Garga Saṃhitā

She is the one of whom every other goddess is a ray. Lakshmi keeping wealth in the world, Sarasvatī keeping speech, Durgā keeping the cosmos safe from its enemies: each of these is a portion broken off from her so that the world below can have something of her in a form it can hold. She herself is not a portion. She is whole. She is the joy by which the absolute knows itself as joyful, the love by which the absolute knows itself as loving, the bliss by which the absolute knows itself as blissful.

Krishna is the dark cloud. She is the lightning that gives the cloud its meaning. Krishna is the flute. She is the breath that makes the flute audible. Krishna is the cowherd. She is the cow he tends and the meadow he tends in and the sky that holds the cowherd and the cow and the meadow together. Without her there would still be Krishna, but no one, not even the gods, would know it.

She sits with him on the jeweled seat at the center of the grove at the center of the forest at the center of Goloka. She is dressed in cloth the color of saffron. She wears the eight ornaments of a married woman. Her hair is bound in a single braid, and at the parting of her hair there is a streak of vermillion put there by his own hand. Her eyes are large and her eyes are quiet and her eyes are not looking at any of the gods who have come to praise her. Her eyes are on him.

And he, who is praised by every creature in every world, is praised in Goloka by the simple act of her looking at him. He returns her look. The look between them is the axis around which Goloka turns, and Goloka, in turn, is the axis around which every lower world turns. Take the look away and the worlds collapse into the empty space where they used to be.

First is Lalitā. She is the eldest. Her temperament is firm and her speech is direct. When the lovers quarrel, she is the one who finds the fault and corrects it without flattering either. Her grove is to the east of the central kunja and the flowers there are white.

Second is Viśākhā. She is born on the same day as Radha and shares her temperament most closely. She is the one who carries Radha's messages and the one who knows what Radha will say before Radha says it. Her grove is to the west and the flowers there are the color of fresh blood.

Third is Citrā. She paints. Her hands have learned to draw on the ground in colored powder the meeting of the two before the meeting has happened, so that the path the lovers will walk is already prepared. Her grove is to the southeast and her flowers are many-colored.

Fourth is Indulekhā. She braids hair. The braid in Radha's hair has been put there by her hands. She is the keeper of the small cosmetic objects, the unguent jars, the eye-blacking, the lip color. Her grove is to the southwest.

Fifth is Campakalatā. She tends the campaka flowers, golden and fragrant, that are the favorite of both lovers. Her grove is to the north.

Sixth is Raṅgadevī. She arranges the dance. She is the one who places the gopis around the rāsa-maṇḍala and decides who will stand next to whom. Her grove is to the northwest.

Seventh is Sudevī. Her name means the good goddess. She is gentle and her presence calms quarrels before they begin. Her grove is to the northeast.

Eighth is Tuṅgavidyā. She is learned. She knows the music and the meters and the prosody of every song that has ever been sung in Goloka, and she teaches the younger sakhīs what they need to know to sing. Her grove is to the south.

Each sakhī has eight younger handmaids, the mañjarīs, in her retinue. Each mañjarī has her own bouquet and her own way of laughter. The total of the inner circle, eight times eight, is sixty-four; and sixty-four is the number of arts, the number of the kalas, the number by which the perfection of relation is measured in this tradition. The arrangement is not casual. The arrangement is the geometry of love made visible.

The full-moon night of autumn does not end in Goloka. It is the only night. The moon hangs at the same height, the size of a great silver platter, and the light it gives is not the light of a moon that has been climbing for hours. It is the light of a moon that is simply there.

The gopis stand in a circle on the meadow by the Yamunā. Each gopī has Krishna beside her, because in the eternal rāsa Krishna multiplies himself so that no gopī is ever without him. The flute is in his hand. It is in every hand. The flute that is heard is one flute, and yet every gopī hears it as if it were being played for her alone, because in the eternal rāsa what is true for one is true for all.

Radha is in the circle and Radha is also in the center, and Krishna is beside each gopī and Krishna is also dancing only with her. The contradiction is not a contradiction here. Goloka does not insist that a thing be in only one place at a time. Time itself, in Goloka, is not the kind of time that asks that question.

The dance moves. The dance does not move. The gopīs sing and the gopīs are silent. The cowherd plays the flute and the flute is set down on the grass. Each of these is true at once. The earthly observer would see only one of them at a time. The eye that has been opened by the grace of the text sees all of them at once and is not disturbed.

