141

Begin with the tongue, dear heart, because here is where the longing of the whole tradition begins. Picture a devotee standing in the dust of Vraja with only two syllables upon his lips: Rā, dhā. He is not reciting. He is tasting. The name has become a flavour in his mouth, sweeter than honey, sweeter than anything the senses have ever known, and his tongue has gone weak under it, vihvalā, overwhelmed, swaying the way a body sways when it is given more sweetness than it can hold. The Rādhāvallabha singers name the mood exactly: the tongue is lālacavatī, greedy, forever craving, never satisfied however much it drinks. This is what is asked for. Not eloquence, not learning. Only this trembling, this glad collapse of the tongue beneath one Name. And Śrīpāda asks it, as he asked in the verse before, standing in sādhakāveśa, in the practitioner's own outer consciousness, longing for what he sings.

For the best of all means to prema is nāma-saṅkīrtana, the chanting of the Name, and the tradition guards a secret about it: when even one sense is flooded by the Name's nectar, the flood will not stay contained. Sanātana Gosvāmī fixes it in his Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta, that the nectar of the Name arising upon a single sense rushes to drench all the other senses with its own native sweetness: ekasminn indriye prādurbhūtaṁ nāmāmṛtaṁ rasaiḥ. So the prayer for the tongue is never only for the tongue. Let the tongue taste, and the eyes will brim, the skin will thrill, the whole body will be carried away on that one stream. And mark the small luminous word Sanātana lingers on, nijaiḥ: svakīyaiḥ, svābhāvikaiḥ, its own, innate. The Name carries its sweetness within itself, by its own nature, the way fire carries heat. It need borrow nothing from us. Rūpa Gosvāmī sings the same hunger in his Kṛṣṇa-nāma-stotram, that the Name is the very life of Nārada's vīṇā and the quintessence of all nectar, praying only this: sphura me rasane rasena, give that savour, always, to my tongue.

And O wonder, the tradition dares to say that even Kṛṣṇa is undone by this Name. For when you truly love someone, you love their very name, you love the sound of it. So Rūpa Gosvāmī tells in the sixth act of his Vidagdha-Mādhava how Kṛṣṇa once burned in the forest-fire of separation from Śrī Rādhā, and His comrade Madhumaṅgala could think of no greater medicine than to trace upon a leaf those two syllables, Rā and dhā, and hold the leaf up to Him: "Friend, here, accept Your Rādhā." And Kṛṣṇa, seeing only Her name written on a leaf, was satisfied as though She Herself had come, and said, "Friend, with this gift you have fully satisfied Me." For who in all the world, the tradition asks, is not made glad when the name of the one they love comes to the edge of the eye or the rim of the ear? The hearts of all the people of the world are naturally, always, eager for exactly this.

But the Name does not yield its sweetness to the proud or the offending tongue. To the offender it hides; to the surrendered it is endlessly merciful, burning away the offences of the soul that takes shelter and then rising up of its own accord, self-revealed, upon that tongue. So when the taste does not come, the devotee does not strive harder, he only prays the more humbly: "O Name, O Cintāmaṇi-jewel, O Lord, O very form of topmost bliss, You are the most merciful of all descents, the Lord come small enough to rest upon a tongue in the shape of syllables. Reveal Your spotless, blissful form here, on my poor mouth. Grant this fallen one even a single drop of Your endless sweetness." And to the one who serves with such longing, the Name comes on its own: sevonmukhe hi jihvādau svayam eva sphuraty adaḥ, it shows itself to the service-turned tongue, never to the clever hand that would seize it.

Now the feet. Pādau tat-pada-kāṅkitāsu caratāṁ vṛndāṭavī-vīthiṣu: let my feet do nothing else but walk the lanes of Vṛndāvana, the very lanes that wear the imprint of Her lotus-feet. Picture those alleys, the narrow paths between the kuñjas, the dust soft underfoot, and somewhere pressed into that dust the mark of Her step. To walk there is to walk where my Īśvarī walks, to feel at every footfall, "She passes here, She has always passed here." Each grain of that dust is sprinkled with the honey of Her supreme love, and the great ones, even Uddhava, longed only to have such dust rain down upon their heads. If my feet may simply tread these lanes and remember this, my whole life becomes bhajana, a life spent inside the place She loves, treading where She has trod.

And the hands. Tat-karmaiva karaḥ karotu: let my hands perform Her work, and Her work alone. O these hands, how long they have served so many, fetched and laboured and grasped for a hundred lesser things. Let them be stunned still at last. Let them forget every other errand and take up only Her menial service, the small sweet tasks of Her care: stringing Her garlands, fanning Her, fetching what She needs. Let the hands that have wandered everywhere come home to this one labour of love.

And the heart. Hṛdayaṁ tasyāḥ padaṁ dhyāyatāt: let my heart meditate upon Her lotus-feet, and not Her feet only but Her whole form, Her pastimes, Her qualities, all that She is. The Rādhāvallabha tongue calls them Her mañjula caraṇa-kamala, Her lovely, charming lotus-feet, and bids the heart rest there forever. O this restless mind, forever slipping away from its own sweetest object, wandering off into the bare and tasteless world. If only it could find a little taste for Her feet, it would grow quiet there, it would settle and stay. And let it not stop with the heart and the tongue and the hands and the feet, but draw in every sense: let the eyes drink the beauty of Rādhā-kuṇḍa and gaze on Her devotees, let the nose breathe the incense burned before Her, let the ears fill with the singing of Her names and Her līlās and Her glories. Let the whole instrument of this body and mind be turned, sense by sense, toward Her alone.

And here someone leans in to ask the question that hovers over all of this: "But Śrīpāda, you live in Vṛndāvana, Kṛṣṇa's own dhāma. Why do you not worship Govinda Himself? Why this single-pointed turning toward Her?" And the answer is the heart of the whole prayer: tad-bhāvotsavataḥ paraṁ bhavatu me tat-prāṇa-nāthe ratiḥ. "Out of the festival of Her bhāva, let supreme love arise in me for the Lord of Her life." For when I surrender wholly at Her feet, my worship of Govinda does not diminish, it is perfected. Knowing me to be the dearest object of Śrī Rādhā's mercy, Govinda will come to me of His own accord, He will pour upon me a tenderness even greater than He gives His own devotees, as the eighteenth verse before this one already sang, prītaḥ svaṁ bhajato'pi. Indeed, since She is hard to attain even for Him, He will have need of me, His Beloved's little maidservant, to win Her grace. I will not stand in need of Him. He will stand in need of me.

This is what the tradition names bhāvotsava, the festival of mood: mañjarī-bhāva, the secret preference for Rādhā even above Kṛṣṇa, that overflow of devotion called bhāvollāsa-rati, and with it a fierce sweet sense of mamatā, "She is mine." The mañjarīs love Kṛṣṇa, yes, but they love Him only because He is Hers, because He belongs to the One they belong to. And so the highest prayer of this stream is the prayer to become Her handmaid. Rūpa Gosvāmī seals his Cāṭu-Puṣpāñjali with it, begging the Queen of Vṛndāvana again and again for the mercy that one day, when She is sulking and turns Her face away, Govinda Himself will have to come flattering the maidservant, pleading, "O Sundari, O lovely one, O dayāvati, O merciful one, please soften your Svāminī toward Me, for the fire of separation from Her is burning Me alive." And then I will take Him gently by the hand and lead Him in to Her. Such is our love for Govinda born in the festival of Rādhā's bhāva, and the tradition calls it the very greatest aspiration of a Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava: not love grasped directly, but love that ripens of itself, like fruit, from a heart that has given everything first to Her.