Vasudeva Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya

 

The king of Orissa (then Kalinga) Prataparudra from the Gajapati dynasty was in conflict and even fought with Krishnadevaraya, the king of Vijayanagara and Karnataka. Krishnadevaraya became king in 1510. In the process of the conflict between the two kings, Prataparudra’s chief pandita, Lolla Lakshmidhara, wrote the Advaita Makaranda, which Prataparudra sent to Krishnadevaraya as a philosophical weapon so that Krishnadevaraya would accept its concept or refute it. The work upholds the teachings of Advaita. The famous Advaitin logician Vasudeva Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya took part in this philosophical conflict on the side of Prataparudra. Bhattacharya wrote a commentary on the Advaita Makaranda at the request of Shrikurma Vidyadhara, a minister of Prataparudra, to whom the commentary is dedicated. In the final commentary stanza, Vasudeva Sarvabhauma writes about the pride of the king of Karnataka — Krishnadevaraya and about the great king — the lord of the earth — Prataparudra, as well as about the great intelligence of Shrikurma.

In the commentary on Advaita Makaranda, Vasudeva Sarvabhauma also talks about his family. Vasudeva’s grandson Svapneshvara, in the closing stanza of his commentary on the Shandilya Sutras, states that his grandfather “was well-known throughout Bengal.” The son of Sarvabhauma, Vahinipati, went further — in the commentary on Shabdaloka, he proclaims his father an avatara of Vishnu.

The philosophical conflict of the kings, according to one source, occurred after the conversion of Vasudeva Sarvabhauma to Chaitanya’s Vaishnavism, which indicates the fictitious plot of the conversion in the Chaitanya Charitamrita. For others, before conversion. According to Dinesh Chandra Bhattacharya (see Vāsudeva Sārvabhauma, Indian Historical Quarterly 16, 1940), Krishnadevaraya’s military campaign against Orissa began in 1512, and Sarvabhauma probably wrote a commentary on Advaita Makaranda in 1511. In 1510–1512 Chaitanya was on a pilgrimage in South India. Dinesh Chandra notes that the history of Vasudeva’s conversion to Vaishnavism is rather controversial (p. 66). Neither the son nor the grandson of Vasudeva Sarvabhauma showed the slightest attachment to Bengal Vaishnavism of Chaitanya in their works, as far as it was possible. Independent descriptions of the life of Vasudeva Sarvabhauma by authors who are not related to Chaitanya and his religion speak of Vasudeva as an orthodox scholar, Advaitin and logician. All this once again makes one doubt the historicity of Vasudeva Sarvabhauma’s conversion to Vaishnavism, or at least believe that the nature of the so-called conversion of Sarvabhauma by Chaitanya really was as deep and permanent as Chaitanya’s biographers try to show (p. 69).

Sarvabhauma left Puri before Chaitanya’s death. Kavikarnapura writes about this in Chaitanya Candrodaya. Sarvabhauma survived Chaitanya and spent his last days in Varanasi, as was the custom with pious Bengali scholars. Despite the claims of some residents of the city of Puri that they are descendants of Vasudeva Sarvabhauma, today there is not a single family that can accurately present their genealogy from Sarvabhauma. With one of these families, more precisely with a brahmin of about 30 years old, I met in 2001 in Puri, in the supposed house of Vasudeva Sarvabhauma. There is no evidence that the famous logician lived in this house.

Tradition states that Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya had four prominent disciples: Chaitanya, Raghunatha Shiromani (1460–1540, one of the six Goswamis of Vrindavana), Raghunandana and Krishnananda. We only know for certain that it was Raghunatha who was such. The other three are legend, apart from Chaitanya’s brief visit in 1510 to several of Vasudeva’s lessons. The Navadvipa-born Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya developed Navya Nyaya in this city.

This article was originally published on my personal website. The full and authoritative version is available here: 

https://bergstreisser.com/vasudeva-sarvabhauma/