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Picture it. The jewelled temple of Vraja stands bright, and at its heart, ringed by Her sakhīs like a crown set upon a circle of girlfriends, stands Rāi, the golden one. Kṛṣṇa walks by with His cowherd friends, the whole of Vraja watching Him as it always watches Him, and in that one unguarded instant His eyes fall upon Her sweetness, and the crown-jewel of all lovers, the threefold-bending Nāgara of Vṛndāvana, goes still. His tribhaṅga form, that beautiful bent posture, freezes where it stands, motionless with prema. This is the secret the maidservant is permitted to see, and she sees it now.

Hear what He says inside Himself, for the words are His own. "These two effulgent globes upon Her breast, round as twin orbs of light, covered only by a thin scarf, how sweet, how maddening. The mere sight of them maddens My heart. And if this is what the sight alone does, what further result will come of it I cannot say." He counts His own ruin and cannot reach its bottom: kiṁ phalaty anyad agre, what else lies ahead. "I am here among My friends, every Vrajavāsī is looking at Me, and in the very same breath Her sweetness undoes Me. What will come of this, I do not know."

And then the deeper dread, for the worst has not even begun. "Still She has not fitted the sharp arrows of Her glances upon the great bow of Her eyebrows. She has not yet taken aim, not yet drawn, not yet loosed. When She does pierce My heart with that flood of glance-arrows, prāṇān hanyāt, when they strike My very life, what will become of Me thereafter I do not know." The bow is unbent still; the arrows rest in the quiver of Her grace; and even so, only by the sweetness already standing before Him, the all-powerful is brought to confess that He cannot guess His own fate.

This is the marvel the tradition holds out, and it titles it the power of Rādhā's sweetness. Kṛṣṇa, whose form is transcendental, whom no force in the worlds can shake, can be controlled by one thing only, by pure love. And since Śrī Rādhikā holds the very highest love for Him, She holds Him the most. The strong one is the one who is moved. There is a small turn of words the old teachers cherish here, mādayatīti mādanaḥ: that which maddens is mādana, and the extraordinary force of Rādhikā's mādana mahā-bhāva can madden even Kṛṣṇa, who is Himself the transcendental youthful Cupid of Vṛndāvana. The maddener of all the worlds stands maddened before Her.

And mark the tenderest gloss of all, the one small word that turns a weapon into an offering. Her glances are called sat kaṭākṣa, true glances, and the teachers say the sat here means pure love, love wholly free of any wish for one's own pleasure. Śrī Rādhikā does not aim those arrows to wound for Her own gain; She casts them at Kṛṣṇa simply to increase His joy. So even the arrow that strikes His prāṇa is, at its root, a pure act of giving. The piercing is a gift. The wound is sweetness poured out for His sake alone.

And how does the maidservant come to overhear so private a confession of the Lord? Only by grace. Śrīpāda, in his kiṅkarī-form, keeps close to Rādhārāṇī, and watching Her he sees first how sweet She looks when Kṛṣṇa passes by, and then, turning, he sees how agitated Kṛṣṇa becomes before Her sweetness. By Svāminī's grace the maidservant is shown even this, that Kṛṣṇa stands stunned at the sight of Her; for nothing remains hidden from the one who has attained Śrīmatī's favor. It is the tradition that Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī, in whose heart the sweet words and the loving eagerness of the Nāgara became manifest, set these very pastimes down in his verses, so that we who come after might stand a little behind the maidservant and watch.