Social Consequences of His Bhakti
It is hardly accurate to write of Chaitanya in terms of social reform, or to credit him with a revolutionary social vision:
Indeed, it is difficult to come at the truth in describing his influence in this respect, for his life and teaching had manifold social effects which lend plausibility to the assertions sometimes made about the social reformation wrought by him.
It seems perfectly clear, however, that Chaitanya was not concerned with the reform of Hindu society:
His sole interest was religion, and it is only as his religious experience, and that engendered by him among others, came into conflict with the Hindu social system that he can be called a social reformer.
His social reform, so-called, was only a by-product of his bhakti.
The social consequences of his religious experience came from the catholicity of his bhakti.
He recognised no limits whatever to be set to this absorbing experience, and the participation of men in it. Such breadth of view was vastly disturbing to orthodox Hinduism.
That all men could find a place in common religious worship and be counted as equal in the attitude of devotion, was startling and revolutionary.
Indeed, many sayings are attributed to Chaitanya which seem to transcend the caste system altogether, although the authenticity of all such teaching is not certain by any means.
This attitude, on the other hand, is balanced by clear evidence of social orthodoxy:
When we come to the study of this phase of Chaitanya's teaching, we shall see that he did not consistently set himself against the caste system.
It is perfectly clear, however, that he went far beyond the customs and ideas of his time in the direction of a brotherhood of bhakti:
He accepted converts from Islam freely, and one of the earliest of his disciples was a Muhammadan fakir, Haridās by name, who attained to great sanctity in the sect and was buried by Chaitanya's own hands at Purī.
We have already seen how the two disciples, Rūpa and Sanātana, who were raised to the highest positions of honour as scholars of the sect, were utterly outcastes from Hindu society as renegade converts to Islam when Chaitanya met them.
He repeatedly proclaimed his bhakti as being accessible to the lowest classes of Hindu society. In short, it may be said that he had courage to preach a message of religious freedom which made a place for all in its cult of loving devotion.
Naturally, this gave his movement a tremendous appeal to the hearts of the common people:
To this day the humble people of Bengal sing such songs as were heard among the sweepers in Tipperah, the burden of which was, "Come, and see the god-man who does not believe in caste.”
However, it is a question, which is the more striking, the opening of the portals of bhakti to all castes, or the sheer simplicity of the requirements of the new faith.
Nothing was demanded of men but what they could give; high and low, rich and poor, without rite or ceremony, all alike were swept in on the wings of song.
The one requisite was the chanting of the sacred name. It was a religious worship in which the humblest, the most ignorant, and the poorest of all could join.
This simplification of religion was an achievement which had its social reverberations also, for it boded ill for the vested priestly interests.
It was an emancipation of the common man from ecclesiastical tyranny, that would have been a social as well as a religious triumph could it have persisted.
Temple-worship remained, of course. It was ingrained in Vaishnavism, and occupied a very large place in the practice of Chaitanya and of his followers.
But in the flowering of the movement, in the enthusiastic days in Navadvīpa, the heart of it, certainly, was the saṅkīrtana. It was the essential and for the time being it seems to have been all-sufficient.
These things must ever stand to Chaitanya's credit.
In the midst of a priest-ridden, caste-bound society, this man, by the expansive power of his own emotional experience, was led to inaugurate a popular religious movement
which for a time freed the commonalty of men from the ancient thraldom of the law book and the priest, and led them into a common fellowship of devotion.
The full consequences of this teaching form part of the history of the sect.
It is probable that Chaitanya neither foresaw them nor was in full sympathy with the steps taken by some of his followers in carrying out the logical implications of his own teaching.
But it does not detract from the significance of those implications that he failed to recognise them himself:
They were the elements that gave the movement its note of liberating power in its best days. Even in its later days of deterioration, this note has never entirely departed from the sect.