Caitanya-candrodaya-nāṭaka

The Rising of the Moon of Caitanya is a Sanskrit drama in ten acts on the life of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu. Its author, Kavi Karṇapūra (b. 1524), was the son of Śivānanda Sena, one of Mahāprabhu's associates, and saw Mahāprabhu himself as a child: this is a first generation's account, not a later legend. The play opens in Purī at a Guṇḍicā festival held without Mahāprabhu, and over ten acts carries the story from Navadvīpa to the taking of sannyāsa, the grace shown to Sārvabhauma and Pratāparudra, the wandering to the holy places and the great festival. Beside the human characters, personifications act in their own right: Kali and Adharma, Bhakti, Vairāgya, Discernment. This is not a purāṇic text — numbered verses alternate with prose speeches and stage directions — so the reading units here are a speech or a verse rather than a numbered verse, with the printed edition's verse number recorded separately. The text was proofread off the page images of the Kāvyamālā edition no. 87 (Bombay, 1917); the editor's footnotes are not part of the corpus.