Caitanya Mahāprabhu is thus a figure of great historical significance. However, our conventional method of historical analysis—that of seeing a man as a product of his times—fails here, for Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya is a personality who transcends the limited scope of historical settings.
At a time when, in the West, man was directing his explorative spirit toward studying the structure of the physical universe and circumnavigating the world in search of new oceans and continents, Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya, in the East, was inaugurating and masterminding a revolution directed toward a scientific understanding of the highest knowledge of man's spiritual nature.
The chief historical sources for the life of Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya are the kaḍacās (diaries) kept by Murāri Gupta and Svarūpa Dāmodara Gosvāmī. Murāri Gupta, a physician and close associate of Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya's, recorded extensive notes on the first twenty-four years of His life, culminating in His initiation into the renounced order, sannyāsa. The events of the rest of Caitanya Mahāprabhu's forty-eight years were recorded in the diary of Svarūpa Dāmodara Gosvāmī, another of His intimate associates.