Hari-Bhakti-Vilāsa

There is a moment in the rite, after the homa and before the closing benediction, when the guru leans toward the candidate's right ear and the room becomes very quiet. The other observers, if any are present at all, look down at the floor. The candidate has been taught not to repeat what is heard, not to write it on paper, not to murmur it in any language out loud. Some of what the guru is about to whisper has been carried like this, ear to ear, since long before the candidate's grandfather was born.

First the eighteen-syllable Gopāla mantra of the Gopāla-tāpanī. Then the Krishna mantras of the family lineage, varying somewhat from one branch of the school to another. And then, in the Gauḍīya line specifically, the mantras of Radha. There is the one for her name alone. There is the one in which her name is bonded to his. There is the one in which her name is held inside the names of the eight sakhīs, and the one in which her name is held inside the addresses of the mañjarīs.

The Hari-bhakti-vilāsa does not print these mantras in its public text. It points to where they live. The guru carries them. The candidate, after the rite, carries them. The book is content to be the door-frame. What walks through the door is not in the book.

What the candidate is given on this morning is not a piece of information. It is an address. The mantras are the postal route by which the candidate, for the rest of life, will reach the One whom the mantras name. Every morning hereafter, in the dark before sunrise, the candidate will sit and walk that route. Sometimes the route will feel empty. Sometimes the route will feel crowded. Once in a long while the route will dissolve into the destination and the candidate will sit in the kitchen at dawn with tears running and not know why. The mantra given today on this floor is the seed of that morning, fifteen years from now.

Wake at the brahma-muhūrta, the hour and a half before dawn. The streets are quiet. The household is asleep. There is no sound but the occasional dog and the breathing of the air. The bhakta sits up in bed and recites a single verse of remembrance, naming Radha and Krishna, asking that this day, like every day, be one in which their meeting is held in the heart.

Then the bath. The water is cold. The cold water is itself a teacher. It refuses the body's wish to keep sleeping. The bath is taken with mantras spoken inwardly, naming the rivers of India and naming the Yamunā last. The Yamunā is named last because the Yamunā is her form. To bathe with her name on the breath is to bathe in her river even when standing in a small pail of well-water in a town a thousand miles from Vrindavan.

Then tilaka. Then the seat. Then the māla in the right hand under the cloth. The mantra given at dīkṣā is begun. The first round is slow. The second round is slow. By the fifth or sixth round the mind has stopped looking out the window and begun to settle into the syllables. By the sixteenth round the mind is largely inside the mantra. By the time the rounds are done the eastern sky has begun to whiten.

Now the deity. A small altar in the corner of the room. A picture, or a painted murti, or a śālagrāma, depending on the household. Water is offered. A flower is offered. A flame is waved. Radha's name and Krishna's name are spoken together, never one without the other. The bhakta bows and rises and the day proper begins. By the time the rest of the household is yawning awake, the inner work of the day is already done, and what remains is to carry the steadiness of the morning into the kitchen, the office, the field, the conversation, the meal.

Plant her in a clean pot in a clean place. The east side of the courtyard, or just beside the door. The earth around her roots is to be touched only with washed hands. Water her each morning before the sun is high. Speak her name as the water enters the soil. The name is Vṛndā, the name is Tulasī, the name is the gopī who in an earlier life was the dearest companion of Radha and who, by Radha's own grace, took this plant-form so that she might continue her service in every household where she is welcome.

Circumambulate her, three times, slowly, each morning after the bath. The leaves above your head as you walk are not a plant. They are her. They are the older sister of Radha, who knows where Radha is and what Radha is doing and who carries the news of Radha's mood from her grove in Vrindavan to the household where you are walking around her now.

When the offering plate is being prepared for the deity, place a single tulasī leaf on top of the food, with the small green tip of it pointing toward the image. The food is now her food, sent to her Lord through her hand. Without the leaf, the food is not yet sent. With the leaf, the food has already arrived.

Wear her around your neck. The bead-strand is shaped from the wood of her old stems, after she has finished her years of leaf-giving and lain down. Her old wood is not waste. It is the necklace by which the bhakta walks through the world wearing her name on the throat. The throat is where speech rises. With her around the throat, the speech that rises tends, over years, to begin to taste of her.

On the seventh day, the eve of the festival, fast. Eat one meal, light, before noon, and after that take only water until the next sunrise. Spend the afternoon in cleaning, in stringing flowers, in preparing the things that the morning will need.

On the eighth day, rise earlier than usual. Bathe with extra care. Put on cloth that has not been worn before, or that has been kept folded for this morning. Bring the deity out. Bathe her in milk, in honey, in yogurt, in ghee, in sugared water, in plain water last. Dress her. The cloth this morning is yellow, because she was born at noon in the bright half and the air around her was the color of turmeric. Place the eight sakhīs around her in their proper directions. Place the mañjarīs around the sakhīs. The whole altar is the small clearing in the forest in which she was found, the morning her father Vṛṣabhānu found her smiling in a lotus by a pond and lifted her up and carried her home.

