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Picture the great forest of Vṛndāvana at the hour of play, and into it walks an elephant in rut, the king of all elephants, dark and immense and drunk on his own strength, the kind of creature no chain holds and no driver tames. This is how Śrīpāda sees Kṛṣṇa here: kalabhendra mada-kalaḥ, the mad lord of elephants, the strongest one, the one upon whom the worlds are strung, swaying through the bowers in the fullness of His power. And then, O seeker, watch what binds him. Not a chain. Not an army. One girl lifts Her eyes the smallest fraction, a single playful sidelong glance just beginning to open, sphurad-vilasita-kaṭākṣa, and the great elephant stops. He is bound. Vandī-kṛtaḥ: taken captive. Jaḍībhūtaḥ: stilled, stupefied, gone soft and obedient, standing like a krīḍā-mṛga, Her toy-animal, Her pet, ready to do whatever Her slightest order, ājñā-lava, might ask of him. The mightiest one in all creation has become a creature that waits on the turn of Her brow.

This is no small picture, and Śrīpāda does not let us mistake it for a small picture. He is still inside the vision he has been carrying, still gazing on the sweet Pair at Their sweet pastimes in the sweet arbours of sweet Vṛndāvana, and out of that gazing he sees, with his own inward eye, just how powerful the least movement of Śrīmatī's glance truly is. Why can a fraction of it do what nothing else can? Because that glance is colored through and through by the highest love there is, mādana mahā-bhāva, the topmost reach of love that lives in Rādhā alone. So when even a sliver of that love looks out through Her eyes, it carries the full weight of the deepest love in existence, and that is why it holds the one who holds everything.

And so that we never imagine some lesser charm could do the same, the tradition sets before us a scene from the Śrīmad Bhāgavata, in the tenth canto, where it is told of the Queens of Dvārakā. Sixteen thousand one hundred and eight queens, each one lovely beyond telling, turned upon the Lord every art the eyes know: the most intimate glances, the most enchanting play of the eyebrows, looks that work like Cupid's finest mantras and arrows, the very best weapons of love. The verse sings it, smāyāvaloka-lava-darśita-bhāva-hāri, that even with all of these the patnyas tu ṣoḍaśa-sahasram could not, with all Cupid's arrows, agitate the Lord's mind or stir His senses even a little. The Vaiṣṇava Toṣaṇī draws out why this is set down: when Śrī Śuka Muni told of the Rāsa-līlā he showed how the goddesses of Vraja, the gopīs, fully controlled Kṛṣṇa by their supreme and utterly pure love; and here, by contrast, the Queens of Dvārakā with every amorous means at their command could not enchant Him at all. The lesson is unmistakable. It is not beauty, not skill, not the whole armory of allurement that binds Him. It is only prema, pure and selfless, wanting nothing for itself. The love of Vraja stands above every other love, and the gopīs' hold over Him proves it.

And within that Vraja love, hers is the highest. Rādhā's mādana mahā-bhāva is, as Śrīpāda says, like a powerful goad in the hand of a mahout, the goad that can drive this maddened elephant wherever She wishes him to go. Raghunātha dāsa Gosvāmī fixes the same wonder in the Vilāpa-Kusumāñjali, in his forty-second prayer, when he cries out to Her eyes: yat-prānta-deśa-lava-leśa-vighūrṇitena, that with even the slightest blink from the very corners of Your eyes You instantly tie down tightly the king of elephants, Kṛṣṇa; and then his longing breaks open, tat khañjarīta-jayi netra-yugaṁ kadāyam, "when, oh when, will this poor person worship those two eyes of Yours, those eyes that defeat the very fickleness of the wagtail bird, by anointing them with kajjala, with eyeliner?" There it is, the whole secret turned right side up: He who is sought by millions of sages and mystics, whose mere audience they pursue through meditation and austerity age after age, is now Himself eager to carry out the least order of this one cowherd girl, and counts Himself blessed, deeply blessed, simply to be allowed into Her service.

O Rādhe, this is who You are: the one half-turn of whose eyes lays the mad elephant of Vṛndāvana down at Your feet. And so the prayer at the close rises naturally from such a sight. Śithilayatu sādhāraṇa-gatim: may She slacken our ordinary course, our ordinary moods. Śrīpāda is asking that every other consciousness fall loose and drop away, that he be made to forget all of it but one thing only, mañjarī-bhāva, the mood of Her surrendered maidservants, the small glad ones who stand at the hem of Her garment and wait, like the elephant, on Her slightest wish. To be bound to Her, after all, is to be most free. The strongest one in Vraja learned it first. The servant longs only to learn it after Him.