas, private secretary.
The escape: unable to resign, he pleaded illness and stayed home studying the Bhagavata. The Sultan came to the house, found him well, and imprisoned him. He bought his way out with seven thousand gold coins and an argument to the jailer, and left with his servant Ishana into the Jharkhand forest.
The innkeeper: at a stop in the hills an innkeeper treated them unusually well. Sanatana asked Ishana whether he was carrying anything and learned he had eight gold coins hidden. The innkeeper intended to rob and kill them for it. Sanatana gave him the coins and asked to be shown the way on, and the innkeeper, shamed, escorted them through the forest himself.
Varanasi: he arrived in torn clothes, unshaven and diseased, and sat down outside the house rather than go in. Chaitanya came out and embraced him, and taught him for two months. That instruction, the Sanatana Shiksha, forms the theological core of the Chaitanya Charitamrita.
The chariot: he had contracted a skin disease with open weeping sores, and the discharge got onto Chaitanya every time he was embraced. He decided to go under the wheels of the Ratha Yatra chariot, reasoning that his body was contaminating the person he loved and was of no further use. Chaitanya found out and told him he had already given the body away, that it was not his to destroy, and that he had work left. He lived another forty years and wrote most of his books afterwards.
The stone: he did the twenty one kilometre Govardhan parikrama daily for years until age made it impossible. The tradition says Krishna came as a cowherd boy and gave him a stone from the hill with a footprint on it, telling him to walk round the stone instead. Four times round counts as the full circuit. It is the tradition's authorisation for adapting a practice to a body that has changed.
His works: Brihad Bhagavatamrita, the most readable of the Goswami works; Hari Bhakti Vilasa, the ritual manual, compiled with Gopala Bhatta; Brihad Vaishnava Toshani; and Lila Stava. His temple is Madan Mohan at Vrindavan, funded by a salt merchant whose boat came off a sandbank, and his samadhi is there.
If any of this is live for you: Tele MANAS 14416, free, 24 hours; emergency 112.
Reader Questions Answered
Who was Sanatana Goswami?+
The eldest of the three brothers and the senior of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan, roughly 1488 to 1558. He was Sakara Mallik, in charge of revenue, in the government of Alauddin Husain Shah, Sultan of Bengal, while his younger brother Rupa was Dabir Khas, private secretary. After meeting Chaitanya he was imprisoned for trying to leave his post, escaped by bribing the jailer, and was sent to Vrindavan, where he wrote the Brihad Bhagavatamrita, compiled the Hari Bhakti Vilasa with Gopala Bhatta, and established the Madan Mohan temple.
What is the story of the innkeeper?+
Escaping through the Jharkhand forest with his servant Ishana, Sanatana stopped at a place in the hills where an innkeeper received them with unusual warmth, good food and considerable attention. Sanatana became suspicious and asked Ishana directly whether he was carrying anything, and Ishana admitted he had eight gold coins hidden, kept back for emergencies without telling his master. The innkeeper had been told by a reader that the travellers had gold and was planning to rob and kill them that night. Sanatana took the coins, gave them to the innkeeper, said he now had what he wanted, and asked to be shown the way onward, and the innkeeper, shamed, escorted them through the forest himself.
What happened when Sanatana planned to end his life?+
He had contracted a skin disease with open weeping sores, and at Puri Chaitanya kept embracing him, so the discharge got onto Chaitanya every time. He asked him to stop and was ignored. He decided to go under the wheels of the Ratha Yatra chariot, reasoning that his body was contaminating the person he loved and was of no further use. Chaitanya found out and told him he had already given the body away, that it was not his to destroy, that he had work to do in Vrindavan that nobody else could do, and that Sanatana's disgust at his own body was Sanatana's problem and not a fact about the situation. He lived another forty years and wrote most of his books afterwards.
What is the story of the Govardhan stone?+
Sanatana did the Govardhan parikrama, the twenty one kilometre circuit on foot around the hill in Braj, every day for years, into old age. Eventually his body could no longer do it, and the accounts describe his distress at that. The tradition says Krishna came to him as a cowherd boy and gave him a stone from Govardhan with a footprint on it, telling him to walk round the stone instead, and that four times round the stone counts as the full parikrama. It is the tradition's own authorisation for adapting a practice to a body that has changed: the practice was never the twenty one kilometres, and when the form could not continue, the form changed and the thing did not.
What can I do if I cannot keep up a practice I built?+
The Govardhan stone is the tradition's answer. People get old, get ill, become disabled, become carers, start shift work or have a child, and the practice they built no longer fits the life they have. The usual responses are to give it up entirely, or to continue at a level that damages them, or to continue and feel like a failure. The story says the third option is authorised at the highest level: reduce the form and keep the thing. Four times round a stone counts as a twenty one kilometre circuit, and the tradition does not describe the reduced practice as lesser.
What are Sanatana Goswami's works?+
The Brihad Bhagavatamrita in two parts, the first a narrative in which a search is conducted for the greatest devotee by moving up a chain of candidates and the second on the destinations, which is the most readable of the Goswami works; the Hari Bhakti Vilasa, the ritual manual of the tradition, compiled with Gopala Bhatta Goswami and credited to both; the Brihad Vaishnava Toshani, his commentary on the tenth book of the Bhagavata; and the Lila Stava, also called Dasama Charita, a listing of Krishna's acts. He also established the Madan Mohan temple at Vrindavan, the oldest of the Goswami foundations, where his samadhi is.
About the author
Pandit Ravindra Sharma · Vedic Rituals & Bhakti, 22+ years
Pandit Ravindra is the Vandnaa editorial team's resident specialist on aarti, chalisa, and daily devotion. He has performed home and temple pujas across Varanasi and Delhi for over two decades and contributes the bhakti-focused articles on this site.
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