Shri Raghunath

In the half dark before sunrise, in a haveli in Gokul thick with the smell of last night's incense, a small boy is walking down a corridor with his eyes screwed shut. He has made himself a rule, and he keeps it the way children keep the rules they invent for themselves, with a fierceness no elder ever asked of him: the very first thing his eyes fall upon each morning must be his father's face, nothing else, not a wall, not a servant, not the courtyard tulsi, nothing that is merely the world. So he goes blind on purpose, one hand trailing the plaster, feeling his way toward the room where his father sleeps. This is Raghunathji, and this habit of his, small and stubborn and almost comic, turns out to be the door through which his whole story enters.

He was born, tradition holds, on the twelfth day of the bright fortnight of Kartik, around Vikram Samvat 1611, which is to say close to 1554 of the common era, the fifth of the sons of Vitthalnathji, the householder-saint the Pushtimarg still calls, with the plain affection of a family nickname, Gusainji. Gusainji was himself the son of Vallabhacharya, the acharya who had taught all of Braj a theology of unearned grace, pushti, love that ripens the soul not because the soul has struggled hard enough for it but because the Lord has simply chosen to give it, the way a father gives to a child who has done nothing yet to deserve anything. Vallabhacharya died when Gusainji was only fifteen, and the boy who inherited a fledgling sampradaya instead of a father grew into a man who built, in Gokul, a household so thick with devotion that it functioned less like a family and more like a small civilization of bhakti. Two wives, Rukminiji and Padmavatiji, gave him seven sons in all, and each son, in time, would be handed one sacred image of Krishna to serve for the rest of his life and would found, around that single image, a house, a gruha, that carries his name into the present day. Raghunathji's image, given to him as his very own to bathe and dress and feed and adore, was a form of the child Krishna called Gokulchandramaji, the moon of Gokul, and it is still worshipped, his tradition says, in the seat remembered as the Pancham Peeth, the fifth house, at Kaman in the Braj country of Rajasthan.

But before any of that, there was the corridor, and the morning the boy misjudged his own darkness. Walking with his eyes shut as he always did, he struck his forehead hard against the low crossbar of a doorway and cried out, and was found bleeding by attendants who came running. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Gusainji to end the habit there, to tell his son that love does not require a person to walk blind through his own house. He did not. Instead, so the family's memory of him insists, he had an image of his own face drawn, so that the boy could open his eyes each dawn onto a likeness of his father kept ready and safe, and never need to risk his skull for it again. It is a small mercy, almost a domestic joke, and it is also, if you sit with it, the entire logic of Pushtimarg compressed into one gesture: the Lord, or the guru who stands in his place, does not scold a devotee for loving carelessly. He rearranges the world a little, so that love can go on being reckless without being ruinous.

The more startling story from his childhood belongs to when he was five. Gusainji, testing or teaching him, addressed him one day in Sanskrit, the learned register of scripture and courtly instruction, and asked him to bring a jewel box. The boy only stared, uncomprehending; Sanskrit had not been given to him yet, not at five. And then, the tradition says, something opened in him, an inward touch remembered as the grace of Shri Vallabh himself, the grandfather Raghunathji had never seen in the flesh, since Vallabhacharya had left his body more than two decades before his grandson was even born. Understanding arrived from somewhere that owed nothing to schooling. The child fetched the box. And in the same breath, still five years old, he is said to have composed, unasked, a hymn of one hundred and eight names of his own father, the Naam Ratnakhya Stotra, built in open imitation of the Sarvottam Stotra in which Gusainji himself had once sung one hundred and eight names of his own father, Vallabhacharya. A son naming the father who had named the father before him: three generations folded into one small boy's mouth. Moved by it, Gusainji is remembered to have made a decision that shaped the sampradaya's inner life ever after, that the language of seva in his household would be Brajbhasha, the spoken tongue of Krishna's own country, not Sanskrit, so that even a child too young for grammar could still take his full part in loving God.

