Shri Sobharam Ji and Shri Harivyas Ji

The river was rising, and the town was afraid. In the country along the upper Yamuna, close to Kurukshetra, where the twin towns of Jagadhari and Yamunanagar stand today in Haryana, the monsoon had swollen Sri Yamunaji far past her banks, and the current was already gnawing at the edge of the town's own streets. The people did the only thing they could think to do. They ran, not toward higher ground, but toward the door of the sadhu they trusted more than any embankment, an acharya of the Nimbarka line remembered as Sobharam ji.

He did not chant a mantra of command over the flood, nor order it back as though it were a servant. He walked down to the water himself and spoke to Yamunaji the way a son speaks to a mother who has lost her temper. A mother nurtures her children, he told her, she does not drown them; but if it was truly her wish to come further into the town, he would take up a spade himself and cut her a path forward. It was not a threat and barely even a bargain. It was the plain, undefended speech of someone who still trusted the river to be, underneath the flood, a mother. Yamunaji, the account says, was pleased by this, and drew back. She never pressed against that quarter of the town again.

Who was this man who could turn back a flooding river with nothing more than a spade and a son's confidence in his mother's love? The Bhaktamal remembers him as Sobharam ji, and the wider record of the Nimbarka Sampradaya knows him more fully as Swami Svabhuram Devacharya, his name also written Shobhuram, a native of a village called Budhiya near Jagadhari and Yamunanagar, who rose in the sixteenth century to become the eldest and most senior among the twelve principal disciples of the great Vrindavan acharya Shri Harivyas Devacharya. To understand where a disciple gets that kind of quiet authority over a river, it helps to first understand the guru who shaped him, because Sobharam ji's whole life reads like an extension, out into the doab country of Haryana and Punjab, of a devotion first tested and proven on the slopes of Govardhan.

Harivyas ji was born in Mathura, and as a boy was sent to Kashi for a Vedic education that lasted, by the tradition's reckoning, from the age of eight until he was twenty-two. Learning alone did not satisfy him. He came instead to Vrindavan and gave himself to Shri Bhatt Devacharya, the poet-acharya who had composed the Yugal Shatak, a hundred verses in praise of the eternal, playful union of Radha and Krishna. Shri Bhatt did not simply initiate the young scholar with a mantra whispered in his ear. He sent him out to circle Giriraj, the sacred hill of Govardhan that Krishna himself once lifted on a fingertip, on foot, in bhajan, for twelve years.

Twelve years is a long obedience by any measure, but when Harivyas returned, dust-worn and inward, and his guru asked him plainly what he had seen upon his guru's lap during all that meditation, the answer that came back was a single word: nothing. Shri Bhatt did not scold him for the emptiness of it. He sent him back to Govardhan for another twelve years. Only when Harivyas returned the second time, and could finally say that he now beheld Shri Radha Krishna seated together upon his guru's lap, was he accepted as a true disciple and given the name by which the sampradaya would come to know him as a poet, Hari Priya. It was this Hari Priya whom Shri Bhatt entrusted with the Mahavani, the great five-part Braj commentary that unfolds, pada by pada, the moods and rasa of the Yugal Shatak, and it is this same acharya who, by every account of the sampradaya, expanded the Nimbarka line further than any teacher before or since, raising monasteries and gathering disciples across the length of north India.

One story about Harivyas ji is so startling that Nabhadas himself, writing the Bhaktamal within living memory of these events, singled it out as a wonder in its own right. In a village remembered as Charthawal, where local worship of a fierce form of the goddess had long included animal sacrifice, the goddess herself, the story goes, could not withstand the force of his bhakti, and chose to become his disciple, and her village turned with her toward the gentle worship of Radha and Krishna. Nabhadas wrote of it in plain astonishment, that a goddess who wanders the heavens had made herself the disciple of a man. No one today can verify what exactly happened in that village nearly five centuries ago, and the story is best read the way the sampradaya itself has always read it, not as a chronicle to be cross-examined but as a sign of how completely bhakti was understood to have overtaken every corner of that acharya's life, even its most forbidding corners.

It was this acharya, ripened by twenty-four years on Govardhan and tested against a goddess, who sent Sobharam ji and eleven other disciples out from Vrindavan to carry the Radha Krishna bhajan of the Nimbarka line in every direction of the subcontinent. Each of the twelve founded what the sampradaya still calls a dwara, a gate or branch of the lineage, and the tradition consistently places Sobharam ji, alone among the twelve, as the eldest, the firstborn of the family Harivyas ji had raised out of disciples rather than sons.

