Radha as Mūla-Prakṛti

Before the world rose and after it settles, she is. Before the first sound left the first throat, she had already been listening. Before the first thought formed in the first mind, she had already been the silence around the thought. She is the source from which the source springs. She is the Nature behind every nature, the root of every root.

The Sāṃkhya philosophers spoke of Prakṛti, the primordial substrate of which all matter and all mind are modifications. The teachers of the Veda spoke of Śakti, the energy by which the absolute manifests as a world. The devotees of the Goddess spoke of Devī, the personal feminine in whom both Prakṛti and Śakti come to a face. Each of these was speaking of the same one. Each was reaching toward her with a different hand.

She herself is not a derivative. She is whole. She does not arise out of something prior. There is nothing prior. She is what is prior. She is the original. The texts call her Mūla-Prakṛti, the root-Nature, because every nature you can name is a branch of which she is the root. The body of the world rests in her the way a tree rests in the soil it has not yet noticed it is standing in.

And she has a name. The name is Rādhā. Not Rādhā in the limited sense, the cowherd girl of one village in one yuga. Rādhā in the unlimited sense, the eternal feminine pole of the absolute, of whom the cowherd girl in the village is the local appearance the way the sunlight in this room is the local appearance of the sun. The Goloka where she lives is the home she has never left. The Vraja in which she walked beside Krishna is one window through which the home becomes visible to a watching world.

From a fragment of her appears Lakṣmī. Lakṣmī sits on the lotus, lifts the elephants from the four directions on the four pots of water, settles into the homes of the steady, leaves the homes of the careless. The wealth that comes when wealth comes, and the absence of wealth when wealth declines to come, are both her movement. The Lakṣmī you offer flowers to on Friday is a fragment of Radha walking through your house in the form your house can recognize.

From a fragment of her appears Sarasvatī. Sarasvatī sits on the white swan, holds the vīṇā, holds the book, keeps the syllables of the Veda in the mouth of the priest, keeps the breath of the poem in the mouth of the poet. Every word that has ever found its perfect form has passed through her hands first. The Sarasvatī you ask for the right sentence is a fragment of Radha sending you the sentence you needed.

From a fragment of her appears Durgā. Durgā rides the lion, holds the eight weapons in eight hands, slays the buffalo demon at the edge of every village in autumn, keeps the cosmos from being overrun by the forces that would unmake it. The Durgā whose feet the warrior touches before going into battle is a fragment of Radha holding the world steady against the dissolving tide.

From a fragment of her appears Sāvitrī. Sāvitrī is the Veda itself in feminine form, the Gāyatrī in the breath of every twice-born at dawn, the syllable that keeps the Veda continuing across the generations. The Sāvitrī recited at the morning sandhya is a fragment of Radha continuing to sing, in the priests' mouths, the song that has been her song from before there were priests.

And then there is Radha herself, not as a fragment but as the whole. The other four are aṃśas. She is aṃśinī, the one of whom the aṃśas are. She walks beside Krishna in Goloka and the four walk beside her, each in her own region, each doing her own work, each ultimately turned back toward the one of whom she is a ray.

Above the seven heavens of the gods, above the realm where the avatāras rest between descents, above even the white island in the milk ocean where Viṣṇu lies on his serpent bed, there is one more place. The texts call it Goloka. Its name means the world of cows because the cows graze there in numbers no ledger has ever counted. The land is the color of new grass. The trees are the color of new leaves. The flowers do not fade and the cows do not age.

In the center of Goloka there is a forest. In the forest there is a clearing. In the clearing there is a jewel-built seat. The two who sit on the seat are Krishna and Radha. He is the dark one, holding the flute. She is the fair one, holding nothing at all because what she holds is him. The eight principal sakhīs surround them. The Yamunā flows past them in eight watches that circle back to the first watch when the eighth is done.

She has not come up to Goloka from somewhere lower. She has always been here. The descent into the Vraja of earthly time, where she appeared as the daughter of Vṛṣabhānu and the friend of Yashoda's son, was not a movement of her essential being. It was a window the eternal pastime opened, for a duration the watching world would call several decades, into the time-bound vision of those whose eyes had not yet learned the upper sight.

And he is hers, as she is his. The Krishna who stands in the upper Vrindavan with the flute in his fingers is not a Krishna she meets, comes to know, comes to love. He is the Krishna whose every breath is already addressed to her, whose flute is the sound of her name being formed in melodic air, whose dark color is the dark of her absence finding her presence. They are not two who come together. They are one who has chosen to appear as two for the joy that is in the appearing.

