Gaudiya Vaishnava

Religious community founded by the
Bengali saint Chaitanya (1486–1533).
It takes its name from the ancient
name for Bengal (Gauda), and its
stress on the worship of the god
Vishnu. The community’s religious
practices and beliefs are founded in
Chaitanya’s ecstatic devotionalism. He
asserted that the path to religious
ecstasy is the repetitive recitation of
Krishna’s name, often while singing
and dancing in the streets. Chaitanya’s
religious charisma gained him many
followers, of whom the most important
were the Goswamis—the brothers
Rupa and Sanatana, and their nephew
Jiva. At Chaitanya’s command the
Goswamis went to live in Brindavan,
the village where Krishna is believed
to have grown up. The Goswamis’
descendants live there to this day. In
Brindavan, the Goswamis set about organizing and systematizing the philosophical foundation of Chaitanya’s ecstatic
experience. Although they conceived of
themselves as Chaitanya’s servants,
they are equally important in the community’s development. The Goswamis’
key philosophical doctrine was
achintyabhedabheda, the idea that
there was an “inconceivable identity
and difference” between the Supreme
Divinity (Krishna) and the human being
that renders the soul simultaneously
identical to and different from the divinity. The Gaudiya Vaishnava community
is also famous for its exhaustive analysis
of devotion (bhakti) as an emotional
experience. They enumerated the different ways to experience the love of god as
five modes of devotion. For further
information see Sushil Kumar De, Early
History of the Vaishnava Faith and
Movement in Bengal, 1961.