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Picture it. Begin not with stone, not with carved pillar or raised dome, but with vines. A temple grown of living green, fresh leaf laid upon fresh leaf, buds half-opened along every wall, blossoms hanging where a lamp might hang. This is the navalatā-mandira, the new-vine temple of Vṛndāvana, and it is built of nothing but tenderness made visible. Here every season is the first season, every bloom the first bloom. Vidyāpati sang it best, and the tradition gives us his song entire: new Vṛndāvana, where the new trees bear newly blooming flowers; a new spring carrying a new southern breeze that maddens the new bees; the new youthful Couple enjoying on the bank of the Yamunā in a beautiful new arbour, immersed in feelings of ever-new love. The honey from the new mango-pits intoxicates the new cuckoos, who sing sweet new songs no ear has heard before. The hearts of the new young girls are maddened, and they run to the new rasika forest; the new prince meets the new ladyloves who shine with an ever-new splendour; and so, niti niti, day upon day, they play nice new games that madden the very heart of the one who sings them. In this grove nothing is ever old. Even eternity is new each instant.

And inside this living bower the inner vision shows us one Girl. Kācid: a certain Girl, one Girl, as if to name Her too plainly would be to seize what may only be glimpsed. She is the daughter of Vṛṣabhānu, the eternally-young Kiśorī, and She is held. The arms that hold Her are proud, dṛpyad, swelling with a strength that has its own history. Why so proud, O arms of Nanda's Son? Because these are the arms that took hold of Keśī, the maddened horse-demon, and broke him; these are the arms that crushed Ariṣṭa the bull. Victorious arms, hero's arms, arms the three worlds fear. And now those very arms have closed around a slender Girl in a grove, and they tremble.

O wonder. The arms that no demon could withstand cannot themselves withstand Her touch. Raghunātha dāsa Gosvāmī fixes it in his Vilāpa Kusumāñjali, that even Ariṣṭa-jayī, the conqueror of Ariṣṭa, cannot stay steady when He so much as decorates and dresses Her, picking flowers to deck Her hair: "ariṣṭa-jayinā kadā tava varoru bhūṣā-vidhir vidhāsyate": when, O nicely-thighed Rādhe, will I see the victor over Ariṣṭa adorn You, and have my ocean of bliss made wide? He perspires, the hair on His body lifts and shivers, He grows faint, because the body He is touching is made of nothing but pure love. The strength that subdued the demons dissolves before Her sweetness. This is the secret hidden inside His pride: His power is real, and Her tenderness is greater than His power.

Now look at Her in His embrace. Niḥspanda-gātrī: motionless of limb. The Rādhāvallabha singers say it the same way, that under the gāḍha āliṅgana, the dense embrace of Śrīlālajī's proud arm-creepers, Her every limb has gone slack, samasta aṅga śithil. She is held so tightly, so completely, that Her body cannot move. But do not mistake the stillness for absence; it is the opposite. As the singers tell it: śyāmāṅga paraśa pāiyā, when She was touched by Śyāma, ānanda nā dhare hiyā, She could not hold Her own heart for ecstasy, and the body simply forgot how to stir. The stillness is the fullness. It is the stillness of a vessel filled past its brim and held perfectly level so as not to spill a single drop of the nectar within. Outwardly She does not move; inwardly an ocean is rising.

And here is the marvel the inner vision will not let us miss. Even motionless, even with Her limbs gone still in His arms, She is doing something. Kalpayanti: She is shaping, composing, bringing forth divya-ananta-adbhuta-rasa-kalāḥ, the divine, endless, wondrous arts of rasa. This is the vraja-bālā who knows innumerable arts of love, who is never not absorbed in ecstatic play. Held until She cannot stir a finger, She is still the artist of bliss, still bringing forth flavor after new flavor, mood after new mood. She does not need to move to create the rasa. She is the rasa. Her very stillness in His arms is itself the highest art.

For consider who She is. Sāndra-ānanda-amṛta-rasa-ghana-prema-mūrtiḥ: the words are piled up like garlands because no single word will hold Her. She is concentrated bliss; She is the nectar of rasa made thick and whole; She is love condensed into a form you could embrace. The Rādhāvallabha stream calls Her anirvacanīya koi kiśorī, that ineffable certain Girl, eternally enthroned in the new-vine temple. Kṛṣṇa is named ānanda-ghana-vigraha, the very mass of bliss given a body; and here in His arms is prema-mūrti, love itself given a body. Bliss embraces Love, and Love embraces Bliss, and between them rises a sweetness that has nothing whatever to do with the grasping hungers of this world. The tradition is careful to say so, plainly: these are not the lusty dealings of ordinary boys and girls. This is transcendental supreme love, the one power that can intoxicate Śrī Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Himself; and only the rasika devotee, only the maidservant standing near, can witness it without distorting it into something it is not.

How near can such witnessing come, and how far does this love reach? Rūpa Gosvāmī gives us a startling picture in the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi. A sannyāsinī comes to Vraja from Mathurā, enters the assembly of gopīs, blesses them, and invokes a protection: may Murāri guard you, He who, far away in the jewel-shining ocean-temple of Dvārakā, already studded with the goosebumps of ecstasy in Rukmiṇī's tight embrace, suddenly faints, because the mere slight remembrance has reached Him of His play with Rādhā in a cane-grove on the soft, glossy bank of the Yamunā. Even held by His own queen, the memory of this grove, this Girl, this embrace, undoes Him across all distance. And Viśvanātha Cakravartī, glossing the word parimala, sees Rādhā as the wish-yielding vine that fulfills Kṛṣṇa's every desire with Her nectarean pastimes. That is the gravity of what unfolds in the vine-temple. It is not one pastime among many; it is the still center toward which even His other intimacies turn and fall faint.

So Prabodhānanda, in his inner vision, simply looks, and gives us the loving power of Rādhikā over Kṛṣṇa in his own song: there in the beautiful new vine-temple of Vṛndāvana stands the daughter of Vṛṣabhānu, kṛṣṇamayī, made all of Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa's most beloved, wrapped in the bolt of Govinda's proud and strong arms, ghanānanda premera pratimā, the very image of dense bliss-love. Touched by Śyāma, Her heart can hold no more, Her body will not move, and still She pours forth endless wondrous arts and sinks into ecstatic play. And then the seer cries out: ei dekho vijayinī, O look at the victor; look at the jewel of all the young girls of Vraja, vrajera kiśorī-maṇi, how beautiful Rādhikā is in Śyāma's company. Even Sarasvatī bows: "O Brother, my goddess Rāi is nanda-suta sukha-sāgarikā, an ocean of bliss for Nanda's son." The conqueror of the conqueror has won, and Her victory is this very stillness in His arms.