"Ut matrona meretrici dispar erit atque discolor."
So must also Vaish.navism differ from true religion, the flesh from the
spirit, the impure from the pure. The singing of hymns about R??dh?? and
K.rish.na is much older than Chaitanya's age. Not to mention Jayadeva
and his beautiful, though sensual, G?®tagovinda. [Footnote: It is many
years now since I read Gitagovinda as a text-book at college, but the
impression I still retain is that it was in many parts far too warm for
European tastes.] Bidyapati, the earliest of Bengali poets, and
Cha.n.di D??s both preceded Chaitanya, and he himself is stated to have
been fond of singing their verses. There was therefore a considerable
mass of hymns ready to his hand, and his contemporaries and followers
added largely to the number; the poems of the _Padakalpataru_ in
consequence are of all ages from the fifteenth century downwards;
moreover, as Vaish.navism aspires to be a religion for the masses, the
aim of its supporters has always been to write in the vulgar tongue, a
fortunate circumstance which renders this vast body of literature
extremely valuable to the philologist, since it can be relied on as
representing the spoken language of its day more accurately than those
pretentious works whose authors despised everything but Sanskrit.
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