Where Radha Is Praised in the Lotus

There is a way the Bhāgavata is to be heard, the māhātmya teaches, and a way it is not to be heard. The way it is not to be heard is the way the Kali age has settled into. A reader sits alone with the book on his lap. He turns the pages. He completes the work the way a clerk completes a task. He closes the book. He has finished nothing. The book is still asleep on his lap and his own heart is still asleep beside it.

The way the Bhāgavata is to be heard is the way the cowherd women of Vraja would hear it if it were read aloud beneath a tree at the edge of the village. There is a reciter, who is not in a hurry. There is a circle, who has come to weep and to laugh and not to be improved. There is a small lamp on a low table. There is a tulasī plant nearby. The recital takes seven days. On the day before it begins, the reciter and the listeners purify themselves and decide to set the world's other business aside.

The recital itself moves at the pace of the breath, not the pace of the eye. When a verse needs a pause it is given a pause. When a verse calls for tears, the tears are not held back. When the tenth canto turns toward the rāsa and the listeners begin to sway, no one rushes them past it. The reciter does not perform. The listener does not study. Both give themselves to the text the way a young woman in Vraja would give herself to a song she had loved since childhood: with no purpose other than the song.

This is what the māhātmya means by the Vraja way. The Bhāgavata is a transmission, not a manuscript. It is meant to be heard inside a living circle and to wake whatever has been sleeping in the listener. Bhakti's two sons begin to stir, in the māhātmya, as soon as the first canto is taken up in this manner. By the seventh day they are standing. The māhātmya tells the reader of any age to recover this manner and apply it to the next recital that comes within reach.

I bow to the one who is the joy of the cowherd women. I bow to the one whose name Krishna repeats when no one is listening. I bow to the daughter of Vṛṣabhānu, raised in the courtyard of Kīrtidā, brought to the gardens of Vrindavan by the chance that is not chance. I bow to the lady of the kunja, the keeper of the flute when its master has set it down, the witness for whom the whole forest has arranged itself.

I bow to the one whose anklets the Yamunā recognizes. I bow to the one whose laughter the peacocks have learned to imitate. I bow to the one whose veil the breeze lifts only enough for the watcher to see and not enough to make her ashamed. I bow to the lady of the rāsa, the bride who is sometimes hidden and sometimes revealed, the one for whose sake the autumn moon stays up a little longer than the calendar requires.

I bow to the one who loves before being loved. I bow to the one who waits without bitterness. I bow to the one whose absence is a presence felt all the more keenly when she is not in the grove. I bow to the lady of meeting and to the lady of separation, the one who teaches that both are doors into the same chamber.

Lady, hear me. I have nothing to give you. I have a heart that is mostly distracted and a tongue that mostly says useless things. Take what little is here. Let me say your name once a day with the attention I give to nothing else. Let that one moment widen, slowly, until the rest of the day is shaped around it. This is the hymn I have. Take it.

The cows had been brought home. The boys had washed their feet at the trough by the gate and gone in to their suppers. The dust the herd had raised was settling, a fine red film on the leaves of the neem and on the rim of the water pot the women had left out. The west was orange. The east was already the deep blue that comes before stars.

Krishna had stayed behind. He stood at the edge of the lane with the flute in his belt and looked toward the path that ran to the Yamunā. He had not seen her all afternoon. She had said in the morning that she would come to the cow-pasture before the herd was brought back, and she had not come. He told himself for the fourth time that something had probably kept her at home, and for the fourth time the explanation did not steady him.

He walked, then, the way a boy walks when he is trying to make himself believe he is not looking for someone. He went toward the tamāla grove. He went through the grove. He came out on the bank where the kadamba tree leans over the water. She was not there. He sat for a moment under the kadamba and the river ran past him without comment.

When he stood up the dusk had thickened. He walked back along the lane and did not pass through the village. He cut across the field behind Nanda's house. As he came around the back of the cow-pen he saw a small figure standing at the wall, looking the other way, looking out toward the lane he had taken and not the field he was now coming from. She had been waiting for him. She had come the long way and missed him. They saw each other at the same instant and neither said anything for a while. The first stars were already out. The flute in his belt was still warm from the afternoon. Vrindavan held its breath the way Vrindavan holds its breath when these two find each other after looking and almost not finding.

