Shri Khadgasen ji spent his entire life describing the lilas of Shri Gopal ji, His sakhas and sakhis, and never once did his dridha bhakti turn to look in any other direction.
His vani was supremely bright and clear, composed to string together the gunas of Shri Govinda Chandra ji. He searched through the granthas and lovingly compiled the names of the gopis, gwalas, and their mothers and fathers into one work. He composed with great skill the Dana-Keli Lila and the Dipamala Charitra. A Kayastha by jati, he was the one who brought honor to his entire kula.
Following the method of the Gautami Tantra, he meditated. And at the time of the sharad Rasa-Mandal, leaving his body, he attained the eternal Rasa-Mandal.
The Rasa-Mandal as Your True Home
Khadgasen ji settled in Gwalior and built his entire inner life around the samaj, the gathered circle of devotees singing and contemplating the divine pastimes of Shri Radha and Shri Krishna. He did not treat the rasa-mandal as an occasional religious event. It was his daily world, his true residence. The Radha Vallabh tradition he inherited from Shri Hit Harivansh ji taught that the eternal lila of Shyama-Shyam is not a story from a distant past but a living, continuous reality. To enter that current through longing, through song, through the company of fellow devotees, is not imagination. It is arrival. Where does your heart settle when the noise of ordinary life grows quiet? That is your true home. Khadgasen ji found his, and he never left it.
Bhaktamal, Tika on Khadgasen ji (entry 259)
Discipline in the Service of Love
By birth Khadgasen ji was a Kayastha, a community associated with scholarship, record-keeping, and the careful preservation of knowledge. Rather than leaving this capacity behind when he entered the devotional path, he consecrated it entirely to Shri Radha and Shri Krishna. He patiently gathered from the granthas the names of all the gopis, the gwalas, their mothers and fathers, and compiled them into a single treasury. Within the rasika tradition, each name is a doorway. To know the name of a companion in the nitya-lila is to establish a relationship with that form in the eternal Vrindavan. Whatever capacity you have received from your birth and upbringing, from your education and your particular kind of intelligence, none of it needs to be discarded on the spiritual path. It only needs to be directed. Khadgasen ji shows that discipline and love, far from opposing each other, are most beautiful when they are one.
Bhaktamal, Tilak on Khadgasen ji (entry 259)
The Dana-Keli: When Love Speaks Through Playfulness
Among Khadgasen ji's compositions was the Dana-Keli Lila, the playful scene in which the Lord, posing as a toll-collector on the forest path, stops Shri Radha and her companions and demands a gift. The entire scene unfolds as mock dispute, quick wit, teasing and counter-teasing, with love expressing itself through laughter rather than solemnity. This lila carries a teaching for the seeker: the relationship with the divine is not always approached through tears of longing or solemn vows. Sometimes it opens through delight, through a kind of inner humor that knows the beloved is near and is not afraid to play. To compose this lila well, as Khadgasen ji did, requires actually feeling its current. The playfulness of the divine is not less sacred than its gravity. It is perhaps more intimate.
Bhaktamal, Tilak on Khadgasen ji (entry 259)
A Luminous Voice: Offering Your Gifts to the Beloved
The Bhaktamal says that Khadgasen ji's vani, his devotional speech and poetry, was visad: luminous, clear, free of any obscuring residue. The Tika explains that those who heard his compositions felt something touch them in the chest before the mind had time to process the meaning. This quality of brightness does not come from cleverness alone. It arrives when the poet surrenders the tongue entirely to the subject it serves, when there is no longer authorial pride standing between the words and what they point toward. Khadgasen ji also composed the Dipamala Charitra, stringing together the Lord's glories the way a garland strings flowers, each one complete and yet more beautiful for its place in the whole. When you offer whatever you love most, whether words or music or art or simple service, without claiming it back, the offering itself begins to shine.
Bhaktamal, Tilak and Mool on Khadgasen ji (entry 259)
The Path of Prema: An Arrival, Not an Ending
The Mool verse of the Bhaktamal says plainly: the love of Khadgasen cannot be expressed in words. Writing the beautiful lilas, enacting them in his heart, he released his body and his prana departed. It happened during the sharad rasa-mandal, on an autumn full moon night in Gwalior, within the singing circle of the samaj. Deep in meditation according to the Gautami Tantra, absorbed in the vision of Shyama-Shyam, the boundaries between the meditating self and the divine reality dissolved completely. He did not die in the ordinary sense. He arrived. The verse before the account speaks of two signs of genuine love: riding the horse of desire into fire, and walking the path of prema all the way to its end, which most people cannot sustain. Khadgasen ji sustained it. His story is a gentle but direct message: the life you give to love is not lost. It is the only life that completes itself.
Bhaktamal, Mool verse and Tika on Khadgasen ji (entry 259)
Hindi text from OCR scan (Khemraj Shrikrishnadas Prakashan, CC0). May contain errors.