At noon, the moment of her appearance, ring the bell. Light the lamp. Offer her the cooked rice and the sweet of milk and rice that her mother first fed her in the upper room of the house at Rāval. The whole household stops what it is doing. For one half-minute, all over the village, all over the country, all over the world wherever a Vaiṣṇava household has set up its altar, the bell is ringing at the same time, because the moment is one moment, and she is being born again into the consciousness of every house that has known to mark the hour.

Then break the fast. Eat what was offered to her. The food is now her grace. Walk afterwards in the late afternoon to a tulasī or to a temple. Sing her names. The day ends in the soft yellow of the western sky and the smell of incense not yet gone from the altar.

When the rains have ended and the ponds are clear and the air at evening turns cool for the first time, Kārtika begins. The new moon falls on Dīpāvalī, when the lamps are lit on every threshold to lead Lakṣmī into the house. The full moon at the end of Kārtika falls on the night of the rāsa, when in the upper Vrindavan Krishna danced with the gopis in the autumn forest under a moon that had agreed not to set.

The whole month between those two moons is hers. The Goswāmīs called it her month. There is no other lunar month that has been named in this way for a single member of the divine couple. The gopīs in the Bhāgavata kept the kātyāyanī-vrata in the cold dawn of mārgaśīrṣa to win Krishna as their husband. The Vrindavan tradition takes the rāsa-month at its other end and turns it into a vrata of its own. For thirty days, the Vraja bhakta keeps a small lamp burning before her image at evening. The lamp goes out only when the morning lamp is lit in its place. The flame, in some households, is unbroken for the whole month.

The vows of Kārtika are gentle. Eat one meal a day, or eat at the same hour each day, or eat only foods that have first been offered. Sleep less. Pray more. Walk through the courtyard before sleep and look at the lamp burning at her image and stand for a moment before going inside. The whole month is a slow softening of the bhakta's edge. By the time the full moon of Kārtika rises at the month's end, the bhakta's body and the bhakta's mood are quieter than they have been in a year. The full moon rises on the rāsa-night. The bhakta sits on the small mat in the small room by the small lamp and the moon comes up over the wall and the year's deepest peace settles down.

Kārtika ends. The lamps are put away. The vows are released. But the bhakta who has kept the month finds, for many weeks afterwards, that the inner climate has changed. The world looks more like Vrindavan than it did in the spring.

Walk it in a circle. The traditional perimeter is eighty-four kos, roughly two hundred and seventy kilometers. A serious pilgrim takes weeks, sometimes a month. Sleep in the dharmaśālās of the small towns. Eat the food that the local hands have offered. Carry a single change of cloth and a water-pot and a copy of a small book of names. The body becomes thin. The mood becomes patient.

The order of the walk varies, but every pilgrim visits the twelve forests, the four ponds, the principal villages. Begin at Mathurā, where Krishna was born, and walk north along the Yamunā to Vrindavan. From Vrindavan circle out to Govardhana, the hill that he held up against Indra's storm, and walk around the hill at its base. From Govardhana go to Rādhā Kuṇḍa, the small pond she struck open with her ankle-bell when he asked her to. Sit by the pond at sunset. Bathe in the morning. From Rādhā Kuṇḍa walk back to her birth-village at Rāval and her father's house at Barsānā on its hill, and to Nandgaon on the next hill where Krishna's family lived. From Nandgaon return to Mathurā by the long route through the further forests.

The pilgrim who walks the circle does not return the same. The whole country has been quietly working on the body for the weeks of the walk. The grass under the feet is the grass of her meadow. The water in the pond is her tears. The breeze through the trees of the kunja at evening is her sigh as she waits for him by the riverbank. None of this is metaphor. The Hari-bhakti-vilāsa is at its most concrete here. The book is not asking the pilgrim to imagine. It is asking the pilgrim to walk, and to let the walking unfold the seeing.

By the time the pilgrim has come back around to the gate of Mathurā, the city of the inner life has shifted. The small altar at home, when the pilgrim returns to it, is no longer a copy of Vraja. It is a window into Vraja, opened by feet that have just walked there. The window does not close again for the rest of the pilgrim's life.

The Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu describes mahābhāva. The Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi grades the heroines. The Sat-Sandarbhas systematize the metaphysics. The Caitanya-caritāmṛta narrates the lineage. These are the high books, and the high books would be insufficient by themselves. A theology that lives only in books is a theology that needs continual translation back into life by readers, and most readers in most generations cannot make the translation.

The Hari-bhakti-vilāsa is the translation, already done. The bath at four-thirty in the morning is mahābhāva translated into a body. The tulasī by the door is acintya-bhedābheda translated into a courtyard. The Rādhāṣṭamī fast is the inner identity of Radha as supreme energy translated into a calendar. The Kārtika lamp is hlādinī-śakti translated into thirty evenings. The Vraja-yātrā is the entire upper Vrindavan translated into a route the feet can walk.

The seeker who only knows the high books and not the manual is a seeker whose theology floats free of life. The seeker who only knows the manual and not the high books is a seeker whose ritual life has no inner climate. The two together hold each other up. The high books give the manual its meaning. The manual gives the high books their body.

Sanātana, in his closing years, knew this clearly. He had spent his middle years writing the high theology. He gave his last great editorial labor to the manual. The two are the two hands of the same teacher. Together they pass the tradition to the next century. Without either hand, the tradition would not have arrived in our hands as it has.