Begin with Mathurā, the city on the western bank of the Yamunā where the prison stood and the child was born. The jail still has its echo in the soil. A pilgrim who walks there at the hour Krishna was born can sometimes hear the bolts open and the river rise. From Mathurā the road runs north along the river and crosses to the eastern bank at the ferry of Viśrāma. There Krishna rested after killing Kaṃsa. The bathing-place keeps his rest in its water.

North of Mathurā lies Vrindavan, the forest. The whole forest is a temple and the whole forest is also a body. The trees are the lover's friends. The river is the lover's joy made liquid. The dust on the path is the dust the lovers have walked through, again and again, until the dust is the lovers in another form. A pilgrim who lifts a handful of this dust to his forehead is not performing a gesture. He is letting them touch him.

Beyond Vrindavan is Govardhan, the hill that Krishna lifted. To circle it once is to have entered every story the hill remembers. The path is twenty-one miles. On either side are the pools the lover bathed in, the ledges where the cows climbed, the small temples that the local kings have built to mark the places the texts mention. The hill itself is sometimes said to be the lover in a different posture. A pilgrim does not climb it for that reason. The body of the lover is not climbed. It is walked around, and it is bowed to.

North again from Govardhan are the twelve forests and the small villages of Barsānā and Nandagaon and Javat and Sanket. Barsānā is Radha's village. The hill rises out of the plain like a shoulder. The temple at the top is white. The path up is steep and it is full, on her birthday in the autumn, of pilgrims singing her name. Nandagaon, the boy's village, looks across at Barsānā from another hill. The two hills face each other the way the two of them face each other in every grove they meet in. Vraja is shaped by their meeting. The land has not forgotten this and will not forget.

Worship her at twilight, the text suggests, when the village is quieting and the cows are coming home. This is the hour she walked out to the grove. This is the hour the heart, by its own old habit, also turns inward. The two motions agree.

Have a flower nearby, and tulasī, and a small flame. The flower can be any flower the soil where you live offers. She is not a goddess of one flower. She accepts what the season has. The tulasī is brought because Vrindavan is brought with the tulasī. The flame is brought because the inner room is shown by it.

Before saying her name, sit until the breath has slowed. Saying her name with a hurried breath is saying a different name. The Padma teaches the worshipper to wait. The breath becomes the breath of the lane in Vraja that is no longer in a hurry. Then say her name. Say it once. Listen.

The Padma does not require a long mantra. It allows the worshipper to take the simple form Rādhe and to repeat it, slowly, with attention, for as long as the heart wishes. Around this simple form, the text says, all the more elaborate hymns gather. The simple form is the trunk. The hymns are the branches. A worshipper who has the trunk has the tree.

After the worship is done, do not get up suddenly. Let the silence close around what has been done. Walk back into the house's other duties slowly. The lady has been in the room. The room is not the same as before she came in. Let the room remain what it has just become, for as long as the day allows.

The Padma Purāṇa is older in some of its layers and younger in others. The Radha who appears in it is the Radha the text could see at the hour each layer was being set down. In the earlier layers she is a presence in the lane, a girl in the grove, a woman whose name has not yet been crowned. In the later layers she has been crowned. The stotras name her. The māhātmyas place her at the center. The mantric instructions teach her worship.

What the Padma has done, taken as a whole, is hold the long arc of recognition. A reader who walks through the khaṇḍas in order can almost feel the tradition itself opening its eyes. A girl who is in the lane in one chapter is the supreme beloved in the next. The text does not announce the change. The text simply records, faithfully, what each century gave it. The reader reads forward and the recognition deepens with each turn of the page.

This is why the Padma is precious to the Radha tradition even though more famous Radha-rich Purāṇas exist. The Brahmavaivarta is grander. The Garga is more cosmological. The Devī Bhāgavata is more philosophically frontal. The Padma is older, wider, more many-voiced. It is the long quiet ground on which the louder texts later stand. Without the Padma's slow holding, the louder texts would not have a tradition to be loud inside.

A reader who comes to the Padma with patience comes to a teacher who does not announce his teaching. The lessons are folded into the structure. Hear the Bhāgavata in the Vraja way, the māhātmya says. Walk Vraja, the Brahma Khaṇḍa says. Stand with Krishna at dusk in the lane, the Pātāla Khaṇḍa says. Bow to her, the Uttara Khaṇḍa says, and let the bow be the whole worship. Each lesson is a flower. The lotus is the book.