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Picture it. The whole machinery of the cosmos turns upon Him. The kings of mystics, Mahādeva and Brahmā themselves, sit through ages with breath suspended and minds scoured smooth, and still the goal stays beyond them, the path to where He plays too hard to enter for the strongest who ever walked. Yogīndra-durgama-gati: He is the destination the lords of yoga cannot reach. And then look at where He is. He is in a lonely flowering bower of Vṛndāvana, and the border of a girl's dark garment lifts and stirs as She shifts, and the small motion stirs a thread of air into being, and that air, warm from having touched the edge of Her cloth, drifts across His face. And Śyāma closes His eyes. And the One whom no austerity can purchase says within Himself: kṛtārtha, now I am fulfilled; now I have everything.

Feel how the whole hierarchy turns over in that single breath. Everything the yogīs strain upward toward, He sets down without a thought, and what He could never receive from all their longing He receives from a breeze that only happened to brush Her sleeve. He is not won by power offered up to Him. He is won by Her, by the least passing trace of Her, by air that was near Her for half a second and is therefore called blessed, and then, because no one word is enough, blessed beyond blessed, dhanya-ati-dhanya, twice over: blessed that it touched Her at all, and blessed again that it carried Her to Him.

And why is He named Madhusūdana here, the slayer of the demon Madhu, a name that rings with thrones and weapons and the rescuing of worlds? A seeker might object: that is a name of aiśvarya, of lordly prowess, and does it not jar against the sweetness, the mādhurya, in which the Vraja-devotees live? But the tradition opens the name from inside and finds a sweeter mouth in it: madhu puṣpa-rasaṁ sūdayati, He who draws and drinks the honey, the bee who breaks open the nectar of Her lotus-lips and will not keep away. He does not come to Her as the Lord of the universe. He comes as the bee that has found its single flower and will go nowhere else.

Know whose voice prays this prayer. It is Śrīpāda Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī, upon whom Śrīman Mahāprabhu poured an unlimited mercy, so that his heart woke into the elevated ujjvala-rasa of Vraja and he knew himself a kiṅkarī, a maidservant of Śrī Rādhā in the forest bowers. Kavi Karṇapūra fixes it in the Gaura-Gaṇoddeśa-Dīpikā, that in Kṛṣṇa's pastimes this great soul is Tuṅgavidyā, one of Rādhā's eight chief girlfriends; yet read these verses and you will hear, sounding under the sakhī, the still humbler longing of a serving-girl. This is the dearest treasure of the Gauḍīya heart, rādhā-snehādhika, bhāvollāsa-rati: to love Rādhā even more than Kṛṣṇa. Rūpa Gosvāmī marks it in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu, that when a friend's love leans toward Rādhā beyond Kṛṣṇa Himself, that swelling mood is named bhāvollāsa, and it is the permanent, governing mood, the sthāyī-bhāva, of all Her maidservants. And Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī, in his Vraja-Vilāsa-Stava, takes shelter of them: those who please the great queen of Vṛndāvana by offering Her betel, by massaging Her feet, by bringing Her water, by arranging Her secret meeting with Kṛṣṇa, the kiṅkarīs headed by Rūpa Mañjarī, before whom Rādhā and Mādhava feel no shyness even in their love, though They are shy before the dearer sakhīs. This is the company Prabodhānanda keeps. And so his book moves between two breaths: sometimes the outward breath of the practicing devotee, sādhaka-āveśa, still aching toward the bower; sometimes the inward breath, siddha-āveśa, in which he stands already inside his eternal serving-body. Yet even in the outward breath the maidservant's heart never stops vibrating in him. And when he bows toward any direction where Rādhā may be found, he is praying a blessing wide as the world, upon every sādhaka anywhere who turns the mind toward Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa's Vṛndāvana play. May their sacred desires be fulfilled.

Let the heart stay a moment with what such a wind even is. It rose only because Her garment was at play. She moved, the dark border swung at its edge, and that small motion stirred the air into being. So this breeze is born of Her play and of nothing else; it is made of Her movement. O wind, you are rightly named gandhavaha, the carrier of fragrance, for you hold the scent of Her now, the very musk of Śrīmatī, the wonder of Her dress that breathes the perfume of Mādhavī-flowers. And Śyāma Himself looks at you with envy and says: how lucky you are; you go where I would give everything to go; you carry what maddens Me. The enchanter of Cupid, madana-mohana, the one at whose glance the universe loses its senses, stands here undone by the smell of a girl's garment on the air. And one of Her own hidden names is gandhonmādita-mādhavā: She by whose fragrance Mādhava is maddened. The name is wholly Hers, even as it tells of His undoing.

