Swāmī Haridās’s Garland of Pastimes

The night has been a long one and is now thinning. The first edge of light is on the eastern leaves. The Yamunā beyond the grove is the color of a darker leaf. Inside the kunja the two of them have not slept. They have not been keeping watch either. Time in the kunja does not require keeping watch over.

She is fifteen. She will always be fifteen. He is thirteen. He will always be thirteen. The age the texts give them is not a milestone they are passing through on the way to adulthood. It is the age that the kunja holds them at. The thirteen-year-old does not become fourteen here. The fifteen-year-old does not become sixteen here. The kunja keeps them at the age of meeting.

Her hair has come loose during the night. He is reaching to gather it back. He has done this many times now. The padas describe the gesture as one a singer can return to without exhausting it: the boy's fingers in the girl's hair at the end of the night. The trees are leaning slightly toward them, in the way that trees do when something they have been waiting for is happening. The peacocks in the higher branches are silent. They will call the dawn in a moment. Not yet.

The poet, who is not in the grove, who is sitting in a hut a little distance away with a small stringed instrument across his knees, sees all of this. He sees it because the singing has trained the seeing. The pada that comes out of his mouth is the description of what is happening in the kunja right now, at this hour, as he is singing it. The pada and the meeting are not separate events. The pada is the meeting becoming audible.

One pada describes the swing. The sakhīs have hung a swing of vines from a branch in the kunja. They have woven flowers into the ropes. They have placed the two of them on the swing and stepped back. The boy is on one side and the girl is on the other and the swing is moving in the rhythm of a song the trees are already humming. The sakhīs push gently at the ropes when the rhythm slows. They are not watching the lovers. They are watching their own work, the swing they have made, doing what they made it to do.

Another pada describes the playing of dice. The two of them are sitting on a small woven mat under a kadamba tree, throwing cowrie shells. She is winning. He is pretending to be displeased. He is reaching for a shell to throw it again and her hand has come down on his and the game has paused mid-throw. The sakhī who is keeping score is laughing into her sleeve. She has stopped writing. There will not be a result of this game. The result was the pause.

Another pada describes the meal. A sakhī has brought into the kunja a small leaf-plate of sweets she has prepared. She is feeding them. She gives one to the boy. She gives one to the girl. The boy is offering his to the girl before he has tasted it. The girl is offering hers to the boy. The sakhī is laughing. She has stopped trying to feed them in any particular order. She has set the leaf-plate down between them and stepped back. Whatever the two of them do with the sweets is the meal she has prepared.

Another pada describes the quarrel. The girl has heard, from a sakhī who heard from another sakhī, that the boy was seen at dusk in a different part of the forest with a different girl. She is sitting with her back to him. He has come into the kunja. He is standing behind her. He is not yet speaking. The pada ends here. The lineage has been singing this pada for four hundred years and the next moment, the moment when one of them speaks first, has never been reached. The pada keeps the quarrel suspended forever, because what the singers have learned is that the suspension is itself the sweetness, and the resolution would close a door that the kunja is asking to keep open.

Each pada has a rāga assigned to it, which is the rāga Haridās is said to have first sung it in. Each pada has a tāla, a rhythmic cycle. The musician who takes up the pada in the morning kīrtan does not invent the rāga. He inherits it. He may shade the rāga with his own breath and his own emphasis, but the rāga itself is given. It is part of the pada the way the words are part of the pada.

The musician learns the corpus by sitting beside an older musician for years. He does not learn it from a notebook. He learns it the way a child learns the songs of his mother's house, by hearing them sung in the house every day until the songs are inside him and he can sing them without thinking. By the time he is fit to sing in the temple he has heard each of the one hundred ten padas of the Kelimāla many thousands of times.

When he sings, he is not performing. He is not entertaining a congregation. He is, in the understanding of the lineage, taking his turn as the eternal sakhī musician whose first turn was Haridās's. Haridās is held to be an eternal companion of Rādhā in the kunja, an eternal sakhī whose service is to sing. The earthly singer is one extension of that eternal singer. The voice that sang the pada first, four hundred years ago in a hut beside Nidhivan, is the voice singing it again now in the temple, only borrowing a different throat for the occasion.

This is what the Haridāsī tradition means by the musician's mode of devotion. The musician is not a worshipper standing outside the kunja and offering songs into it. The musician is a sakhī inside the kunja whose role in the eternal līlā is the role of the one who sings while the others arrange and serve. The discipline is not separation from the līlā. It is participation in it through the only opening the human body provides, which is the breath that becomes voice that becomes song.

The first thing the Sādhāraṇa Siddhānta does is name what is highest. What is highest is not a god outside the world. It is the meeting of the two in the kunja. The doctrinal padas say this in many ways. They say the highest is the dual form, the form that is two and is also one. They say the highest is the Yugala, the couple. They say the highest is the place where the boy and the girl are leaning toward each other and have not yet quite touched.

