Ramai Pandit or Ramai the Wise was a medieval Bengali

Bengali language

Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 from the region of Bengal

Bengal

Bengal is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is mainly divided between the sovereign land of People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, although some regions of the previous...

. The exact date of his birth is not known, but it is believed that he lived in the 11th century AD as he is a contmporary to Mayur Bhatt, the coart-poet of King Lausen. He is famous as the author of Shunya Purana, the scripture of Dharma Puja Bidhan, written in the 11th century AD.

American Sanskrit scholar Edward Washburn Hopkins

Edward Washburn Hopkins

Edward Washburn Hopkins, Ph.D., LL.D. , American Sanskrit scholar, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts.He graduated at Columbia University in 1878, studied at Leipzig, where he received the degree of Ph.D...

 wrote in his "Origin and Evolution of Religion" in 1923 that,

Thus Ramai Pandit, who, in the Middle Ages, was an earthly expounder of the 19 great void I I doctrine (and was soon afterwards revered as a worker of miracles, a supernatural power), addresses this "form of the void," shunyamurti, as "sole lord of all the worlds " and begs it as " highest god" to confer boons.

Devotional Background

Ramai Pandit advocated the worship of God, whom he called Dharma and Shunya. His son, Dharmadas converted a king of Kalinga

Kalinga

Kalinga is a landlocked province of the Philippines in the Cordillera Administrative Region in Luzon. Its capital is Tabuk and borders Mountain Province to the south, Abra to the west, Isabela to the east, Cagayan to the northeast, and Apayao to the north...

 into the sect of Dharmathakur

Dharmathakur

Dharmathakur is a Hindu god worshipped by villagers in the traditional Rarh region in the present day Indian state of West Bengal as one of their special village gods...

.

"Shunya" mean void and Ramai Pandit, like many other Hindu philosophers in Bengal and Orissa in the time period advocated worshipping God as void and formless. Mahima Swami of the Mahima sect is another example of a Hindu philosopher popularizing worshiping God as formless (Alekh.)

Though Ramai Pandi was a devotee of Dharmathakur, in his Dharma Puja Bidhan he praises several other deities. He writes of Jagganath as Vishnu

Vishnu

Vishnu is the Supreme god in the Vaishnavite tradition of Hinduism. Smarta followers of Adi Shankara, among others, venerate Vishnu as one of the five primary forms of God....

:

In the ninth incarnation Hari dwelt on the sea-coast known by the name Jagannath.