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Begin in the kuñja, deep in the green hush of Vṛndāvana, where the leaves close overhead like cupped hands and every road of the world dissolves at the threshold of the bower. Here Śrī-Śrī Rādhā and Śrī Mādhava are met, and They are making love in this lovely grove, and there is no third thing anywhere, no errand, no yesterday, no afternoon waiting beyond the vines. There is only the Two of Them, and even the Two are folded into one warmth. Picture how close They lean, how the breath of one becomes the breath of the other, how Her glance and His glance have nowhere left to travel because each has already arrived. Aho. To stand even at the edge of such a grove is the whole of fortune.

Now watch what happens at the smallest threat of distance. Not separation itself, O Rādhe, only its semblance, only its shadow, only the merest flicker of a thought that the beloved might for an instant be elsewhere. The word is ābhāsa: not parting, only the look-alike of parting, the bare appearance of it, lasting less than a moment. And at that flicker the body cannot bear it. The limbs loosen, the frame goes faint, the strength drains away as a flower wilts the instant it is lifted from water. Less than the closing of an eyelid, and already the suffering rises. This is the measure of Their love: that what would be nothing to us, a hair's breadth, a fraction of a fraction of a moment, is to Them an unbearable wound, and no earthly word can describe it.

And how does that wound feel within Them? The tradition reaches for the kalpāgni, the fire that swallows the worlds at the close of an age, and then it multiplies that fire by millions, koṭi upon koṭi of blazing dissolutions, and then it confesses that even this falls short. Bāhyam abhyantaram: the blaze runs without and within, through skin and through marrow, across the surface of the body and through the secret chambers of the heart, so that there is no cool place left anywhere in Them to flee to. The fire that ends the universe is a single candle beside it. Such is the cost, and the glory, of loving with nothing whatever held back.

Why should the merest shadow of parting be so terrible? Because They are grathita, knotted, bound to each other with a tight cord of sneha. Rūpa Gosvāmī sets the meaning down in the Ujjvala Nīlamaṇi, that when prema climbs to its very pinnacle it begins to kindle a lamp upon the beloved, illuminating that transcendental object of love, and it melts the heart, and once this sneha has arisen the lover is never, never satisfied, however much the beloved is seen, however much the beloved is touched. The eyes thirst on for more seeing; the hands thirst on for more touching. There is no full cup here, no enough, no resting place where longing lies down satisfied. And Rādhā's sneha is the sweetest of all. For She holds the madīyatā toward Kṛṣṇa, the attitude that sings within Her without ceasing, You are Mine, You are Mine, and this most elevated feeling Rūpa Gosvāmī names madhu-sneha, the honey-affection: sweet of itself, a gathering of many transcendental flavors into one, warm and intoxicating, and above all gāḍha, firm, a knot that only draws tighter the more it is pulled.

The tradition turns the word for Their binding, anubandha, over and over in its hands the way a lover turns a beloved's gift, and finds in it meaning after meaning, all of them true here at once. First it means attachment: that They cannot get enough of each other's form and quality and nature, and the wanting only grows. And the tradition remembers Vidyāpati, who let Rādhā pour out what Mādhava is to Her, that He is the mirror in Her hand, the flower in Her hair, the dark line of kohl drawn around Her eyes, the betel upon Her lips, the musk at Her breast, the necklace at Her throat, the all-in-all of Her body and the very best thing in Her house. You are the life of My life, She says, as the bird must have its wings, as the fish must have its water. And when She asks, trembling, O Mādhava, what then am I to You, the answer Vidyāpati gives is the only answer love can give: the Two of Them belong wholly to each other. Two blossoms strung upon one thread.

But anubandha holds more than attachment. It means abhiniveśa, absorption, that deep drowning in the līlā-rasa of Their play from which no one wishes to surface, and here too the heart is unsatiated, thirsty for love, and no one in all creation carries this divine thirst as Rādhā and Mādhava do. It means bandhana, the sweet bondage each is to the other. It means āgraha, eagerness, the leaning-forward of the heart. It means paripāṭi, the practiced art, the expertise of lovers who know each other so wholly that loving has become its own perfected craft. Heap every one of these together and you have the cord that binds Rāi and Kānu in the arbor: firm and genuine, full of wonder and skill and hunger, tying Them as two flowers are tied upon the single string of love.

So fierce is this nearness that when They are united They will not suffer even sandal-paste upon the skin, nor a garland at the breast, for the cool smear of the candana and the woven blossoms would interpose the thinnest film between body and body, and even that They cannot endure. The tradition recalls the old songs, Vidyāpati's cīra candana ure hāra na delā and Jñāna dāsa's hiyāya hiyāya, that no garland be laid on the breast, no sandal smeared on the limbs, lest anything at all stand in the way of touch meeting touch; heart wishes to lie against heart with nothing between. This is the same unbearable hunger Śuka Muni records in the Bhāgavata, that when the gopīs first beheld the dark beloved they cursed the Creator for setting eyelashes upon their eyes, those tiny shutters that fall for an instant and rob Him from sight even while He stands before them. A single blink felt like theft. And what is a flicker of an eyelid to the gopīs, who even in their secret meeting with Kṛṣṇa taste a thread of separation, becomes in Śrī Rādhā, lifted to its very crown, the towering mādanākhya mahā-bhāva, the love that has climbed past every height there is.

These Two, then, the cleverest lovers of all the three worlds, tribhuvane vidagdha, the ever-sweet abodes of rasa, are prema-mūrti: love that has put on a body and a name. They do not merely love; They are love, met in a grove, knotted in honey, blazing at the very breath of parting, drinking each other endlessly and never once filled. In the Bengali songs the tradition sings Them as the two jewels Rāi-Kānu bound in deep sneha in the prema-kuñja, as Pramodinī Rādhā and Pītavāsa Dāmodara burning inside and out at a moment's supposed parting like the fire at the end of the age. And of these Two the tradition, through Śrīpāda Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī, lifts up its great jewelled verses and sings: that sweet twin effulgence known here in this world by the name Śrī Rādhā-Mādhava, I know to be the supreme sweetness, the param madhuram dhāma beyond which nothing sweeter is. The Rādhāvallabha singers name this very state viraha-śūnya ekātma-bhāva, the single-souled oneness in which separation has been emptied out entirely; and they too marvel, what a wonder it is that mere bodily parting for a single moment should appear to Their mind and body as crores of dissolution-fires ablaze, and so they too take this wondrous prema-mūrti named Śrī Rādhā-Mādhava as their own supremely sweet refuge in the world. Aho. To merely glimpse this Couple is the whole of fortune.