Narottama Dāsa's Prārthanā and Prema-Bhakti-Candrikā

When will that day be mine. When will the morning come on which I wake and find that the wanting itself has finally become the doing. The lamp lit. The water carried. The flowers strung. The garland already in my hand on the path to the kunja, no longer something I am asking for but something I am simply doing because it is the morning and this is what the morning is for.

When will that day be mine. The day on which I no longer rehearse the prayer in my mouth like a man practising a song he has not been called to sing. The day on which the prayer has become so much my breath that I have stopped noticing I am praying. The day on which I am too occupied with her sandals to remember to ask for the right to touch them.

When will that day be mine. The day on which the body that has been a problem all my life is no longer a problem because it has been given a small task and is now simply doing it. The day on which the mind that has been a noise all my life is no longer a noise because it is busy listening for her voice in the next clearing. The day on which the heart that has been a wound all my life is no longer a wound because the wound has been bound up by someone whose hands smelled of her flowers.

When, Hari, when. I am not asking for vision. I am not asking for trance. I am asking for the small ordinary day in which the youngest handmaid wakes in the kunja before anyone else, and lights the lamp before anyone else asks her to, and is gone again before her mistress notices the light is on. Give me that ordinary day. Take everything else.

Six brothers walked ahead of me into the forest. They went in when the path was still being made by the going. They built the small hut at Rādhā Kuṇḍa. They sat under the trees and wrote the books that the rest of us would later open as if they had always existed. Without them I would not know which way to face when I turned my heart toward Vrindavan.

Rūpa, who knew how to taste the seven kinds of love and how to write them down so that a Bengali farmer could taste them too. Sanātana, his elder, who wrote the textbook of the path so the path would not be lost. Raghunātha Bhaṭṭa, who could not stop singing and so the song became his life. Raghunātha Dāsa, who ate so little that he became almost transparent and through that transparency the meditation walked into him without resistance. Jīva, the youngest, who took the whole library on his small shoulders and held it for the next generations. Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, who gave us the deity of Rādhā Ramaṇa and the pattern of the worship to be done before him.

These are my elder brothers. I do not approach Radha by myself. I approach her in their company. When I sing in Bengal I am singing what they sang in Sanskrit. When I weep at the kīrtan I am weeping the tears they wept first under the trees of the kunja. When I bow before the lamp I am bowing into a line of bowings that has not stopped in the centuries since they bowed.

Therefore my prayer is not only to Radha. My prayer is also to them. Take the small village boy who has nothing to offer except the wish to follow you. Stand him at the back of your line. Let him hold the corner of your shawl as you go forward. Do not let him fall away. He is too easily distracted. He is too easily proud. He needs the older men in front of him so that the path will keep being a path. He needs you to keep being his elder brothers until he no longer needs anything else.

Make me the smallest one. Not the chief of the eight. Not even one of the eight. The youngest, the one whose name is not yet on anyone's lips, the one who is still learning how to fold a leaf cup so that the milk will not spill. Make me that one.

Let my work be small. To string the garland. To cool the cup of water. To bring the flowers from the side of the pond. To run ahead and announce that she is coming. To run behind and gather what she has dropped. None of this is great work. It is a child's work. I am asking to be that child.

Let my place be near. Not in front of her, where I would have to look at her face and would forget my errand. Not behind her, where I would lose her in the crowd of older sakhīs. At her side, half a step behind, where she can call me by name without turning her head and where I can hear her without straining.

Let my one happiness be hers. When the meeting in the kunja goes well, let me know it before anyone else, by some small sign she gives me, and let that knowing be the whole of my joy for the day. When the meeting in the kunja goes badly, let me be the one she sends for first, the one who arranges what needs arranging, the one whose closeness is closer because the trouble has made it closer. Either way, the day is hers and so the day is enough for me.

Hari, this is the village boy speaking, the one who has crossed the river and the field and the long road to come and stand at the gate of your forest. Do not turn me away because I am from Bengal and not from Vraja. The longing is the same longing. The girl I want to serve is the same girl. Open the gate.

Listen, my mind. There is a moonlight that falls on the path of love and the path is not visible without it. The sun of dry knowledge does not show you this path. The lamp of ritual does not show you this path. Only the moonlight of devotion shows it, and only at night, and only when the bhakta has stopped trying to see by his own light.

First there is faith. The seed has fallen on a quiet ground. The ground does not yet know what is growing. There is no shoot, only the dark warmth of soil over a seed that is doing its first work in private.

