201
Verse 201 of 270
कदा गायं गायं मधुरमधुरित्य मधुभिदश्चरित्राणि । स्फरमृतरसविचित्राणि बहुशः । मृजन्ति तद्विलासगृहमनभिरामं मलयजच्छटाभिः । सिञ्चन्ति रसह्रदनिमग्नः स्मि भविष्ये ॥
kadā gāyaṁ gāyaṁ madhura-madhuritya madhubhid-aś-caritrāṇi spharāmṛta-rasa-vicitrāṇi bahuśaḥ mṛjanti tad-vilāsa-gṛham abhirāmaṁ malayaja-cchaṭābhiḥ siñcanti rasa-hradanimagnaḥ smi bhaviṣye
Plain rendering
When will I, singing over and over in the sweetest of sweet ways of Madhusūdana's wondrous, endless deeds that brim thick with the nectar of love, sweep clean His lovely bower of play and sprinkle it again and again with cool sandal-scented water, and so go under, drowned at last in the ocean of pure rasa? That is the one desire of my heart.
The tender, hidden joy of the servant of love, madhurya in its dāsya form: the sweetness of singing and tending the Divine Couple's intimate bower, never of being the beloved oneself.
The inner meaning
Begin with a single name, for the whole sweetness of this verse hangs upon it. O seeker, hear how She calls Him: Madhubhid. Read it the grand way, the way of majesty, and it parts as madhu bhinantīti madhubhit, He who broke the demon Madhu, the slayer who cuts down what is dark. That is the aiśvarya reading, true and noble. But there is a sweeter way to hear the same name, a way that belongs to Vraja and to a bower at the close of love. Let madhu become honey, and let bhit become not the slayer but the bee, the one who breaks the honey loose from the flower. Now the Lord is no warrior. Now He is the rasika bhramara, the relishing bumblebee, who has come to the blossom of Rādhā's lips and drunk and drunk by kissing Her, until He is wholly drunk Himself. Ecstasy itself has fainted of ecstasy. The killer of demons has melted down into a tipsy honeybee, and power, once again, has dissolved into honey.
Picture it now, the hour the verse is born in. The love-play is finished. The tired Couple has risen and gone out to sit on the terrace of the kuñja, to let the cool breeze pass over Them. And into the emptied bower the maidservant slips, broom in hand, sandal-water ready. See what She sees. The floor is a wreck of sweetness: garlands snapped and flung about, the bed of flowers kicked apart, loose pearls scattered where a necklace broke in the play, chewed betel and used unguents lying here and there. To another it would be only a mess to clear. To her it is the very record of Their love, every scattered pearl a syllable of what just happened here, and her heart leaps to tend it.
So she begins. She mṛjantī, she sweeps; she siñcantī, she sprinkles, drawing the cool sandal-luster, the malayaja-cchaṭā, across the floor in shining streaks. And as her hands move she cannot keep silent. She sings, loudly and in a wonderfully sweet voice, madhura-madhurītya, sweeter than sweet, and the songs are her own, homemade, unrehearsed, poured up out of love. She sings the caritrāṇi of Madhubhid, His deeds that are sphārāmṛta-rasa-vicitrāṇi, wonderful with a great swelling abundance of nectar-rasa, endless, says the Hit rendering, ananta, ghanībhūta, thick and condensed with the nectar of love until there is no thinning it. For no subject under the sky is as sweet as the Vraja-pastimes of Kṛṣṇa with Rādhā, soaked through with the nectar of transcendental love.
And hear what her little songs say. She sings how Hari's peacock-feather crown came rolling down to lie at Rādhā's lotus-feet when He bent to soothe Her pique, His pride laid in the dust before Her displeasure. She sings how sweetly Rādhā and Mādhava met, how He drank the honey of Her lips and grew drunk upon it, the very intoxication folded into His sweeter name. This is why She named Him bee at all: She is singing the bee's own drunkenness even as She sweeps the floor where it happened.
