The Last Years at Purī
Chaitanya never again left Purī.
Although in commissioning his followers to settle and preach at Vrindāvan, he repeatedly expressed the wish that such could have been his own lot, yet it is clear that he accepted his mother's word as determining his residence for life at Purī.
Having once visited the sacred sites, he gave himself to a life of worship at Purī, and left to his disciples the great work he had hoped to do himself.
The remaining 17-18 years of his life were uneventful. With a chosen few about him he settled down to the routine of life in the temple city.
Each year the Bengal contingent spent several months at Purī, which served to break the monotony somewhat. But, apart from the occasional visits of scholar ascetics and disciples, the even tenor of Chaitanya's life as a recluse was unbroken.
There is singularly little in the record with which to fill out the story of these last years. Small incidents and descriptions of Chaitanya's emotions make up the narrative.
He was constantly attended by a small group of disciples, who read and sang to him much of the day and superintended all the details of the daily worship, bathing, etc.
As the years went on, Chaitanya became increasingly incapable of caring for himself:
The extreme emotional demands made upon his nervous system for so many years could not but result in growing instability and disorder.
No human organism could stand the strain put upon it by Chaitanya's experiences.
Although there is no satisfactory record of the last days, what there is indicates a state of nervous disorder characterised by stupor, trances and wild outbursts of frenzied delirium, showing only too clearly the approaching utter collapse of a mind and body strained to the breaking point.
The end of the saint is unknown:
His principal biographers have drawn a veil over the death of their master. Legends there are of his disappearance in temple and image, but of the fact there is no certainty.
One of the less reliable of the biographies - the Chaitanya Maṅgala, by Jayānanda - gives the date of his death as July, 1534, and attributes it to a wound in the foot, which brought on fever resulting in death.
This may be the fact.
However, the common supposition that the end came by drowning in the ocean during one of his fits of ecstasy has a great deal of probability in its favour, considering the many times Chaitanya was rescued from just such a death.
The body was probably buried in the temple by the priests, and the miraculous tales that arose, of the master's disappearance in various images, were doubtless created and encouraged by them for purposes of revenue.