The second thing the Sādhāraṇa Siddhānta does is locate the seeker. The seeker is not a male devotee bringing offerings. The seeker is a sakhī, a young female friend who lives in the kunja and serves the lovers. The doctrinal padas teach that the human birth, whatever body it has been given, is a temporary covering. The real form of the soul, in the lineage's reading, is the form of an eternally adolescent female friend in the kunja, whose name and ornaments are revealed by a teacher when the seeker is ready.

The third thing the Sādhāraṇa Siddhānta does is explain the discipline. The discipline is the practice of music, learned from a teacher, taken up daily, offered without ambition. The discipline is also the discipline of the heart that does not seek union with Krishna for itself. The sakhī does not desire the boy. She desires the meeting. Her happiness is in arranging the meeting and in singing while it occurs. This is the orientation the doctrinal padas insist on, again and again, lest the singer of the love-padas confuse the role of the sakhī with the role of the bride.

The fourth thing the Sādhāraṇa Siddhānta does is set the limit of theology. The doctrinal padas warn the singer not to multiply concepts. The kunja is not to be turned into a system. The Yugala is not to be turned into a theological proposition that requires defense. The teaching is to be held lightly, used to keep the singing on its path, and then dropped when the singing begins. The doctrine exists to release the singer back into the song.

He stands in a slight curve. The curve is the curve of a boy leaning. His body is bent at three places, in the threefold bend the texts call tribhaṅga, but the bend is gentler than in the more famous Krishnas of other temples. He is not playing a flute. His hands are held in the gesture of one who is about to embrace, or has just released. His eyes are dark and wide. The lineage says they are too powerful to be looked at for long, and the priests draw a curtain across the deity every few minutes during darshan to release the worshipper from the gaze.

Haridās did not, in the lineage's understanding, install this deity. He sang the deity into appearing. The padas of the Kelimāla are addressed not to a distant Krishna in Goloka but to the boy in the kunja in front of the singer. Tradition says the singing became so insistent, so present, that the form the singing was addressing rose up out of the soil one day at a place in Nidhivan. The form was the boy as he is in the kunja: leaning, about to embrace, looking with an undivided attention.

This is why the deity is called Bāṅke Bihārī. Bāṅke means slightly bent, the curve of the body in the kunja. Bihārī means the one who roams in pleasure, the one whose home is the līlā. The two words together name the boy as he is in the meeting, not the boy as he is in any other story. The Mathurā Krishna is elsewhere. The Dvārakā Krishna is elsewhere. The Bāṅke Bihārī is the kunja-Krishna and only the kunja-Krishna, the one Haridās sang up out of the ground.

The temple was built around the spot. It is small by Vrindavan standards. It does not have the great courtyards of the larger temples. It has the rhythm of a place that knows what it is for. The kīrtan happens at fixed hours. The padas of the Kelimāla are sung. The deity is shown. The curtain falls. The deity is shown again. The pattern repeats, day after day, year after year, century after century, the same songs being sung to the same boy in the same kunja that the trees of Nidhivan are still arranging a few minutes' walk away.

The center is still the Bāṅke Bihārī temple in Vrindavan. The kīrtan there is led by musicians of the lineage. The padas of the Kelimāla are still sung in the rāgas Haridās is said to have first sung them in. A visitor with no Brajbhāṣā can still stand in the courtyard and hear what has been heard there continuously for four hundred years.

Beside the temple, the grove of Nidhivan is preserved. It is open to pilgrims during the day. The trees are low and intertwined, just as the Kelimāla describes. The lineage holds, and many pilgrims will tell you, that the kunja-līlā continues there at night, when the grove is closed, and that any human who tries to remain in the grove after dark is asked by the trees to leave. Whether one accepts this literally or as a way of saying that the līlā belongs to the kunja and not to the visitor, the practice of closing the grove at dusk reinforces the understanding the Kelimāla teaches: the meeting is real, it is occurring now, and the human role in it is the role of the visitor who comes for darshan and then withdraws.

The lineage does not actively recruit. There is no large diaspora movement. There are not branch temples on every continent. There are musicians, mostly in north India, mostly in Vraja, who have inherited the corpus from teachers and continue to sing it. There are householders who have taken initiation into the lineage and who keep the orientation of being a sakhī inside daily life. The number is not large. The lineage prefers it this way. The teaching is held to be most secure when it is not commercialized.

For the seeker who comes to the Haridāsī tradition from outside, the door is the kīrtan. Sit at the back of the temple courtyard during the morning service. Listen to the padas. Do not require translation. Let the music orient you. If, after some weeks of this, the orientation has taken root, ask one of the resident musicians who teaches the padas and how a student begins. The lineage will not push the doorbell. The lineage will receive the seeker who knocks.