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Come quietly into the dusk of Vṛndāvana, where the air itself is thick with honey, and let your eyes adjust to a glow that is neither sun nor moon. There, rising out of the green, are two lotuses. One is the deep, dreaming blue of the indīvara, the night-lotus blossoming open; the other is the warm, fully unfolded gold of the hema-aravinda, the lovely day-lotus. Vyākośa, vikasita: both have burst into bloom. And the wonder the tradition presses into our hands is this: They grow from a single stem. One stem, two flowers. One soul, two bodies. O wonder of wonders, that the one undivided sweetness should overflow into a blue Beloved and a golden Beloved, so that love might have a face to turn toward.

How do we know it is one stem? Because Rādhā Herself once said so. The tradition tells the tender tale: once Śrī Kṛṣṇa came to Rādhikā in the disguise of a goddess, and to that disguised Lord Rādhikā opened Her heart in the Prema-Sampuṭa: "Just as a single lotus-stem in a lake blooms forth two flowers, one blue and one yellow, so Our one soul, manifesting within the lake of rasa, sprouted forth Our two bodies, blue and yellow." Hear it from Her own mouth, O seeker. The blue and the gold are not two loves bargaining across a distance. They are one rasa wearing two bodies, blooming on one stalk in one lake.

And yet, do not mistake the lotuses for the thing itself. No words can actually describe these pastimes; the flowers are only an aid that mercy hands to beginners so that our small hearts, which cannot hold the formless, may have something to cradle. For who could describe Them as They are? When the gopīs stood weeping in the Rāsa, separated from their Lord, they could not even take in His whole form. They fixed on one single eye of His and cried out, as the Bhāgavata preserves it in the Gopī-gīta: "O Lord of eros, O bestower of blessings, with Your eye, lovely as an autumnal lotus blooming in a clear lake, You are taking the very lives of Your unpaid maidservants. Is this not murder?" If one eye of Kṛṣṇa is a lotus that slays with sweetness, then what of His whole dark body, what of Her whole golden body, what of the ever-rising tide of beauty that is the two of Them together? No comparison reaches it. The lotuses are only a doorway, and we step through gratefully.

Now watch the swing. Śrīman-niṣyandana-rati-rasāndola-kandarpa-keli. The two lotuses are swaying, and as they sway, honey trickles. From freshly opened flowers rocking in the wind, drop by drop, the nectar slides down the petals and falls. So it is here. As Rādhā and Mādhava move together in the swing of Their love, the honey of amorous play, kandarpa-keli, drips from Them and pools in the grove. But understand what kandarpa-keli means in this grove, for it is not what the word means anywhere else. It means that each one bends every endeavor toward making the Other glad. He pours Himself out for Her delight; She pours Herself out for His. This is not the grasping of two who use each other. This is two who are one, each making a gift of the self to the Beloved, and the honey that falls from such giving is the sweetest thing in all the worlds.

O wind that carries this fragrance, do not let me confuse it with anything I have known. The world has its love-couples too, and they may protest, "Is our union not also kandarpa-keli? We also come together to gladden one another." And the scriptures and the saints answer gently. Real love becomes possible only when God, the Supreme Truth and the Self of Selves, becomes the One who is loved; where that Supreme Self within the beloved is not known, love thins into something mundane, a reaching for the surface. The ancient teaching of the sages stands behind this. In the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad the great Yājñavalkya turned to Maitreyī and taught: the husband is not dear for the husband's sake, but dear for the sake of the ātman, the Self; nor is the wife dear for the wife's sake, but for the sake of the ātman that shines through her. And again the same Upaniṣad teaches that nothing whatever is dear for its own separate sake, but only for the sake of the Self, and so that Self is to be seen, to be heard, to be pondered, to be meditated upon, for by that the Self is found. Here in the grove the Self of all selves has become the blue lotus and the golden lotus, and so Their play is the one true love of which every earthly love is only a far, broken echo. This is why the honey is divine: it drips from the very ground of being, swaying in delight.

And there is more, for the kiṅkarī, the maidservant-in-spirit who watches from the bushes, sees that it is not only from Their swaying bodies that sweetness falls. From Their very lotus feet, nava-rasa-sudhā-syandi-pādāravindam, a stream of ever-fresh nectar is flowing. Honey from above, where They sway; nectar from below, from the soles of those tender feet. Both have the same two qualities, coolness and tastiness, and the grove becomes a lake of rasa, the two lotuses standing in it and pouring still more rasa into it, until the whole forest is drowning in a coolness and a sweetness that has no bottom. The servant who beholds this is undone, and so is absorbed Śrīpāda himself, lost in meditation on these two sweet lights that are the source of the very pinnacle of bliss.

Listen, then, to how the tradition sings it in its own songs. Parama-ānanda-kanda: Śrī Rādhikā and Śrī Govinda are the source of the pinnacle of transcendental bliss, the adolescent Couple named Pramodinī, the joy-giving Rādhikā, and Pītavāsa, the yellow-robed Kṛṣṇa, carrying a golden and a bluish luster that flashes out a wonderful light found nowhere else. Look at the rasika Couple, Hema Gaurī, golden Rādhā the daughter of Vṛṣabhānu, and Śyāma Rāya, Kṛṣṇa the son of Nanda, reclined on Their play-bed, playing Their love-games and wholly enchanted by ecstatic rasa. This heroic Pair, nāgarī and nāgara, has gone niṣpanda, stunned and still with the fullness of joy: what more can They even do? And still the honey trickling from Their lotus feet is full of fresh, sweet, nectarean taste. Cakāsti, the tradition says simply: It shines. It is. In the bower-forest this youthful Couple gives Their devotees the grace of beholding in the mind's eye, mānase darśana, the sweetness of Their rasika play. They do not hoard it. They give it. So sings Śrīpāda Prabodhānanda, letting the servant stand at the edge of the grove and watch the honey fall.