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Picture the end of a long garland-stringing. Verse after verse the singer has bent over the same bloom, and now, at the last knot, he does not reach for a new word. He reaches for one word and lays it down again and again like a jeweller emptying a velvet tray: nidhi, treasure; nidhi, treasure; nidhi, jewel upon jewel until the whole verse is a casket of them. This is no poverty of speech. It is a confession that Rādhā cannot be told, only counted, and that even the counting runs out before She does.

The tradition, through Prabodhānanda, the rasika jeweller who has strung this whole Sudhā-Nidhi, reads the stacking as a quiet teaching. The world boasts of nine famous jewels: kumuda, padma, mahā-padma, śaṅkha, makara, kacchapa, mukunda, ānanda, nīlā. Set against the kingdom of love, every one of them is a stone. Karṇapūra fixes it in his opening to the Caitanya-candrodaya: "nidhiṣu kumuda-padma-śaṅkha-mukhyeṣv arucikaro nava-bhakti-candra-kāntaiḥ": once the nine jewels of devotion shine in the heart, hearing, chanting, remembering and the rest, the soul loses all taste for the kumuda and the padma and the conch of worldly fortune. And devotion, when it ripens, becomes prema; and prema, when it deepens, becomes mahā-bhāva; and mahā-bhāva is not a state Rādhā enters. It is what She is made of. So when a single drop of these nine nectar-jewels of Her love touches the tongue, every other treasure, of earth and even of heaven, turns to gravel. This is why the verse can afford to be so lavish: it is spending out of an inexhaustible vault.

Begin, then, with the first jewel: śuddha-prema-vilāsa-vaibhava-nidhi, the treasure of the very prowess of pure, playful love. Pure means unbought. This love asks nothing back; it has no thought tucked inside it for itself; it bends in one direction only, toward Kṛṣṇa's happiness. And here the tradition says something tender and bold: even among the gopīs, whose love is the purest the worlds have ever seen, Hers is purer still, and so She is gopītamā, the greatest of them all, a whole mine packed with jewels of selfless love. The mañjarī, the maidservant standing just out of the lamplight, sees this with her own eyes whenever Rādhā and Śyāma play.

Now the jewels that draw Him. She is kaiśora-śobhā-nidhi, the treasure of adolescent radiance, that first bloom of youth that never fades in Vraja. The tradition even defines the word: "sā śobhā rūpa-bhogādyair yat syād aṅga-vibhūṣaṇam," that beauty which adorns the body through form and the sweetness of enjoyment, that is śobhā; and the śobhā that streams from mahā-bhāva is what Kṛṣṇa cannot turn from. Listen to Him confess it in the Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi, where He tells Subala of only a friend of Hers: "When Viśākhā steps from the vine-cottage at dawn, her eyes still twirling with sleep, her reddish bud-like fingers curled round a Nīpa branch, her half-loosened braid slipping down her shoulder, My heart is caught in her beauty and will not come back out." If a friend's morning can so undo Him, what of Rādhā Herself, who is the reservoir from which all such śobhā pours.

She is vaidagdhī-nidhi, the treasure of cleverness, and the tradition is careful: this is no mere wit but mastery, expertise in every art and in the very performing of the līlā. "Kalā-vilāsa-digdhātmā vidagdha iti kīrtyate," says the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu: the one whose whole self is steeped, dyed through, in the arts and their play, that one is called vidagdha; and the maidservant tastes this only when she stands on the Yugala's playground, the līlā-bhūmi where the two are at their game. She is madhurāṅga-bhaṅgima-nidhi, the treasure of the sweet bend and sway of Her limbs, the small turn of a wrist, the tilt of the throat, gestures that can enchant even Śyāmasundara mid-play. And as the maidservant watches a stream of liquid luster gush from Her every limb, she names Her lāvaṇya-sampan-nidhi, the treasure of the whole wealth of elegance, beauty poured out like melted moonlight.

Then the verse goes deeper than form. She is mahā-rasa-nidhi, the treasure of great rasa, and the reason is staggering: Kṛṣṇa Himself, rasikendra-mauli, the crest-jewel of all who relish sweetness, counts Himself blessed, fortunate, lucky, to be allowed to taste the sweetness of Her love. She is kandarpa-līlā-nidhi, the treasure of love's own play, and again the maidservant gives the reason she has seen: in the contest of love, śṛṅgāra-rasa-rāja Śrī Kṛṣṇa, the very king of eros, is defeated by His Svāminī. Cupid loses to Her. She is saundaryaika-sudhā-nidhi, the single, sole nectar-ocean of all beauty, for the tide of Her loveliness only rises higher when Śyāma is near.

And now the last knot, the largest claim the garland can hold. She is madhupateḥ sarvasva-bhūto nidhiḥ: the treasure that is the entire all-in-all of Madhupati, Kṛṣṇa the lord of bees. Rādhā is not one jewel among the many a king might own. She is His everything. The whole long poem has called Him a bee drunk on honey, circling, thirsting, never sated; and here, at the close, the honey is named outright. He is the bee; She is the all He cannot stop drinking. The mañjarī knows exactly how the Kṛṣṇa-bee thirsts for loving play with her Svāminī, and she knows that in Her, all nine jewels of pure selfless love are gathered for Him alone. And so does Prabodhānanda, the jeweller who strung this whole treasury, know how dear to Madhupati these jewels are. The poem cannot end with a definition. It ends with a shout: śrī-rādhāṁ jayatām. All glory to Śrī Rādhā. May She forever win.