Daśaślokī

Three kinds of souls. The nitya-mukta, never bound, the eternal companions of the Lord in his abode. The baddha, bound now, walking the world in forgetting. The baddha-mukta, once bound and now free, the saint who has crossed.

And one more secret: the true nature of the soul is known only by the Lord's grace. Not by argument, not by yogic effort alone. The Vedānta of Nimbārka is not a system that the mind constructs and verifies. It is a vision that grace permits.

There are two kinds of insentient: the prākṛtic, which is this world's matter under māyā; and the aprākṛtic, which is the substance of the Lord's eternal abode. Goloka is real but not made of the stuff this world is made of.

And then there is time. Time is its own category in Nimbārka. It is not part of prakṛti, not part of the soul, not part of the Lord. Time is a third thing the Lord arranges. Sattva, rajas, tamas, the three guṇas, hold even within prakṛti, even when prakṛti is in equipoise.

And here, in the fourth verse, Nimbārka turns from the soul to the Worshipped. He does not begin a separate treatise. He simply moves the gaze. The same hand that named the soul atomic now points and says: meditate on Krishna.

dhyāyema kṛṣṇaṃ kamalekṣaṇaṃ harim. Let us meditate on Krishna, the lotus-eyed Hari. The first-person plural is the Vedāntic invitation: not 'one ought to meditate' but 'let us', the speaker including himself among those who must do this.

This is the verse. This is why the Nimbārka tradition holds the Daśaślokī so dearly, and why every Vraja-rasika of every other lineage receives it with reverence. In one of the oldest Sanskrit texts of any sampradāya, before the Goswāmīs of Vrindavan, before Hit Harivaṁśa, before Vallabha, Nimbārka has placed Rādhā by name on Krishna's left side, attended by thousands of sakhīs, and asked us to remember her always.

vṛṣabhānu-jām, daughter of Vṛṣabhānu. anurūpa-saubhagām, of matching beauty. sakhī-sahasraiḥ parisevitām, served by thousands of friends. sadā smarema, ever may we remember. The Yugala-siddhānta is here in eight half-lines. The supreme worship is not of Krishna alone, not of Rādhā alone, but of the divine couple, never separated, never disjoined.

The verse names the lineage. Sanandana, one of the four Kumāras, declared this teaching to Nārada. Nārada is described as akhila-tattva-sākṣin, the witness of every truth, and from him the teaching descends. The Daśaślokī is not Nimbārka's invention. It is what he received.

And the purpose is named: prahāṇaye 'jñāna-tamo-anuvṛtteḥ, for the destruction of the entrenched darkness of ignorance. This is why we worship. Not for boon, not for power, but for the lifting of the long forgetting.

Here Nimbārka draws his line against the Advaita of Śaṅkara. For Śaṅkara the world is mithyā, real only as appearance. For Nimbārka the world is yathārthaka, true to its object, real because it has Brahman as its self. Bhedābheda does not require the world to be unreal in order for Brahman to be supreme.

tri-rūpatā, the threefold form. Brahman, soul, and matter are the three real categories of being, simultaneously different and non-different from one another. Nimbārka claims this is what śruti and the sūtras themselves establish, and he was prepared to argue it line by line in the Vedānta-pārijāta-saurabha.

Krishna is the refuge. Brahmā and Śiva and all the gods bow to him. The lotus feet are not a metaphor for some abstract principle. They are the place where the heart goes, and there is no other place.

bhaktecchayopātta-sucintya-vigrahāt. His form is taken on for the love of devotees, for the sake of being contemplated. The Lord becomes graspable so the heart can grasp him. acintya-śakti, unthinkable power. acintya-saṃśraya, unthinkable refuge. Both terms reach the limit of language and stop.

The order matters. First humility, then grace, then bhakti. Not the other way round. The seeker who waits for inspiration before being humble has the order wrong; the humble heart is what grace already chose.

And bhakti is twofold. There is sādhana-bhakti, the practiced form, the daily discipline of remembrance. And there is parā-bhakti, the supreme form, the love that is not chosen but received. The first prepares the soil. The second is the crop.

The whole Daśaślokī gathers itself in the tenth verse and names what the wise must know. The Worshipped: Rādhā-Krishna. The worshipper: the soul, atomic, dependent, longing. The fruit of grace: bhakti. The rasa beyond bhakti: the supreme love that is its own taste. And the virodhins, the obstacles, the long darkness that ignorance keeps in the heart.

Five truths. Ten verses. The whole Yugala-siddhānta in a length you can recite at a single sitting. The Goswāmīs of Vrindavan inherited Nimbārka's framework and made it more elaborate; the Rādhāvallabhīs intensified its Rādhā-side; the Pushtimārga developed it differently. But every Vraja sampradāya has read this work and felt the family resemblance.