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Picture an ocean that has no shore. You row out from the sandbar of your small understanding, and the land falls away behind you until there is only water in every direction, water that is not water but love. This is where the tradition wants to set you down: in the middle of a sea that cannot be measured, with one Name on the lips. Rādhā. And the tradition gives the sea a strange and shining title at once, mahā-nidhiḥ, a great hidden treasure, and tells you that this shoreless ocean is somehow also a secret one. Hold both at the start, O heart: boundless, and hidden.

Look first at Her limbs, and do not look away. From every part of Her body something rises and pours, pratyaṅga, limb by limb, an unbroken springing-up that never pauses, the way heat shimmers off sun-warmed stone, the way fragrance climbs from a crushed flower. The tradition names it ujjvala-amṛta-rasa, where ujjvala holds two glories in one word, splendid and amorous, and amṛta is nectar and rasa is the flavour itself: the blazing nectarean flavour of love. Her glance, the turn of Her wrist, the lift of Her brow, the way emotion plays across Her face in those countless tender ornaments the elders name hāva and bhāva and helā and vilāsa and kila-kiñcita, the bhāva-ornaments that stream from Her every limb, all of it is rasa overflowing, and all of it has one purpose: to satisfy every desire of Śyāmasundara, to make Him glad, to fill Him. The maidservants standing near know this best of all, for they have watched, again and again, what happens when She comes to meet Her dark Beloved: how the splendour breaks from Her like waves and floods toward Him, each limb of Hers become a small sea pouring into the great sea of His longing.

Now name the seas that empty into Her, O seeker, for the tradition gives the loveliest picture for it: just as the many oceans of the earth all meet and mingle in one great water, so all these oceans meet in the single great ocean of love named Rādhā, the ocean of mahā-bhāva itself. Count them like a devotee counting beads. First, premaika-pūrṇāmbudhiḥ, the one ocean that is full of love and nothing else, the single sea wholly filled with prema. Then lāvaṇyaika-sudhā-nidhiḥ, the lone nectar-ocean of loveliness, of that liquid grace that runs through beauty the way moonlight runs through water. The word the tradition leans its whole weight upon here is eka, only, alone, the only one of its kind; it is set down precisely to say that nothing in all the worlds can be placed beside this loveliness and called its equal. And the maidservants have seen what this elegance does: its waves reach out and strike Govinda Himself, they catch His heart and His mind and carry them off, so that the Lord who steals all hearts stands struck and undone before the One whose lāvaṇya has stolen His.

Then comes another sea entirely, and it surprises the heart that came expecting only sweetness: puru-kṛpā-vātsalya-sārāmbudhiḥ, the ocean that holds the very essence, the sāra, of great motherly tenderness. For She is not only the beloved who blazes; She is the mother whose mercy gathers up the helpless. And what is Her one compassionate gift to the bound souls drifting in this world? It is prema itself, love of God, which the tradition calls the great treasure and the great gain of all mankind, worth more than every jewel the earth has ever hidden. So freely does She give it that the most fortunate soul needs only to see Her once, only once to let his eyes fall on Śrī Rādhikā, and in that instant he is plunged whole into the nectar-ocean of Rādhā-and-Kṛṣṇa's love. And Her own maidservants stand always within the spray of this motherly ocean, forever sprinkled by its waves, for She does not hold them apart from Herself; She sees them as non-different from Her own being. O Mother of the world disguised as a girl of Vraja, what kind of compassion is this, that pours out the one gift the heavens themselves cannot purchase.

And there is a kingdom in this ocean too, O wonder. The tradition calls it taruṇyāḥ prathamā-praveśa, the first entering-in of youth, that trembling threshold where childhood has just slipped away and a luminous new sweetness begins to shine. This is no small thing; it is a samrājya, an empire, and She is its bhūḥ, the very ground and birthplace on which a kingdom of newly-blossoming mādhurya rises and reigns. As a wealthy kingdom brims with countless objects of delight to be enjoyed, so the vast ocean of Her body brims with the countless delights of Her dawning, adolescent sweetness; and the maidservants are fortunate beyond fortune to witness how dear all of it is to Kṛṣṇa when the divine Couple meets, how each new sweetness becomes for Him a fresh treasure laid open.

Now hold the strangest word of all in your two hands: mahā-nidhi, which the tradition says may mean great jewel or great ocean both at once. It lingers here, for something wonderful and self-contradicting is being said, what the elders name virodhālaṅkāra, the ornament of beautiful contradiction. Everyone knows that jewels are born from the ocean; the diver goes down into the sea and brings the pearl up to the light. But here the order is overturned, gloriously reversed. Here the great oceans, the sea of amorous nectar, the sea of loveliness, the sea of mercy, the sea of motherly love, all of them are born from the jewel. They pour out from the single hidden gem that is Śrī Rādhā's own form. The tradition reaches for the famous wonder set down in the Caitanya-caritāmṛta, in the sixteenth chapter of the Ādi-līlā: the whole world knows that lotuses are born from the Gaṅgā, yet the Gaṅgā herself is born from the lotus-feet of Lord Viṣṇu, and the heart gasps at the reversal, that most astonishing ornament of contradiction. So it is here. From Her, the jewel, the oceans flow. She is the great, indescribable, supreme jewel of love, the source the seas come out of.

And mark the word the tradition will not let you skip: guptaḥ, hidden, concealed, secret. This shoreless ocean is somehow also a hidden one, and it is no material sea but one made wholly of transcendentally blissful, sweet love. The truth of Rādhā is set down in the Vedas in a veiled way, and even in the essence of all Vedānta, even in the crown-jewel Śrīmad Bhāgavata, Śrī Śuka Muni also speaks of Her with a covering over His words. The tradition gives us the loveliest image for this: She is like the soul within the body. You cannot doubt that the self is present, for the whole body lives and feels by it, and yet point as you may, you cannot lay your finger on one spot and say, here, this is it. So with Her name in the Bhāgavata. The letters of it are nowhere written plainly across that holy book, and yet the experienced devotee feels Her presence breathing through every page, the unseen self of the whole scripture. She is here, She is everywhere in it, and She is hidden.

So the heart understands at last why the tradition ends the way it does: vijayate, She reigns, She conquers, She is supremely victorious, present in the highest excellence above all. In the Gītā the Lord says, bhaktimān me priyo naraḥ, the one who is devoted to Me is dear to Me; but the one who surrenders at Śrī Rādhā's lotus-feet is dearest of all to Govinda, for to follow Her order is already to win His whole heart. The tradition tells, in the Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta, of Gopa-kumāra, a soul of fraternal love who burned above all for Kṛṣṇa's company, who said, having attained the order of Śrī Rādhā, that he had come in topmost bliss and had not waited even for the bliss of meeting Kṛṣṇa. Why would one so eager for Kṛṣṇa set Kṛṣṇa's own nearness aside? Because, the ṭīkā answers, following Śrī Rādhā's order accomplishes Śrī Kṛṣṇa's satisfaction of itself, brings Him under love's sway, and so even greater bliss in His company comes flooding back, fuller and sweeter than before. This is the victory of the hidden jewel. This is rādhā rasaikāvadhiḥ, Rādhā the one and only boundary, the last limit, the farthest shore and final crown of all rasa, beyond whom there is nothing left to seek.