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Let the night sky over Vṛndāvana darken above the groves, and let it be no ordinary night. Not one moon, but rākā after rākā, full moon upon full moon, a whole congregation of them rising together, and every one vicitra, strange and wonderful, lovelier and larger than any moon the eyes have ever held. They climb the dark in their thousands, and they do not give the cold, thin, silver light we know. They pour. From each of them streams the premāmṛta-jyoti, the nectar-light of love itself made luminous, falling in vīcī upon vīcī, wave breaking over wave, until the radiance spills past the rim of this one sky and floods the next, and the next, until agaṇita-brahmāṇḍa-koṭi, uncounted millions of the eggs of Brahmā, whole universes beyond reckoning, stand drowned and shining in that single tide of tenderness. Picture it. Hold it in the heart as long as the heart can bear the holding: an infinity of moons, an ocean of love-light, every world soaked through and glowing.

And now lean close, O seeker, for here comes the unbearable word. All of that. All that splendor poured across all those worlds. And it would be only ābhāsa, only a semblance, a dim and borrowed glimmer, of one face seen at the edge of these very groves. O Rādhe, that is Your face. That is what is being set in the balance against the brimming heavens, and the heavens come up short: immeasurably short, hopelessly short.

For the moon overhead was never the original at all. Consider how the moon in the sky is caught and trembling in every pool and lake below, and how the reflection in the water carries only a little of the source's light. So too, that great lamp of the night is itself only a reflection. The true original is the moon-face of prema-lakṣmī, the very goddess of love, Śrī Rādhā, whose countenance showers down the nectarean ambrosial light from which every lesser moonbeam in creation is borrowed. The sky's moon shines only because Her face shone first. The pools mirror the moon; the moon mirrors Her. She is the source standing over all the water.

And see where this face is rising. Not in some far and frozen heaven, but here, at the sīmani, the very border of Vṛndāvana's nikuñjas, on the threshold of the flowering arbours. Why here, and why does it blaze so now? Because She has just seen Śyāmasundara. The moment Her eyes fall upon Him, countless deep emotions wake and crowd upon Her face and ornament it, bhāva upon bhāva, each fresh feeling a fresh jewel. This is no serene and distant disc hung in empty space. This is a face flushed and trembling and wholly alive, decked in emotion, rising right where the dark-blue Beloved waits among the leaves. The love-light here is no abstract radiance; it is the radiance of one heart meeting the heart it was made for.

Then an honest lover must turn and ask himself a hard question. If Her face is so utterly beyond the moon, if not millions of moons across millions of worlds can so much as touch it, then why compare it to the moon at all? Why stoop to so poor a measure? And the answer is itself an act of love, for it takes up the small word bhāva and turns it over like a jewel in the hand, finding in it more than one light. The Vaiṣṇava scriptures, after all, give the word many meanings.

In one light, bhāva is svabhāva, settled custom, the dear old habit of the heart. Poets have always, always likened Her face to the moon; it is the loving custom of all who adore Her, and so, Śrīpāda confesses, by that custom alone I too reached for the moon. In another light, bhāva is āveśa, the absorption that forgets itself: I was so swept away in describing Her, so lost, that I made no careful discrimination at all; ecstatically, weighing nothing, I simply laid Her face beside the moon because the heart in its rapture could not pause to be exact. And in yet another light, it is the plain inadequacy of speech confessed with tenderness: it does not read beautifully to set down the bare word "face." To say "lotus-face," to say "moon-face," nourishes the beauty of the praise, even while everyone knows, and gladly confesses, that such things cannot equal Her at all. The comparison is offered and withdrawn in a single breath; it is a flower laid at Her feet and an apology for the flower's smallness, both at once.

For what, in truth, could this face ever be compared to? This is the face whose ambrosial light reaches into the darkness gathered in Śyāmasundara's heart, the despair of His unfulfilled longing, and destroys it, and revives Him, and gives Him back His very life. O Rādhe, Kṛṣṇa's dearmost beloved, he kṛṣṇa-priyatamā, Your face is rasānanda-khani, a mine of delicious bliss, and it cannot be set beside even koṭi candra, ten million moons. Your reddened lips, aruṇa-adhara, are sudhā-mādhurī, an abundance of sweet nectar pressed full to overflowing, and at their touch the Beloved who was wasting in the fever of unfulfilled desire, kāma-bādhā-viṣaṇṇa, is made whole again. Life-giver, jīvana-dāyinī; daughter of Vṛṣabhānu, vṛṣabhānu-nandinī; who can find Your measure? There is no measure. There is no equal. Let the endless moons rise and pour and flood the worlds; still the heart that has once seen Your face at the edge of the grove can only shake its head and say: a semblance, a shadow, a far-off hint, and nothing more.

The Rādhāvallabha singers, gathering before this same verse, name it the abhūtopamā varṇana, a praise built upon an unprecedented comparison such as the world has never made, and they set it in the rolling Śārdūlavikrīḍita meter as befits so vast an image. And in their hearing the little word bhāva turns once more, with a tenderness all its own: it is now a sakhī who speaks, and she says, O Rādhe, only if those many wondrous full moons filled crores of universes with their love-nectar waves, and only then You, standing at the border of Vṛndāvana's nikuñja, were to look upon that whole semblance with a feeling-filled gaze, bhāva-pūrṇa dṛṣṭi, only then, by that loving glance of Yours, could I in any way set the moon beside Your face. The same word, the same surrender: in one telling Śrīpāda's mood dares the comparison, in the other Her own gaze alone could ever permit it.

So we are left where every true lover of Rādhā is finally left: with the comparison offered and confessed insufficient, with the moons rising and falling short, with one face that cannot be weighed. And out of that helplessness comes the only fitting prayer. O Vṛṣabhānu-nandinī, life of Kṛṣṇa's life, kṛpā-diṭhe cāho, cast upon us too the mercy of a single glance. Let one ray of that incomparable moon fall even upon us who stand far off at the border of the grove.