Then there is association. The bhakta finds himself drawn toward the company of those who have already walked this road. The shoot has come up. The shoot is small. It needs to be sheltered by the older trees that have grown nearby, or the wind will take it.

Then there is the keeping of the practices. The taking of the name. The hearing of the līlā. The serving of the deity. The shoot has put out leaves. The leaves are working in the sun. They are gathering the strength that will become flower.

Then anarthas fall away, the small wrong appetites that have no place in this garden. Then steadiness comes, like a tree that no longer bends in every gust. Then taste comes, the first sweetness, the bud of a flower the bhakta has been working toward all his life without knowing what flower it would be.

Then attachment comes, where the bhakta no longer chooses. The flower has opened. The fragrance has begun. He cannot now turn away even if he wanted to. Then bhāva, the foreshadowing of full love, the dawn-light before the sun. Then prema, the love itself, where the bhakta and the beloved are no longer two separate gardens but one garden in which the lover is the soil and the beloved is the flower and the moonlight is everything that has ever fallen on either of them.

This is the moonlight of loving devotion. Walk by it. Do not turn back to walk by your own torch. The moonlight is enough. The path is open.

There are six robbers on this road. The bhakta should know their faces.

The first is lust, that pretends to be love and is not. The second is anger, that pretends to be conviction and is not. The third is greed, that pretends to be carefulness and is not. The fourth is bewilderment, that pretends to be understanding and is not. The fifth is pride, that pretends to be confidence and is not. The sixth is envy, that pretends to be discernment and is not.

Each of these can wear the costume of devotion. Each of these can sit at the edge of your kīrtan and sing along. Each of these can come into your shrine room with you and bow before the lamp and rise with you afterward, and you will not notice the difference. You will think you are alone with the deity. You are not. Six robbers are sitting in your shrine room with you, waiting for the moment when the deity steps out and you turn your back.

There are two especially that will undo a bhakta who has gone far. The first is the appetite for honor, the wish to be known as one who has gone far. The second is the appetite for company, the wish to be surrounded by those who recognize you as one who has gone far. These two will let you go further than the others. They will travel with you for years. And then they will, at the last grove before the kunja, sit down and refuse to let you walk on.

Therefore, my mind, do not think the road becomes easier when the early appetites have fallen. The road becomes more particular. The robbers become more refined. The appetites that remain are appetites you would not call appetites. Watch them. Do not call them by their false names. Call them by their true names. Lust is lust even when it is wearing the costume of bhakti. Pride is pride even when it is signing the song you are signing. Envy is envy even when it has come to the festival to sing along.

Walk with the elder brothers. Walk where they tell you to walk. Sing what they tell you to sing. Do not trust your own discernment past the point where the elder brothers have stopped being able to see you. Past that point only the moonlight of true devotion will show you the road, and the moonlight does not fall on the bhakta who has gone off alone.

Open the door of a Vaiṣṇava household in any Bengali village just before sunrise. The lamp is already lit. The conch has already been blown. Someone is sitting on a low stool, a manuscript or a printed book of Narottama's songs in front of them, singing one of the kobe-more-hobe songs in the slow contemplative meter that Narottama himself standardized at the Kheturi festival. Their voice is not trained. They are not performing. They are doing what their mother did in this room, and what her mother did in this room, and what every mother in the lineage has done in this room since the seventeenth century.

In the temple at Rādhā Kuṇḍa, in Vrindavan, in Mayapur, in Navadvīpa, in the small ashrams along the Yamunā, the same songs are being sung. They have crossed the language barrier without losing their Bengali bones. Bhaktas who do not speak Bengali learn just enough Bengali to sing them. The translations are footnotes. The songs themselves remain in the Bengali Narottama wrote them in.

The Gaurāṅga Mahotsava that Narottama founded at Kheturi is still kept. Bhaktas walk to the festival site, sometimes for many days, to be there for the chanting and the procession and the offering of bhoga. The songs sung at Kheturi today are the songs Narottama sang at Kheturi. The line has not broken.

There is a particular sound a Bengali Vaiṣṇava household makes when the evening kīrtan is going well. It is not the loud sound of celebration. It is the soft sound of a song that knows what it is for. The family is together. The lamp is lit. The deity is on the small altar at the back of the room. Someone is singing kobe more hobe sei dina. Someone else is repeating the line softly. The children are half asleep at the edge of the room, learning the song without knowing they are learning. This is the form Narottama left behind. It is not a book. It is a way of being a household. It has not finished happening.