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Begin with the river. The Yamunā, daughter of Mount Kalinda, comes down dark and cool through Vṛndāvana, and at her bank she does not merely flow. She gives. The breeze stoops over her surface, gathers an abundance of her finest droplets onto its own breath, salila-bindu-sandoha-bhṛt, and lifts them like an offering toward a certain bower set deep in the trees. O Kālindī, even you have your service: your spray is carried inward through the lattice of an arbour-cottage, that two who are wearied may be cooled.

Now look to the grove itself. This is Vṛndāṭavī, the forest that belongs to no king and to no logic except love. Flowers bloom thick on the trees and on the climbing vines, and their fragrance does not stay politely on the branch. It spills. It travels on the wind and reaches the deer, the birds, the very air, and every forest-creature that breathes it goes a little mad with ecstasy, drunk on perfume. The cuckoos, made tipsy on this same sweet air, lift their throats and sing in the fifth note, the high clear pañcama that belongs to longing. And the bees, O the bees, follow the scent to the honey-filled flower-bushes all over Vṛndāvana, swarm upon swarm, bhramara-vṛnda upon bhramara-vṛnda, until the whole bower rings with their soft droning as though the forest itself were singing the love-song it cannot hold inside.

And in the heart of all this, on the very bank of the Yamunā, stands a kuñja-mandira, a bowerhouse of leaves and vines surrounded by a deep forest of trees and creepers, the best of all the bowers, nikuñja-vara-mandire. The tradition does not even rush to name the Two within. It says only kim api sundaram: a certain indescribable beauty, some lovely Couple, as if the sweetness must first be felt before the holy Names may be spoken. They are the rasika-yugala, the connoisseur-Pair, immersed in relishing each other's sweetness so wholly that the world reduces to this single arbour. O Rādhe, O Mādhava, here You are not Lord and worshipper of the worlds. Here You are simply young and in love, the wonderful adolescent Couple, drinking each other's beauty. How sweet for Them is this time, this place, this circumstance.

What is happening within that bower is amanda-rasa-tuṇḍila: swollen and rounded with no mild flavour but the very greatest rasa, increased and extended by the highest ecstatic mellow. It is as if the flavour of Their pastime has taken on a body of its own and grown and grown, each glance increasing the other's longing, each touch deepening the other's wonder, until They constantly cause each other's love and beauty and passion to mount higher. Their hearts and minds float out in innumerable directions on that gradually rising tidal wave of beauty and sweetness and love and passion, and there is no shore. This is the adbhuta-krīḍā, the wondrous play, the rati-kalā revealed; and the Rādhāvallabha rendering catches it in one image, calling the Pair jaḍībhūta, made rapt, set fast, frozen still inside the great rasa, the indescribable nāgarī-nāgara gladdened by Their own wondrous game. It is wonderful precisely because it never empties, never tires of itself, only mounts higher.

And They are tired, yes, in the sweetest way. Rati-śrama, the gentle weariness that comes only from love, has settled upon Them. Their movements have gone soft and slow, mṛdu-udgati. And just here is the tenderness of the whole scene: the wind has been watching. The wind knows. It understands that by carrying the cool spray of the Yamunā in through the windows it can soothe that lovely fatigue, and so it does, and the wind is glad, very happy and satisfied in its small work. O servant-wind, you carry the river's dew to refresh the Two who are wearied by love, and your whole happiness is in Their relief. For the wind, the sky, the water, the sun, the moon of this place are all of them servants in Rādhā-Mādhava's play, attending without ever once breaking the spell with awareness of Kṛṣṇa's majestic prowess. Here no one remembers that this is also the Lord of all worlds. Here there is only the bower, the bees, the breeze, and the Two.

For this is the secret of Vṛndāvana, which the tradition fixes by the words of the Caitanya-caritāmṛta: Kṛṣṇa is the original Personality of Godhead and the proprietor of this dhāma, where the soil is touchstone and the abodes are jewels, where the maidservants' very foot-ornaments are thought-gems, where the vines and trees are all wish-yielding and the cows beyond counting graze in every grove. Yet in all that endless wealth no one asks the trees for anything but flowers and fruit, and no one asks the wish-cows for anything but milk. No one reaches for the riches. The riches are only ever for the play of Rādhā and Mādhava, and the joy of the residents is simply to be near it, to fan it, to cool it, to witness it. In a blissful grove there is an enchanting jewelled temple where Rāi and Kānu, the adolescent Pair who are great rasa personified, dwell; these Two are like the very monarchs of rasa, rasika-mithuna-bhūpa, absorbed in the pinnacle of ecstasy as They reveal Their artistry; and the hosts of bumblebees in that rasika kuñja buzz sweetly as if they were themselves singing of the game and standing witness to the festival.

And now the one who tells us all this. In external consciousness Śrīpāda Prabodhānanda turns to praise Śrī Rādhā's sweetness, and by Her grace alone he is given this vision; and in his inward, eternal form as a kiṅkarī, a maidservant of Śrī Rādhā, he stands at the latticed window of the arbour-cottage, deeply absorbed in his mañjarī-service, and looks in. He is not outside the rasa; he is drowning in it too, floating in the same ocean as the Two he serves. This is what the tradition means by mūkāsvādanavat: it is sweet as honey on the tongue of a mute who cannot speak it back. Anyone who has tasted even a single drop of this, even once, even in a dream, can testify, and no one else; for the mouth that has tasted is the very mouth struck silent. So Śrīpāda ends not in triumph but in helpless ache. He says that even to hear this story, this līlā that gives such joy to the eyes, and not to be granted entrance to it, is like a stone hung round the neck, locana-ānanda-līlā śunile-o gole śilā, a weight of longing that will not let the heart rest until it too is given a place at that window.