And the singing is not lost on the breeze. O wonder: out on the terrace the Couple hears, and goosebumps of ecstasy rise along Rādhā's skin and along Mādhava's, and They turn and glance at each other, the old desire freshly kindled by the maidservant's voice. So her service feeds the very love it serves. And she, singing these sweet songs, sweeping this kuñja, gazing upon the sweet forms of the Yugala Kiśora, goes under: rasa-hrada-nimagnā, drowned in a pool of rasa, which is the whole of her longing and the whole of her reward.
The tradition does not leave this as a scene only to admire from outside. It hands the broom to you. O seeker, you too should sweep this kuñja in your mind, sprinkle it, tend it, sing within it; and when that remembrance grows deep and steady, the self-manifest beauty of the bower rises of its own accord before the mind's eye, a beauty that can then be tasted simply through hearing and chanting. And so the old longing of the heart is gathered up and given a voice, in the cry the tradition sets in the mouth of Śrī Prabodhānanda himself: Śrī Madhusūdana's pastimes are very sweet, and when they extend they become a very flood of nectar-rasa; when shall I glorify those wonderful deeds with lovely tunes, when shall I sweep the cottage in the playgrove and sprinkle it with sandal-scented water, when shall I thus, always, drown in a pool of rasa? This, He says, this is the desire in my heart.
The two traditions
Both streams hold this verse as a maidservant's first-person longing to serve in the bower, sung as an unbroken ache, and both keep the plain, earthly picture of sweeping the floor, sprinkling sandal-scented water, and singing of Kṛṣṇa's deeds until she drowns in rasa. The Gauḍīya reading, in the Ananta Dāsa Bābājī lineage, lingers tenderly on the name Madhubhid, unfolding both its majestic sense, the slayer of the Madhu-demon, and its sweeter Vraja sense, the honey-drunk bee at Rādhā's lips; it furnishes the full scene of the disordered kuñja and the songs of the rolling crown and the soothed pique, and then turns the whole into a practice, bidding the sādhaka sweep this bower in the mind until its self-manifest beauty appears. The Rādhāvallabha Hindi bhāvānuvāda of Swami Śrī Hitdas ji, under the heading Sevā-bhāvanā, the mood of service, keeps the same shape and the same cry, naming Him Madhusūdana and pressing His deeds as ghanībhūta and ananta, thick and endless with nectar-rasa, asking with the same clean ache when she will drown in the ocean of rasa while singing and tending and sprinkling His lovely bower. The two run close here: the Gauḍīya gives the fuller word-by-word meditation, the Hit rendering gives the bare, heartfelt cry.
For the seeker
O seeker, weigh carefully what this heart actually asks for. She does not beg to be near the Couple, nor to be seen by Them, nor to be loved. She begs for the chores. She wants to sweep Their room. She wants to splash sandal-water across the floor. She wants to sing while she works. The whole of her prayer is for labor, humble and unwatched, done so full of joy that she forgets herself in the doing. Sit with that a moment, for it overturns our usual order: the reward she pleads for is the work itself.
Let the verse, then, teach you the sequence of things. First comes the wish to serve. The sweetness arrives afterward, on its own, as a gift folded inside the serving; she does not chase the lake of rasa, she picks up the broom and sings, and finds herself already underwater. This is why the masters hand you the broom too. Sweep this bower in your mind, day after day, until the remembrance deepens and the kuñja's own beauty stands up before you unbidden, tasted simply by hearing and singing of it. The practice is not to imagine your way into the love; it is to serve your way into the remembrance.
And keep the safeguard close, for it guards the whole approach. The room being swept is the very chamber where the Divine Couple have just been together, and the signs of that love lie scattered all around. This is not ordinary romance, and it is not ours to picture for our own thrill. Come to it the way She comes: not into the story to be loved, but beside it, to serve the love of Another, quietly and with care. This intimate rasa is approached as a servant approaches, to be served and never grabbed. The mood opens only to a heart that has put itself last.
Grounded in Gauḍīya commentary (Ananta Dāsa Bābājī lineage); Rādhāvallabha edition: Hindi bhāvānuvāda by Swami Śrī Hitdas ji, Hit Sāhitya Prakāśan.
Draft. Opened by the editorial council and grounded in the traditional commentaries, pending final review and a scholarly check of the Sanskrit text.