The absolute is described in three modes. There is sat, the being by which it is. There is cit, the consciousness by which it knows itself. And there is ānanda, the bliss by which it rejoices in being and in knowing. The three are not separable. The being is not somewhere apart from the knowing. The knowing is not somewhere apart from the bliss. They are three faces of one thing.

Each of the three has, in the personal theology of the Goddess, a feminine energy that holds it. Sandhinī holds the being and gives it its substance. Saṃvit holds the knowing and gives it its clarity. Hlādinī holds the bliss and gives it its taste. The three energies are not three different goddesses. They are three modes of the one Goddess, the way a single flame has heat and light and color all at once.

And of the three, hlādinī is the highest. Without bliss, being is just bare existence and knowing is just bare information. Bliss is what makes the absolute want to remain itself, want to know itself, want to become a world. Without hlādinī the absolute would still exist. With hlādinī the absolute is happy to exist. And hlādinī, in the personal form, is Rādhā.

This is why Krishna is incomplete without her. Not because the absolute can be incomplete, but because the absolute, having chosen to take the form of the dark cowherd, has chosen also to send out its own bliss in a form that walks toward him from a different direction. The flute he plays is the flute that calls hlādinī home. She always comes. She has never not come. The pastime in which she comes, the pastime in which she has always already come, is the eternal hlādinī-līlā of which every devotional practice on earth is a far echo.

Sit. Let the breath settle into the rhythm it already wants. Then bring the inner eye to a forest at the edge of a river. The river is the Yamunā. The forest is the Vrindavan that does not end. The trees are tamāla and kadamba and aśoka. The light is the soft gold of the late afternoon that holds without fading.

In the clearing of the forest, on a seat of jewels that the seat itself is also dreaming, place her. She is the color of molten gold or the color of saffron at sunset, the verses say. Her eyes are long, dark, kind, and held just slightly downward in the modesty of the great. Her hair falls around her shoulders, gathered loosely, with a single jasmine flower above her left ear. She wears the blue cloth, the blue of monsoon clouds, because she has taken his color into her clothing as he has taken her color into his skin.

Beside her, place him. He stands at her left, leaning very slightly toward her, the flute hanging at his side because in this moment he is not playing. He is listening. The sakhīs ring them in a circle that does not press in. The forest continues all around. The Yamunā is heard but not seen.

And you, the meditator, are not in the clearing. You are at the edge of the trees, at the place where the forest opens onto the path that leads back to the village. You are not there to be noticed. You are there to behold. The verse offered as your prayer is simple. Let me not look away. Let nothing in me wish to be anywhere else. Let the only thing my heart asks for, from this birth and from any birth that comes after it, be the permission to keep watching the two of them, in the clearing, at the hour that does not end.

Listen. The sage sets down the long telling and looks at the king the way one looks at a child to whom the simple thing is finally about to be said. Every Goddess you have ever worshipped is her. The Lakṣmī of your home shrine is her. The Durgā of the autumn festival is her. The Kālī of the cremation ground is her. The Sarasvatī to whom your daughter prayed before her examination is her. The grāma-devatā of your village, whose stone shape you have been offering rice to since you could first walk, is her.

There is no goddess outside her. There is no goddess in competition with her. Every name by which the feminine absolute has ever been called in any village in any century in any language is a name she has answered to. The flowers offered in any of those names have arrived in her hands. The lamps lit in any of those names have been received in her presence. The tears wept before any of those altars have fallen on her feet.

And so the Śākta and the Vaiṣṇava, who have argued in the schools and the assemblies for centuries about which face of the absolute is highest, are singing the same song from two sides of the same hill. The Śākta sings to the Goddess. The Vaiṣṇava sings to Krishna. The Goddess the Śākta sings to is Rādhā. The Krishna the Vaiṣṇava sings to is the dark one beside her. There is no quarrel. There has never been a quarrel except in the eyes that did not yet see.

Worship, then, in any form your heart already knows how to worship. Keep the practices your mother taught you. Keep the festival your village keeps. The Goddess does not require you to leave any of it behind. She only asks you to know, once the knowing is ready, the one to whom all of it has been quietly traveling. Her name is Rādhā. Her home is Goloka. She is in your heart and she is the fragrance of the flower in your hand. The skandha is finished. The teaching, the sage says, is yours.