after the fashion of some revivalists of modern times. The young
students at the Sanskrit schools in Nadiya naturally found all this
very amusing, and cracked jokes to their hearts' content on the crazy
enthusiasts.

In January 1510, Chaitanya suddenly took it into his head to become a
Sanyasi or ascetic, and received initiation at the hands of Keshab
Bharati of Katwa. Some say he did this to gain respect and credit as a
religious preacher, others say it was done in consequence of a curse
laid on him by a Brahman whom he had offended. Be this as it may, his
craziness seems now to have reached its height. He wandered off from
his home, in the first instance, to Puri to see the shrine of
Jagannath. Thence for six years he roamed all over India preaching
Vaish.navism, and returned at last to Puri, where he passed the
remaining eighteen years of his life and where at length he died in the
48th year of his age in 1534 A.D. His Bengali followers visited him
for four months in every year and some of them always kept watch over
him, for he was now quite mad. He had starved and preached and sung
and raved himself quite out of his senses. On one occasion he imagined
that a post in his veranda was Radha, and embraced it so hard as nearly
to smash his nose, and to cover himself with blood from scraping all
the skin off his forehead; on another he walked into the sea in a fit
of abstraction, and was fished up half dead in a net by a fisherman.
His friends took it in turns to watch by his side all night lest he
should do himself some injury.

The leading principle that underlies the whole of Chaitanya's system is
_Bhakti_ or devotion; and the principle is exemplified and
illustrated by the mutual loves of Radha and K.rish.na. In adopting
this illustration of his principle, Chaitanya followed the example of