What is the disciplic succession by which Krishnadas Kaviraja Goswami got the knowledge to write the Chaitanya Charitamrita?

From: Praveen
Could you please provide the disciplic succession in which the knowledge has come down to Krishna Das Kaviraj Goswami to be able to compile Chaitanya Charitamrita, especially there are some intimate past times of Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu like showing the universal form which was shown only to Advaita acharya and Nityanand prabhu – meaning how were they revealed to him.
Also how has that knowledge of Chaitanya Charitamrita come down in disciplic succession could you please explain in detail.

Transcript

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Question from Praveen Thiru. Could you please provide a disciplic succession in which the knowledge has come down to Krishnadas Kaviraj Goswami to be able to compile Chaitanya Charita Amrit.
Especially there are some intimate pastimes of Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu like showing the universal form which was shown only to other Acharya Nityanand Prabhu meaning how were they revealed to him and how was that knowledge of Chaitanya Charita Amrit come down in disciplic succession. Could you please explain in detail. Answer.
Krishnadas Kaviraj Goswami himself explains the sources through which he got the knowledge. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu lived in Puri for a major part of his life and for most of that period Sarodamudra Goswami was with him and there was also Raghunath Das Goswami who soon came thereafter and Sarodamudra Goswami being the secretary of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu noted down all the pastimes that occurred and he told them to Raghunath Das Goswami also and then when Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and Sarodamudra Goswami departed and thereafter Raghunath Goswami came from Puri to Vrindavan and there he would everyday speak elaborately on the pastimes of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and Krishnadas Kaviraj Goswami was among those who attended and he heard the pastimes from Raghunath Das Goswami now Krishnadas Kaviraj Goswami also had the advantage that he was born and brought up in the Bengal area in Mayapur, Navdeep area and that was where Chaitanya Mahaprabhu performed his pre-sannyas pastimes so now many of his associates who lived with him during those pastimes they wrote down their own books, Murari Gupta wrote his Karjas which were also a source indirectly for Krishnadas Kaviraj Goswami and then Kavir Karanapur wrote pastimes actually a total of 27 biographies were written and in a sense Krishnadas Kaviraj Goswami was the final word so basically because Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was in Navdeep and he was very loved in Navdeep and the devotees who loved him wrote about him and so the Navdeep pastimes for example he is showing the Virat Rupatu otherwise Acharya and Nityanand Rupatu it was shown only to them but they told about it to others and there was Murari Gupta there and Kavir Karanapur was born soon after that and he heard it from the devotees so now when we talk about knowledge coming down in disciplic succession there are several important points to understand in that knowledge doesn’t have to come down verbatim it is not that Aishwarya Prabhupada repeated every single word that Bhakti Sahasrat Thakur spoke there are essential principles that are understood not just intellectually but are also internalized in terms of one’s living and then they are taught according to time and place circumstances so it is not that when an author is writing a book and Aishwarya Prabhupada is writing a book it is not that every single word that he is speaking he has sincerely heard it from Bhakti Sahasrat Thakur during some classes no, Aishwarya Prabhupada has heard the essential message he has read between the Acharya’s books he has seen the modern society and under Krishna’s expert guidance he combines all these sources and gives us his purpose so his books similarly Krishna’s Kaviraj Goswami he also heard about Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s pastime from his many intimate associates so the primary among them was of course Evanadas Goswami for the Puri pastimes and Murali Gupta and his Karchas for the Karchas or the tablets on which the pastimes are written for the Navdeep pastimes and in fact as I said Krishna’s Kaviraj Goswami’s book was the last book to be written so he also had the benefit of the writings of the other authors like Chaitanya Bhagwat by Vrindavan Das Thakur Chaitanya Mangal by Lochin Das Thakur and the other books Chaitanya Charita Chaitanya Charita Amrit Mahakavya Chaitanya Amrit Mahakavya written by its authors like Chaitanya Chandra Nathakam written by Kavi Karnapur, Murali Gupta all of them wrote extraordinary books and he had the advantage of various sources because all of them are devotees and they are associates of the Lord so they all wanted to glorify the Lord in their own ways and Krishna’s Kaviraj Goswami got the knowledge from all these sources and integrated them into one book where he presented not just the philosophy but also the teachings sorry not just the pastimes but also the teachings integrated together in one book and that’s why this is considered to be such an important book in the tradition because it integrates the pastimes from various sources and also presents the pastimes along with the relevant philosophy as one magnificent work of integration since then how has the book come down? the book is 500 years ago and it’s not very far so the manuscripts have also been preserved and there are manuscripts of Chaitanya Charita Amrit available even now and basically the Sampradaya has been continuing since the Mahabharata times and the Sampradaya Acharyas especially after Krishna Das Kaviraj Goswami completed his book and then he departed from the world the book was interested with the disciples of the Goswamis especially the Goswami had three disciples Shri Masa Acharya Shyaman Pandit and Nathul Das Thakur and they came back from Vrindavan to Bengal and Odisha and they started preaching over there and then they held the Kheturi Gram Festival the first Gaur Purnima Festival in Kheturi where Nathul Das Thakur’s place and there they distributed the copies of Chaitanya Charita Amrit so the devotees from various parts had come there to celebrate Gaur Purnima the appearance of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and there they received the copies and this book became like the standardizer for the whole Gaudiya Vaishnava community in different parts of the in different parts Bengal, Odisha, Vrindavan even South India where Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had gone and preached so in this way the book became disseminated and since then through various sources through various disciplic successions the book has been coming down to us so now the specific disciplic succession we have given by Shri Bakhtar Sutanshu Thakur and listed by Shri Prabhupada at the start of Bhagavad Gita as it is it is a Shiksha disciplic succession where the spiritual teachers have received instruction the spiritual, the preceptors in this line have received spiritual instruction from their teachers and this goes down, goes on right up to not just Krishnaswami but goes not up to Lord Krishna into remote antiquity so that is the way the Chaitanya Charita Amrit essential conclusions have also been preserved so that manuscripts have been preserved through the various people who had those manuscripts and who rewrote those manuscripts in order to preserve them if some got weakened some got damaged and then original manuscripts are also available in many places and especially Prabhupada’s desire there is a library being established in Vrindavan in Calcutta to preserve the works of primarily the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition and also to have a broad Vedic library so many precious Gaudiya Vaishnava manuscripts are also available but the manuscripts were preserved by those who had those manuscripts and the essential principles essential understanding of the text was preserved through the disciplic succession as is given in Bhagavad Gita as it is and as was described by Shri Bhaktisanta Thakur in his song Krishna Hoite Chatur Mukha that comes in the Vaishnava song book Thank you