Sobharam ji did not stay behind to inherit Vrindavan. He went back, more or less, toward the doab of his own birth, and there he raised, tradition says, more than fifty temples, carrying the worship of the divine couple into towns that had likely never held a Krishna shrine before. One of those temples, the Rupkala commentary notes with evident local pride, stood near Jagadhari in his own lifetime and was still standing when the commentary was set down centuries later. The surviving text grows unclear at exactly the point where it may once have named a second, more distant place his temples had reached, so that detail cannot honestly be recovered, but the plain confidence that a temple of his stands even today is itself a kind of testimony to how deeply he had planted the sampradaya in that soil. He did not neglect Vrindavan either. There, in the Naz Bazaar quarter, he is remembered as having raised a temple of his own and establishing what is called an Acharya Panchayatan, a seat gathering the images of several acharyas of the line side by side, which a later successor, Balgovind Das, would rebuild into the shrine known today as Nimbark Kot.

The river was not the only test of nerve the tradition remembers. In the same town, the hakim, the official who governed the district, heard the shankh-dhwani, the long call of the conch that rang out from Sobharam ji's temple at the hour of arati, and took it as an offense large enough to consider moving against the sadhu. Sobharam ji, sensing the direction of the hakim's mind before it had hardened into action, did not wait to be summoned. He went to the hakim's court himself, at daybreak, and offered him something no ruler expects from a man he is preparing to punish: total surrender. If his presence troubled the hakim, he said, then tomorrow he would go wherever the hakim wished him to go. There was no defiance in it and no plea either, only the plain fact of a man who had nothing left to protect because he had already given all of it away. The hakim, disarmed more thoroughly than any argument could have disarmed him, asked his forgiveness instead.

Both stories, the river and the hakim, turn on the same hidden teaching, one the theologians of the Nimbarka Sampradaya would recognize as the deepest note of their own Svabhavika Bhedabheda, the teaching that the soul is at once different from and inseparable from the divine, the way a wave is never other than the ocean even as it rises and falls in its own particular shape. A man who knows himself folded that closely into the source of all things has nothing left to grip and nothing left to defend. He can speak to a flood as a son speaks to a mother, and to a hostile official as someone who has already surrendered everything, because in both cases he has stopped experiencing himself as a separate thing that could be swept away or destroyed. That is not passivity. It moved a river and unmade a magistrate's anger in a single morning.

The line that ran from Harivyas ji through Sobharam ji did not end with either man's death. By one dating still used in the sampradaya, Harivyas ji lived nearly a hundred years, from around 1443 to 1543, though other students of the tradition's history place him somewhat later, closer to the turn of the seventeenth century, and the exact span remains a matter of scholarly debate rather than settled fact. His samadhi stands at Narada Tila in Mathura, beside an image of the sage Narada, and devotees still gather there every year on Kartik Shukla Dwadashi to remember him. Sobharam ji's own branch, the Svabhuram dwara, proved to be one of the most enduring of the twelve. The seat now called Kathiababa ka Sthan, on Vrindavan's Gurukul Road, is held today by an acharya descended from that same lineage and is recognized as a principal shrine of the Nimbarka Sampradaya. A saint of this same branch, remembered as Chaturchintamani Nagaji Maharaj, is credited with first organizing the Vraj Chaurasi Kos Parikrama, the eighty-four-kos walk on foot around the whole of Braj that pilgrims still take every year, a practice the lineage says has continued, largely unbroken, for more than five centuries.

It is worth sitting for a moment with what these two lives, taken together, actually ask of a reader who has never seen the Yamuna in flood or feared a magistrate's displeasure. Neither man's authority came from some occult power wielded over an enemy. It came from having handed themselves over so completely to Radha and Krishna that fear, of drowning, of arrest, of loss, had simply stopped being the operating fact of their lives. A guru who spent twenty-four years learning to see nothing before he could see anything at all; a disciple who could face down a swollen river and an angry ruler in the same lifetime with nothing but a plain word and an open hand. Between them they suggest that the deepest miracle in the Bhaktamal is never really the flood turning back, or the goddess bowing down. It is the emptying out of the self that made either possible, and it is that same emptying, the text seems to say, that is still open to whoever reads it, all these centuries later, with an unguarded heart.