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Begin on the bank of the Kālindī, where the water keeps its dark blue stillness and the bowers lean low with bloom. Step in among the leaves. Something is shining here, O seeker, and the heart that sees it cannot find a name for it. Kim api: indescribable, a "something" too full to be folded into language. It is not a person who happens to be loved very much. It is rasa, the nectar of love itself, puñjībhūta, heaped and gathered and condensed, the whole formless ocean of prema poured into one place until it could no longer stay formless. And so, as the Gauḍīya teachers of the Ananta Dāsa Bābājī lineage say so tenderly, it is as if the boundless abundance of prema-rasa simply took on a body and stood up as the princess of Vṣabhānu. Love decided to walk, and Her walking is called Rādhā.

She is adbhuta-keli-nidhāna, the storehouse of wonderful pastimes. Mark how this is no list of accomplishments set beside Her. The pastimes are not something She does in spare moments; they pour out of Her the way light pours out of a flame, endlessly, niravadhi, without edge or floor or end. She does not run dry. The nectar in Her never empties, and She shines, ullasati, glowing on Her own riverbank, rejoicing on Her own ground.

Now enter the scene the way the old teachers enter it, through the eyes of a maidservant. Śrīpāda, in his kinkarī-svarūpa, sits on the bank of the Yamunā in the soft tension of hope, anxiously waiting for a chance to serve. Then all at once Vṛndāvana floods with a golden aura, and the servant rises in a rush of joy: Śrī Rādhikā has come down to the bank to meet Her beloved. Look how She moves. Every limb of Svāminī is playing on the waves of the longing to meet Him as She slips into the trysting-bower. The servant follows Her in, and there, close now, sees what these words have been pointing to all along: She is the very form of a vast, unspeakable abundance of nectarean rasa. The kim api has a face, and the face is Hers.

Sure in Her heart that Her beloved will come, Śrīmatī sets joyfully to decorating the trysting-kuñja, and the maidservant does the one thing she is given to do: she hands over the soft flowers and the tender sprouts, one by one, into Rādhā's hands. And as Rādhā remembers the artful, rasika pastimes She has played with Her Nāgara, wonderful flower-like bhāvas, ecstatic emotions, erupt all over Her vine-like body, blossom after blossom opening along the creeper. Watching this, the servant understands at last: this is the keli-nidhāna, the reservoir of love-play made visible before her eyes.

And here is the note the tradition will not let us miss, the note these words end upon. Rādhā can give Her Nāgara a delight He could not have dreamed for Himself, a sweetness even He did not know to want; and in the giving She tastes a happiness that never stops renewing. That is niravadhi rādhābhidhānam ullasati: the One named Rādhā, ever rejoicing, ever overflowing, because Her joy is the joy of pouring joy into Him.

How, then, does Śrīpāda beg his way toward such a treasure? He begs as a beggar at evening. The tradition sets Vidyāpati's old song beside these words, yatane yoteko dhana, pāpa baṭoraloṅ, where Vidyāpati pleads with Śrī Kṣṇa: if a beggar comes to a householder's door in the evening and is sent away empty, shame falls on the householder; and I, O Lord, am a beggar at Your door in the very evening of my life, begging only for Your grace; if You let me down, shame will come upon Your own name, Dayāmaya, the Benign One. This is the posture before the storehouse, O seeker: not the hand that seizes, but the hand held out, trusting the Benign One not to disgrace His own mercy.