For these pastimes are confidential past all reckoning. Even Mahādeva and Brahmā, the lords of yoga, cannot perceive them. The Caitanya-Caritāmṛta lays it plain, that the līlā of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa is hidden so deep that not even Kṛṣṇa's own servants and friends in Vraja, in their moods of servitude and parental love, can see into it; only the sakhīs may enter, and it is they who unfold these pastimes for the world. And so, while Śrīpāda wonders whether he could ever be fortunate enough to witness what the kings of yogīs cannot, the grace of Mahāprabhu opens a window, and a vision is given.

He sees Rādhā-Mādhava at Their hidden play in a lonely bower. And when it is over, Rādhā sits up upon the flower-bed, tousled and spent and lovely as a garland a bumblebee has ravished and left. Kṛṣṇa, Rasika Śiromaṇi, the crown-jewel of all who relish sweetness, grows tender at how tired She is, with a tenderness that has nothing left of mastery in it, a compassion the tradition is careful to mark off from any ordinary lover's care, as Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja shows in his reading of Bilvamaṅgala's Kṛṣṇa-Karṇāmṛta. His long eyes, already reddened with the honeywine of love, go wide and soft with care for Her. Then She, in Her sovereign mood, svādhīna-bhartṛkā, the lover who holds the reins, commands Him: dress Me quickly, or My girlfriends will laugh to see Me so. And the kiṅkarīs come running with sandal-pulp and aguru and musk, with collyrium and footlac, and the Lord of all worlds becomes Her dressing-maid, lost in setting right what their love disarranged. Svāminī smiles to see Him so absorbed, and the maidservants giggle behind their veils. As He works He keeps lifting His eyes to Her face, and they brim with tears, for He cannot get enough of it. Viśvanātha Cakravartī sets it down for us: though He drinks again and again the nectar of Her smiling moon-face, He rises from it thirstier than before. And as He paints the dark collyrium around Her restless, frisky eyes, He begins to sweat, and though the flutter of Her own eyelashes fans Him, still He cannot cool. The Lord whom nothing can fill is, before this one face, eternally unfilled, eternally drinking, eternally thirsty for more.

Then Rādhā turns to the kiṅkarī standing near, who is Śrīpāda himself in his serving-form, and bids her fan Śyāma to dry His sweat. And the little servant's expert fanning cools Him, and then a sweet mischief rises in her. She fans not quite straight. She fans so that the air passes first across Rādhā and only then to Him, so that all at once He catches a current carrying the fragrance off the edge of Her garment. And He stops. And He is lost. He praises the wind aloud, calling it blessed and rightly named the carrier of scents, envying it the musk it bears from Śrīmatī's body. And the maidservant, watching the Lord of all the worlds undone by a breath of air that she herself has aimed, drowns in an ocean of bliss she has no name for. Now, here, inside the kingdom of the līlā, Śrīpāda has tasted for himself how perfectly that name fits Her: gandhonmādita-mādhavā, She whose fragrance maddens Mādhava.

Then, as suddenly as it opened, the vision closes, and the heart that was standing in the bower is standing nowhere, in the ordinary dark, empty-handed. Hā Rādhe, where is that honeysweet play now? Where did You go? And out of that ache rises the bow of this whole verse, the bow that does not even dare to claim Her presence. I do not say I have found You. I only say: somewhere, in some direction, You are. Perhaps today You are at Yāvaṭa, Your in-laws' home that lies halfway between Nandagrāma and Kośī; perhaps You are at Barsānā with Your parents, forty miles west of Vṛndāvana. Those who are fixed in smaraṇa know the very quarter where You may be found, on this day, in this month, in this hour, and the wind that maddens Mādhava is blowing toward me from where You are. So to that direction, to the mere quarter of the sky that holds You, I press my forehead. O direction, you who face Her, turn me toward Her. Show me my Prāṇeśvarī, the queen of my life.

That is the whole prayer of a heart that has lost the sight and kept the love. Not even, give Yourself to me, which would be too bold. Only: let me bow toward where You are. Let my obeisance fall in Your direction. And in that smallness, that refusal to grab, there is more love than in any demand, for it loves Her enough to want nothing but to face Her. So Śrīpāda Prabodhānanda, who relishes the nectar-bliss of bhajana, lets the Sudhā-Nidhi, the treasury of the nectar of Rādhā's rasa, open with a bow toward a direction.