Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/509

 V.] BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. —_ 473 a temple at Puri, and that there he suddenly van- ished. The priests of the temple declare that Chaitanya Deva’s corporal frame, which was not of gross matter, was lost in Gopinath’s figure ; they point to a golden mark in the image, asserting that that it has been there, ever since the time when Chaitanya Deva disappeared. A similar story is related by the priests of the Puri temple, who associate the disappearance of the devotee with the figure of Jagannatha. As the biographers of Chaitanya Deva are generally silent on the point, fables like these could pass current in the Vaisnava community. and they have been jong be- lieved by the people. _Jayananda’s Chaitanya-Mangala, which has been recently unearthed in the shape of some old manuscript-copies of the work by Babu Nogendra Nath Vasu, gives a version of Chaitanya’s passing away from the earth in a manner which we may accept as historically true. It is told by our author that in the month of Asada (July) Chaitanya Deva, while leading a Sankirtana party in procession, fell into a trance and as he_proceed- ed leaning on a companion, his eyes streaming with tears, and his hands up-lifted to heaven, with a. smile which made his face divinely radiant, he was hurt in the foot by a brick, of which he was totally unconscious at the time. On coming to himself he felt illness with great pain in the foot and said to his companions, that after two days he would die. He caught fever that day, which increased and on Sunday the 7th day of the wax- ing moon, in the month of July 1534, at about 3 P.M. he left his mortal frame. 60 An his= torical account,