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              vande 
                bhakti-vinodamsri gaura-sakti-svarupakam
 bhakti-sastrajna-samrajam
 radha-rasa-sudha-nidhim
 "I 
              bow to Sri Thakur Bhaktivinoda, Mahaprabhu's love divine personified. 
              He is the king of all knowers of the purpose of the scriptures, 
              and he is the ocean of Sri Radha's devotion."[Srila Bhakti Rakshak Sridhar Maharaj]
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  Srila Sachchidananda 
              Bhaktivinoda Thakur, the nineteenth century pioneer of Krishna consciousness, 
              was born in 1838 in Bengal. He worked tirelessly to preserve the 
              spiritual tradition and literature of India; he composed, edited, 
              and published more than 100 books in Sanskrit, Bengali, and English. The pioneer 
              of pure devotion, it was Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur who foretold 
              that people the world over would join under the banner of Sri Chaitanya Maharabhu's Harinama Sankirtan 
              [congregational chanting of the holy names of Lord Krishna]. By 
              his profuse writings, Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur infused the current 
              which was to be the renaissance of a devotional civilization, which 
              had become overgrown with spurious interpretations und misrepresentation. He 
              advocated exclusive surrender [saranagati] 
              to the service of the Supreme Lord's pure devotees as the life of 
              devotion, and to this end he composed a great stream of books, prayers, 
              poems, and commentaries 
              in Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi, English, and other languages, which 
              are now revered by the genuine devotees as scripture. His style 
              of presentation was chiefly analytic, simple, and appealing. He 
              taught that the apparently sophisticated philosophies and doctrines 
              which deviate one to materialism, salvation, voidism, etc. [karma, 
              jnana, sunya-vada, etc.] must be abandoned by the true aspirants 
              of devotion; yet, he acknowledged that from the universal standpoint 
              such "charming" distractions served to segregate the insincere 
              from the sincere. Thus he foresaw that inevitably the intelligentsia 
              of the world must come to appreciate the all-attractive path of 
              divine love given by Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. The 
              Thakur inaugurated the worship of Lord Chaitanya at the holy site 
              known as Sri Yoga-Pith, the advent location of Sri Chaitanyadeva 
              in the holy Sri Dham Mayapur.
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