THE RISE OF VAISHNAVISM UNDER THE GUPTAS
There have been many Vaishnavisms, and any adequate history of the subject must make some attempt to take account of them all. Let us begin at the end, with the movement of Chaitanya in the fifteenth century. This would seem to have swept over Bengal like a fever. Wherever it went, it conquered high and low alike. It availed itself of the severest learning, and yet penetrated at the same time to the hearts of the most ignorant. It embraced and transformed all that was left of Buddhism. It established Brindaban as a great college of piety, holiest of tirthas, and most notable of ashramas. It ended outside Bengal by creating a new order of architecture, and inside her boundaries by forging a great vernacular on its anvil. And yet in the form given to it by Chaitanya and Nityananda it was a Bengali rather than an all-India movement. It centred in Radha and Krishna and the story of the Gopis. The contemporary movement in the rest of India selected for emphasis now this element, now that, in the older Vaishnavism. Here it anchored itself on Sita and Rama : there it found and
