Nārada Pañcarātra

He asks first about her name. He says: I have heard a name spoken in the upper heavens that no Veda explicitly records. The cowherd women of Vraja speak it in their kīrtana. The siddhas in the rasa-circle whisper it. Even your own flute, when it is played, seems to be calling it. The name is Rādhā. Tell me. Who is she that this name lifts every other name above itself when it is heard?

He asks next about her supremacy. He says: There are many goddesses. There is Lakṣmī in your heart at Vaikuṇṭha. There is Sītā at Ayodhyā. There is Rukmiṇī at Dvārakā. There is Sarasvatī on the tongue of every poet. Each has her own dignity and her own worship. Tell me how Radha stands in relation to them. Is she another name for one of them? Is she a separate goddess? Is she above them? If she is above them, in what sense?

He asks third about the means of her worship. He says: If she is to be worshipped, by what mantra? In what yantra? With what dhyāna of her form? At what hour, in what direction, with what offerings? You who have given the priests of the world the mantras for every other deity, give me also the mantras for her, that I may carry them where I go and offer them to those who can hold them.

He asks fourth about the goal. He says: A worshipper of Lakṣmī attains Vaikuṇṭha. A worshipper of Sītā attains Sāketa. A worshipper of Rukmiṇī attains Dvārakā. The worshipper of Radha, where does she or he attain? What is the world that opens at the end of her mantra? And what is the form of the soul that arrives there?

She is, the Lord says, my own self in the form of joy. I am cit, the consciousness that knows. I am sat, the existence that holds. The third side of the absolute, ānanda, the bliss by which I taste my own being, is her. She is not a goddess separate from me. She is the very capacity by which I am happy to be who I am. Without her there is no joy in being the Lord. With her there is nothing in any of the worlds that is not joy.

She is, he says, the source of every goddess you have named. Lakṣmī is one ray of her. Sītā is another. Rukmiṇī is the form she takes when I take the form of the prince of Dvārakā. Each goddess is her, narrowed for the work of one of my forms. She herself is none of these alone. She is all of them at their root, and the root is in Goloka, where she and I are not yet separated into the forms in which the worlds know us.

Worship her, he says, and you have worshipped every goddess. Worship Lakṣmī alone, and you have worshipped one of her rays. There is no rivalry in this. The rays do not contend with one another. The sun does not contend with its rays. But the worshipper who has come to her at the source has come home, and the worshipper who is still at one of the rays will, eventually, follow the ray back.

And the world her mantra opens, he says, is not Vaikuṇṭha. It is not Sāketa. It is not Dvārakā. It is the world above all those worlds, where the cows do not age and the trees do not fade and the two of us, she and I, sit on a jewel-throne in the center of the rasa-maṇḍala. Her servants are her servants there. Her servants do not become me. They do not become her. They become themselves, perfected, sitting at her side and arranging her flowers and laughing at her laughter.

She who is the only beloved of the cowherd, who has no second above her, who is the queen of the rasa, the breath of the flute, the moonlight of the autumn night. She who turns toward me when I have grown tired of being the Lord, and who in turning calls me back into the joy of being one who can be turned toward.

She who is the goddess of every garland in every garden, the fragrance inside every flower, the sweetness inside every fruit, the cool of every well, the rest at the end of every road. She from whom Lakṣmī takes her wealth, from whom Sarasvatī takes her speech, from whom Pārvatī takes her unwavering love for her Lord, from whom Sāvitrī takes her constancy and Sītā her purity and Rukmiṇī her queenship.

She who alone has worshipped Hari fully, of whom the verse is sung, anayā ārādhito hariḥ. She by whose worship every other worship is completed. She whose name, when it is spoken, makes my own name sound like only half a name until hers is added to it.

I bow to her. I, the Lord, bow to her. I, who am bowed to by every world, take the dust of her feet on my forehead. Whoever recites this hymn with attention, morning and evening, becomes by my own promise her servant, and by her grace, mine.

The bīja, the seed-syllable, is given first. It is short. It is the syllable that holds her entire form folded inside it as a seed holds a tree. The text instructs that the syllable be taken from a qualified teacher, never from the page alone, because the syllable without the teacher's breath does not open. With the teacher's breath, even a single recitation begins her acquaintance in the heart.

Around the bīja the longer mantras are arranged. There is the eighteen-syllable mantra of Radha-Krishna together, which the Gopāla-tāpanī Upaniṣad had already given for the Lord and which the saṃhitā now reads as already being the mantra of the two of them, not of him alone. There is the twenty-eight-syllable mantra of Radha. There are the longer kavacas, armor-mantras, that wrap her presence around the worshipper through the eight directions and the sky and the earth.

Then the yantra. The text describes a diagram with eight petals around a central seat. On the central seat the bīja is written. On the eight petals the eight principal sakhīs are placed. Outside the petals, in a ring, the sixty-four mañjarīs. Outside that, the directions and their guardians. The worshipper, sitting before the yantra, recites the mantras in order. He calls Radha to the central seat, the sakhīs to the petals, the mañjarīs to the outer ring. He offers each her flower, her incense, her lamp, her food, her water for cooling her feet.

