Chaitanya Mahaprabhu

Viśvambhara Miśra, born at Nabadwip in Bengal and known as Nimāi, was a young scholar who, after a transformative encounter at Gayā with the ascetic Īśvara Purī, became consumed by ecstatic devotion (bhakti) to Kṛṣṇa. He inspired a movement of communal chanting and dancing in the names of God (saṃkīrtana) that swept Bengal and Odisha, took sannyāsa, and settled for the last quarter of his life at Puri in Odisha, with a celebrated pilgrimage to Vrindāvan in between. Chaitanya himself left almost no writings; his theology — Achintya-Bhedābheda, the 'inconceivable simultaneous difference and non-difference' of God and the soul — and the cult of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa devotion were systematized by his followers (the Six Gosvāmīs of Vrindāvan). Many of his devotees revere him as a joint incarnation of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa; this is the tradition's devotional view. His lineage, Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, is the root of the modern ISKCON movement. He died at Puri in 1534.