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Look up into the night and find the moon hung there, the one the poets have praised since the world was young, the one the cakora-bird is said to live upon, turning its small face up all night to drink the falling beams. Look at it as long as you like. Then turn toward Barsānā, toward the bower where She is, and look once at the moon of Her face. After that single look you will never again be able to praise the moon overhead. It will hang there shamed and idle, a lamp someone forgot to take down. This is what the tradition names sudhākara mudhākaram: sudhākara is the moon, mudhākaram is the making-futile of it. Her face does to the night-moon what dawn does to a candle. The Rādhāvallabha rendering opens under just this longing and calls the whole verse by its true name, śrī-mukha-candra-darśanābhilāṣā: the longing to behold the moon of Her holy face, the face that makes the moon itself fall to nothing.

For consider where each moon comes from. The moon you know was churned up long ago from an ocean of milk, and the demigods drink the nectar it pours. A fine thing, as material things go. But Her face was never churned from milk. It rose from the ocean of rasa, rasāmbudhi samunnatam, from the shoreless deep of transcendental sweetness, and it carries the whole flavor of that ocean in it as its very essence. So the comparison collapses the instant you make it. Her face cannot be set beside a material luminary like the moon, nor beside an ordinary waterflower like the lotus; both go dim the moment they are brought near. And there is more, for this is no cold radiance. Let a single ray of this transcendental moon fall into a heart, and every darkness lodged there, every grasping wish for the things of this world, is gone, the way mist lifts when light comes over the hill. The night-moon cannot do that. It can silver a rooftop; it cannot empty a heart of its darkness. Hers can, with a single ray.

And here the tradition holds up the wonder trembling: even Gokulacandra is gladdened by this moon. Even Śyāmasundara, who is Himself the endlessly sweet moon of all Gokula, the moon every gopī's eye follows, even He is soothed and made happy by the moonlight of Her face. The tradition recalls Śrīpāda Līlāśuka's tender mockery in the Kṛṣṇa-Karṇāmṛta, that the poor sky-moon has only now, after ages of waiting, become fit to serve as the little camphor-lamp waved before Kṛṣṇa's face in ārati, nīrājana-krama-dhurām, and even then, the ārati once done, the lamp is set aside and thrown away like any spent thing. That is the whole of the moon's worth: a brief offered flame at His face, then discarded. How shall it stand as a likeness for Hers? It cannot. So Rūpa's nephew, the Govinda-Līlāmṛta, fixes it: kṛṣṇendriyāhlādi guṇair udārā śrī rādhikā rājati rādhikeva, that with Her beautiful qualities Śrī Rādhikā pleases all of Kṛṣṇa's senses at once, and that Rādhikā shines like Rādhikā only. She grinds to powder the pride of every object men reach for when they reach for a comparison, the moon, the lotus, all of them; they line up to be Her likeness and are sent away ashamed. Her limbs are beautiful as Her own limbs are beautiful, and there is no second thing in the three worlds to set beside them. No material form, no material taste, can touch the transcendental senses of Bhagavān; only pure love can, and mostly, mostly, it is Her love and no other that makes Him happy.

Now feel how the tide moves. At every instant, pratipada, the choicest essence of sweetness shines out of Her face in moonbeams that are forever new, nava-candrikā, fresh in each fresh moment; and just as the ordinary moon, rising, draws the ordinary ocean up after it so the waters climb the shore, so Her risen face draws up the whole ocean of the essence of sweetness, and that ocean swells, nava-candrikā-jaladhi-tundilam, its great waves lifting and lifting. And who is that ocean of sweetness? He is. Śyāmasundara is the personified deep of mādhurya, the very substance of God-ness which is sweetness, mādhurya-bhagavattā-sāra, as the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta sings; and this deep is never still water, for it is forever increasing, anusavābhinavam, new in every instant, as the Bhāgavata says of Him. When His eyes fall on the moon of Her face, the whole ocean of Him rises in high waves: rādhā-vadana-vilokana-vikasita-vividha-vikāra-vibhaṅgam, jalanidhim iva vidhu-maṇḍala-darśana-tuṅga-taraṅgam, the Gīta Govinda has it, that at the sight of Rādhā's face wave upon wave of varied amorous transformation breaks across His being, exactly as the sea heaves up its tall tide when the disc of the moon swings into view. He sees Her face and He is unmade and remade in waves. There is the secret of the tide: Her risen moon, His rising ocean, the one calling the other up out of its depths forever.

And there are the cakora-birds. The moon overhead pleases the whole world, yet it pleases the cakora best, the bird that lives on moonbeams and turns its face up all night to drink. So what are Hari's two eyes but a pair of cakoras, lifted always toward the moon of Her face, drinking its nectar without pause: atṛpta-hari-locana-dvaya-cakora-peyam, this is the drink for Hari's two unsatiated cakora eyes. Mark the word unsatiated. He is Hari, the thief who steals away every heart in creation by His beauty and His sweetness, the one from whom no one can hold back love; and yet even Hari, the all-drinker, is never filled by the nectar of Her face. From My very birth, the tradition lets Him sigh in Vidyāpati's words, I have looked on Her form, and still My eyes are not satisfied: janama avadhi hām rūpa nehārinu, nayana nā tirapita bhelo. The cakora drinks all night and is never done; so His thirst does not lessen with drinking but grows without end, tṛṣṇā śānti nahe tṛṣṇā bāḍhe nirantara, says the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta. The more He drinks of Her, the thirstier He becomes for Her. This is no lack in the nectar; it is the very glory of it, a sweetness so living that fulfillment in it is only ever a deeper hunger for it, an ocean that the more you drink the more it rises to be drunk.

So now hear the prayer rise out of this whole scene, simple as a child's longing under a great sky. The tradition's voice, which the sampradāya attributes to Śrīpāda Prabodhānanda, folds its hands and says: O Premamayi Rādhe, O You who are made of love, Your face is a spotless full moon, akalaṅka, the sixteen digits whole, ṣola kalā nidhi, without a single stain; and when I see the sweetness of it the moon in the sky seems to hang there for nothing, poor thing, vṛthā avasthiti, occupying its corner of heaven to no purpose at all. Every single day fresh moonbeams pour from Your enchanting nectar-filled face, and every day they make the shoreless ocean of Your own sweetness climb higher, ananta amṛta dhāre, endless streams of amṛta overflowing without cease. Govinda's cakora eyes can never have their fill of this nectar; they drink and drink and drink. And so the servant, naming himself only as one who serves, breathes the question that is the whole of this verse, the question that is itself a kind of worship: O moon-face, O candrānana, O cānda vadana, when, when will my own eyes at last be cooled by the sight of You, kobe juḍāibo ānkhi. When shall I see Your moon-like face, that rose out of the ocean of rasa? The asking is itself the longing; the longing is itself the love; and there is no answer the prayer wants except the day it names.