The text is careful, in this section, to mark that the worship is not magical. The bīja does not coerce the goddess. The yantra does not capture her. They are forms in which her own consent to be approached has been made visible. The worshipper who treats the form as a transaction has misunderstood. The worshipper who treats it as an invitation that she has authored, and to which he is responding by walking through the door she has already opened, will find her at the center of the yantra because she has been waiting there for him.

She is to be seen, the text says, as a young woman in the first bloom of her youth, fair as molten gold cooled to the hue of a kadamba flower at dawn. She is dressed in a silk that is the color of the new sun. The folds of her clothing are stitched with patterns that are themselves small representations of the rasa-circle. She wears ornaments at every place an ornament can be worn, but no ornament is heavy. Each is light enough that her movements move it.

Her hair is braided with pearls and small flowers. The braid falls behind her almost to her ankles. A single curl has come loose at her temple. Her eyes are long and the color of the lotus before it has fully opened. Her brows are like the bows of love. Her smile is the smile of a young woman who has just been about to laugh and has remembered, courteously, that she is in company.

She holds in her left hand a lotus. The lotus is the color of her own complexion. The fingers that hold it are slender and the rings on them are simple. With her right hand she is gesturing toward a young man who stands beside her. The young man is dark as a rain cloud. He is dressed in yellow. He holds a flute at his hip. He is leaning slightly toward her. The two of them are looking at each other. The looking is the entire image. Nothing else in the meditation matters more than that they are looking at each other and that the worshipper has been allowed, for the duration of the meditation, to stand a small distance away and see them looking.

Around them the sakhīs. Around the sakhīs the mañjarīs. Around the mañjarīs the trees of Vrindavan. Outside the trees the rest of the worlds, which do not, at this moment, exist except as the place this meditation is happening from. The worshipper holds the image as long as the breath holds it. When the breath grows short, he releases the image, recites the bīja once, and lets the form return tomorrow morning at the same hour.

The Lord answers Nārada that the four vyūhas are not separate from Radha. They are forms his own being takes when he turns toward the work of governing the worlds. The form that creates is Saṅkarṣaṇa. The form that holds the mind of every creature is Pradyumna. The form that grants the will to act is Aniruddha. The form that is the source of the other three, the unmoving center, is Vāsudeva. These are his four faces toward the worlds.

She, however, is not one of the four. She is not a vyūha. She is the bliss in which all four rest. When Vāsudeva is the still center, she is the stillness in which his stillness is sweet. When Saṅkarṣaṇa creates, she is the joy in which the creation is good. When Pradyumna lights up the mind, she is the pleasure with which the mind receives the light. When Aniruddha gives the will, she is the willing.

The text is precise on this point. To make Radha a fifth vyūha would be to put her on the same shelf as the others, as one more emanation alongside them. The saṃhitā does not place her there. It places her at the level above the vyūha-distinction. She is the one in whom the Lord is not yet divided into his four governing forms. She is, in the Lord's own words to Nārada, the union before the unfolding.

Each vyūha, the text adds, has his own consort in the formal Pāñcarātra system. Vāsudeva is paired with Lakṣmī. Saṅkarṣaṇa with Sarasvatī. Pradyumna with Rati. Aniruddha with Śānti. Each of these consorts is a partial expression of Radha. The full Radha, the saṃhitā says, is the consort of the Lord at the level of his unbroken being. The four pairings are her, divided to match the work of the four vyūhas. Worship of any of the four pairings is, in its deeper register, worship of her.

The Gauḍīya Goswāmīs, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at Vrindavan, treated the Nārada Pañcarātra as one of their primary scriptural authorities for Radha. Rūpa Goswāmī cites it in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu when he is establishing the legitimacy of the parakīya-rasa, the lover-not-married-to-him relationship, as the highest of the devotional moods. Jīva Goswāmī cites it in the Saṭ-sandarbha when he is articulating Radha as the hlādinī-śakti and as the consort of Krishna at the level of the Absolute. Sanātana Goswāmī draws on its ritual sections in the Hari-bhakti-vilāsa for the formal worship of the divine couple.

The Nimbārka tradition treats the saṃhitā as confirmation of its own central doctrine, the eternal yugala-tattva. The Vedānta-pārijāta-saurabha and its commentaries lean on the vyūha section in particular. The Rādhā-vallabha tradition of Hit Harivansh, which rose in the same century, adopted the Rādhā-stotra as one of its core morning recitations. The Haridāsī tradition of Swāmī Haridās similarly carries verses of the saṃhitā in its lineage texts.

Beyond these explicit citations, the saṃhitā shaped the air the tradition breathes. The image of Radha and Krishna on a jewel-seat with eight sakhīs at the eight petals, sixty-four mañjarīs in the outer ring, has become so widespread in temple iconography and in the inner meditation of practitioners that few who hold it know it was first given formal scriptural shape here. The bīja-mantras and yantra prescriptions of the saṃhitā are still being used, in the temples of Vrindavan and beyond, by priests trained in the unbroken lineages.

And the four questions of Nārada with which the text begins, who she is, where she stands among the goddesses, by what mantra she is worshipped, and what world her mantra opens, remain the four questions every newcomer to Radha-bhakti, in any age and any language, asks at the threshold. The saṃhitā has been answering them for a very long time. It is still answering them.