The Treasury of Radha’s Sweet Nectar

There is a clearing in a forest no map records. The trees that ring it are tamāla, dark as her braid. The vines that climb the trees are mādhavī, white as her teeth when she laughs. The ground beneath the vines is soft with petals that the wind has been carrying in for ages and has not yet stopped carrying. The light that falls there is not the light of any sun I know.

Inside the clearing there is a small bower of flowers. Inside the bower there is a couch made of lotus and bakula and jasmine. On the couch the two of them are seated. He is dark. She is golden. His head is bowed. Her hand is on his hair. The cosmos is the breath that moves between them.

I am not asking to enter the bower. I am not asking to be seen by either of them. I am asking only to be allowed to live in the forest that surrounds the bower. Let me be a vine on the tamāla. Let me be a leaf on the vine. Let me be the dust that the petals fall onto. Let me be one of the bees that comes for a moment to the jasmine and goes away again with my body sweetened by the brush of one petal that her foot has touched.

The kingdoms of the world I do not want. The heavens of the gods I do not want. The four kinds of liberation the texts describe I do not want. I want the kuñja. I want the kuñja as my address from now until the cycles of time have stopped circling. I want the kuñja as the first thing in my mind when I wake and the last thing in my mind when I sleep. I want the kuñja as the only word my mouth still remembers when every other word has gone.

Outside the kuñja there is no home. Inside the kuñja there is no need for a home. The kuñja is the home that home was an imitation of.

I have seen her every morning of my life and I have not yet finished seeing her. The first time the light touches her face I am as surprised as the first time. The braid that her mother taught me to weave when we were both small girls I weave again every dawn and the weaving is a fresh weaving every time. There is no familiarity that becomes habit. There is only a familiarity that becomes deeper wonder.

The cosmos thinks she is a girl from a village. The cosmos is wrong. The cosmos thinks the dark boy who waits for her at the bend of the river is the supreme Lord come down to bless the world. The cosmos is half right. He is the supreme Lord and he is also the boy who cannot eat his food until he has seen her, who cannot sleep at night until she has sent word, who walks back and forth at the edge of the kadamba grove because she said she might come at this hour and she has not yet come.

I am the one who carries the messages between them. I am the one who knows which path she will take this evening because I am the one who suggested it. I am the one who arranges the flowers on the couch and slips out before they arrive. I am the one who, when he comes too early and finds the kuñja empty, sits with him until she arrives, and lets him say her name as many times as he needs to before she comes through the trees.

The world thinks the sakhī is a minor figure. The world thinks the sakhī is a stagehand of the divine play. The sakhī is the one without whom the play does not occur. She is the one who knows them both as no one else knows them. She is the one for whom each morning is a fresh dawn and each evening is a fresh meeting. She is the one whose service is the silent thread that holds the poem together.

I would not trade my place at her left elbow for a throne in any heaven. I would not trade my fan made of peacock feathers for any scepter the gods are holding. I would not trade my errand to the kuñja at twilight for any duty the seers have been assigned. The sakhī's life is the life every other life has been an unsuccessful imitation of.

I am the smallest of her circle. The older sakhīs do not always notice me. They are busy with the messages, the meetings, the songs. I am the one who arranges the cushions on the couch in the kuñja before they arrive and slips behind the vines as the two of them come through the trees. I am the one who gathers the petals from the path after they have passed and weaves them into the next day's garland.

I have no role of my own. I have no song of my own. I have no message to carry, no errand of my own design. My happiness is in their happiness. When she smiles, the morning has succeeded. When he says her name in the bower and she does not yet answer, the air I am breathing has been blessed.

I do not want to be looked at. I do not want to be praised. I do not even want her to remember my name. Let her forget I exist. Let her think the cushions arrange themselves and the petals fall into garlands of their own. I will be the one who has done the small task and slipped out, and I will be content.

If there is a higher heaven than this, the texts have not described it to me. If there is a deeper service than this, the seers have not named it. The mañjarī's life is the smallest life there is, and inside the smallness there is a room as large as the cosmos. I have entered the room. I do not intend to leave it. Let me die at her feet, let me be born again at her feet, and let no one ever ask me to do anything else.

She does not know my name. He does not know my face. The trees know me. The vines know me. The dust of the kuñja knows me. That is enough. That is more than enough. That is everything.

I have come to the end of what I can say. The verses I have written are not enough. The verses that the poets before me wrote were not enough. The verses the poets after me will write will not be enough. She is larger than language. The language is what we use to point at her, knowing the pointing is poor.

Take this poem from my hands. Take it the way you would take a flower from a child who has carried it across a hot field to give to you. Do not look at the flower. Look at the child. The child does not know whether the flower has any worth. The child knows only that the flower is the only thing the child had to give.

I do not want renown for the verses. I do not want disciples for the verses. I do not want temples to be built where the verses are recited. I want the verses to be lost. I want the verses to be forgotten. I want only one thing to remain. I want the small flame in the chest of one reader who, generations after I have died, picks up the poem and feels his own breath catch on her name. Let that flame be lit. Let everything else fall away.

I will not say more. I have said as much as a small mouth can say. The remainder of the saying will be done by the reader's silence, after the book has been closed and the lamp has been blown out, in the dark room where the kuñja will continue to open without any further help from me.

Her name. Her name. Her name. Her name. Her name. The mouth has nothing left after that. The poem ends because the poem cannot end any other way. Whatever has not yet been given is given here. Take it. Carry it forward. The kuñja waits.

The dispute is not bitter. Both communities recite the verses daily. Both communities know the verses by heart. Both communities have produced commentaries on the verses. The two attributions exist side by side in printed editions, and a reader who walks through Vrindavan today can hear the verses chanted in temples that hold opposite positions on who wrote them.

Why does this happen. The simplest reason is that the poem belongs to a moment in 16th-century Vrindavan when the Vraja-rasika sensibility was being formed across multiple lineages at once. Hit Harivaṃśa and Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī both lived in Vrindavan in the same decades. They likely knew each other. The atmosphere was one of shared poetic and devotional discovery. The poem could have come from either of them, or from a circle around them, and would still feel exactly like itself.

The Rādhāvallabhīs read the poem as a Sanskrit twin to the Hit Caurāsī. The two share the central conviction that Rādhā is supreme and Krishna is her devotee. The Caurāsī sings this in Brajbhāṣā for daily recitation; the Sudhā-Nidhi argues it in Sanskrit for the learned. From this angle the two poems are clearly by one hand.

The Gauḍīyas read the poem as the inner counterpart to Prabodhānanda's other Sanskrit works, especially the Vṛndāvana-Mahimāmṛta and the Caitanya-Candrāmṛta. They point to the mañjarī verses, which align closely with the rāgānuga sādhana the Gauḍīya tradition was developing in the same decades. From this angle the poem is clearly Prabodhānanda's.

Both readings are coherent. Both communities have been reading the poem this way for four centuries. The poem itself does not name its author in any verse. The honest position is to acknowledge the dispute, to honor both traditions' relationship to the text, and to set the question aside in favor of the verses themselves, which speak with a single voice whoever first wrote them down.