And this dance has no end. It is the dance that the autumn night below was a single window into. When the village of Vraja saw Krishna multiply himself for the gopīs by the river, it was not seeing a thing that had begun and would end. It was seeing, for one night, the thing that has always been happening in the upper meadow.

She has slipped away from the others to braid her own hair. There is a small pool inside the kunja where the water is so still that her face looks back at her without a ripple, and she has knelt by the pool with the comb in her hand. Her hair is loose. The comb is moving slowly. She is not thinking about the comb. She is thinking about him.

He has come up behind her without her noticing. He has been still long enough to have watched her for what would be, in any lower world, a long time. He moves now. He sits beside her. He does not speak. He takes the comb from her hand. She does not turn her head. He begins to comb her hair himself, slowly, the way a careful gardener pulls a thorn from a flower without breaking the stem.

She closes her eyes. She does not need to look. She knows whose hand is in her hair. The forest around them is silent in the way a forest is silent when even the birds have decided not to interrupt. The pool reflects them both, and then a leaf falls on the surface and the reflection breaks, and then the surface settles and the reflection returns.

When her hair is braided he ties it with a single strand of jasmine. He places the comb back in her hand and gets up and is gone before she opens her eyes. She opens her eyes. The braid is finished. The jasmine is in it. She has never asked who. She does not need to ask. She rises and walks back through the grove to the others, who look at her hair and look at each other and say nothing.

Begin at Mathurā, where the dark boy was born. Walk west across the Yamunā into Madhuvana, the first of the twelve forests. The forest of honey. Bees gather here in such number that the trunks of the trees seem to hum from inside. The next forest is Tālavana, where the tall palm trees stand and where the elder Krishna once felled a demon disguised as a donkey.

Continue. Kumudavana, the forest of the white lotus, by a small lake that does not dry up. Bahulāvana, where a particular cow named Bahulā gave her milk so freely that the place took her name. Kāmyavana, the forest of desires. Khadiravana of the acacia trees. Bhadravana, the gentle.

Bhāṇḍīravana, where the wedding under the tamāla took place, where if you sit at the root of the largest tree in the late afternoon you can sometimes feel that something is still being witnessed there even though no one is visible.

Then turn east. Bilvavana of the bilva trees, sacred even before Krishna walked here. Lohavana, the iron forest, hard and small. Mahāvana, the great forest, where Krishna's earliest pastimes as a tiny child took place, the eating of the clay, the slaying of Pūtanā in the cradle.

And finally Vṛndāvana itself, the forest that has given its name to the whole region. The other eleven forests are leaves. This one is the lotus the leaves are arranged around. Inside Vṛndāvana the principal kunjas are named: Sevā Kunja, Nidhuvana, Rādhā Kunda, Śyāma Kunda, the bathing places by the river, the meadows where the cows still graze every day at the hour when their grandmothers grazed.

The pilgrim who walks this circuit walks it in the lower world. The geography is real and dusty. But the parikrama is also a passage through the same geography in the upper Goloka, where every place named here has its eternal counterpart and every step taken below is also a step taken above.

The other goddesses each have a name. Lakshmi has her name. Sarasvatī has her name. Pārvatī has her name. The name is enough because the goddess being named is one quality of the absolute, and one quality can be held in one word.

She is not one quality. She is the absolute under the aspect of joy itself, and joy itself has so many shades that no single word can carry it. Therefore she has a thousand names. Not because she is plural. Because she is the source of the qualities of which the others are aspects.

Some of the names are simple. Vṛṣabhānu-nandinī, the daughter of Vṛṣabhānu. Kīrti-putrī, the daughter of Kīrti. Some are descriptive. Kiśorī, the young one, eternally on the edge of girlhood. Some are theological. Hlādinī, the joy-energy of the Lord, by which he knows himself as joyful. Some are local. Vṛndāvaneśvarī, the queen of Vrindavan. Some are intimate. Krishna-vallabhā, the beloved of Krishna; Krishna-priyā, dear to Krishna; Krishnārādhitā, worshipped by Krishna.

The hymn moves through them in a cascade. The reciter is not expected to memorize each one. The reciter is expected to be carried by the rhythm of them, the way a bather is carried by the rhythm of the river he has stepped into. By the end of a thousand names the reciter has been bathed not in information but in praise itself, and the praise is what the names were for.

Krishna in Goloka recites them privately. He recites them while he combs her hair, while he laces her sandal, while he waits for her in the kunja in the moment before she arrives. The names are not for an audience. The names are how he loves her in language. That the names should also have come down to the lower world, in the mouth of Garga, is grace. The lower world gets to overhear what the lover says to the beloved when no one is listening.