Gaudiya Vaishnavism
Hindu religious movement inspired by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu
Gaudiya Vaishnavism (IAST: Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavasampradāyaḥ), also known as Chaitanya Vaishnavism, is a Vaishnava religious movement inspired by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486–1534) in India. "Gaudiya" refers to the Gaura or Gauḍa region of Bengal (present-day Malda division of West Bengal and Rajshahi division of Bangladesh), while Vaishnavism means "the worship of Vishnu". The tradition is part of Krishnaism, a Krishna-centric branch of Vaishnavism.
The theological basis of Gaudiya Vaishnavism is primarily the Bhagavad Gita and Bhagavata Purana, and it was systemetized by the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan and others.
The focus of Gaudiya Vaishnavism is the devotional worship (known as bhakti yoga) of the deities Radha and Krishna, and their divine incarnations, regarded as the supreme forms of God (Svayam Bhagavan). This worship commonly takes the form of singing the holy names of Radha and Krishna, including "Hare", "Krishna" and "Rama", most often in the Hare Krishna mantra, accompanied by kirtan and dancing.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Bengal became the center of a Hindu religious revival. Gaudiya Vaishnavism influenced or served as the basis for several new religious movements, such as the Gaudiya Math, from which international active institutions were later emerged. These include the Gaudiya Mission and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, often called the "Hare Krishna Movement". Scholar Ferdinando Sardella estimates the number of Gaudiya Vaishnavism adherents at between 30 to 50 million, concentrated primarily in the regions of Orissa, Manipur, West Bengal and Bangladesh.
“Gaudiya Vaishnavism” enters the record as hindu religious movement inspired by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gaudiya, Vaishnavism and Hindu can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1144575. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1486 and 1534.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gaudiya Vaishnavism” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.