He grew up, in other words, inside a house already crowded with poet-saints. Surdas, Kumbhandas, Paramanand Das and Krishnadas had gathered around his grandfather; Chaturbhujdas, Govindswami, Chhitswami and Nanddas had gathered around his father, the eight of them remembered together as the Ashtachhap, the eight seals, whose padas still carry the eight daily darshans of Shrinathji to devotees who have never set foot in Nathdwara. Nanddas, the tradition adds almost as an aside, was kin to Tulsidas, an elder godbrother by some tellings, and where Tulsidas gave his whole life to Ram, Nanddas gave his to the cowherd boy of Gokul, each pouring the same total love into what looked, to the world, like two different gods. That old, gentle rivalry between two devotions is the exact hinge on which the most cherished story of Raghunathji's life turns.

He was married at fifteen, in Gokul, to a girl named Janakiji, and by that marriage in time had five sons and a daughter. The story his tradition tells of the wedding itself is the one worth carrying away. Tulsidas, already known through Braj and Avadh for a hunger for Ram so total it unsettled people more comfortable with moderate devotion, is remembered as having been present at the ceremony. And at its height, before the wedding fire, in the middle of a Krishna-worshipping household's most Krishna-centered hour, Raghunathji is said to have shown himself for a moment as Ram, bow and arrow in hand, so that the old poet who had spent a lifetime aching for one more sight of his Lord received it, unlooked for, inside somebody else's wedding. It is why, even in a family devoted heart and soul to the cowherd of Gokul, this fifth son is remembered by the tender household name Ramchandraji. Whether it happened exactly as the tradition tells it belongs to the province of faith rather than record, and it is offered here as the Pushtimarg itself offers it, as cherished memory rather than settled history; what the story insists on, in any case, is not a magic trick but a claim about the nature of God, that Krishna and Ram were never two different beings competing for a devotee's loyalty, only two doors into the same boundless love, opening onto whichever room a particular heart happened to be standing in front of.

That claim is, in fact, exactly what the old commentary on Raghunathji reaches for in its closing lines, worn and broken as the surviving text now is. Addressing an assembly of sadhus directly, it says: hear all these accounts; in Dvapara Yuga there was the story of the stealing of the calves, and afterward, in Kali Yuga too, this astonishing matter came to pass, and it is well known indeed. The reference is to the well loved episode in which Brahma, testing Krishna, spirited away Vraja's calves and cowherd boys for a year, and Krishna, so that not one mother in Gokul should spend even a single day mourning an empty stall or an empty lap, quietly became every missing calf and every missing boy himself, indistinguishable, until Brahma returned the originals and found the whole of Vraja already, secretly, filled with God. What the commentary is telling its listening sadhus is that the same willingness never went away with the yuga that made room for it. If the Lord could multiply himself without limit to answer the ordinary love of cowherds in Dvapara, he could do it once more, at a fifth son's wedding in Gokul in the middle of Kali Yuga, to answer the extraordinary love of one old poet who had given his whole life to a single name. Love that is total enough, the text is saying, is never sent away empty by the one it longs for, in any age at all.

What can be said with more confidence than any single miracle is the shape of the life that followed. Raghunathji spent his years serving Gokulchandramaji with the same undivided attention he had once given to his father's face in a dark corridor, and out of that service grew a lineage, a house among the Pushtimarg's seven, that his descendants still tend. There is very little else recorded of his later years, no dramatic renunciation, no famous journey, nothing that would satisfy a biographer looking for incident; and perhaps that itself is the teaching. Some saints are remembered for leaving the world. Raghunathji is remembered for refusing to open his eyes on anything in it that was not, in some way, his Beloved, whether that meant a father's living face, a grandfather he never met, a hymn he had no business yet knowing how to write, or a friend's whole lifetime of longing suddenly, briefly, answered. If there is a discipline in this story simple enough to take home and actually try, it is not fasting or vigil or any hardship at all. It is only this: choose, tomorrow morning, what your eyes will fall on first, and let it be something worth having waited the whole dark night for.