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One word beats like a pulse through this whole song: sāra. Essence. The teachers gloss it plainly, the most enjoyable part of a substance, the innermost, the precious remainder when everything that is not its heart has fallen away. Say it once and you hold a single jewel. But here the word is strung again and again until the thread itself becomes a necklace, a litany of essences, and at the very last it is clasped doubled and given back to us: sāra-sāra, the essence of the essence. The Hit stream titles the verse with exactly this aim, the seeking of the essence-of-all-substance, akhila-sāra-vastu, set to the gentle gait of the Vasanta-tilakā metre. O my heart, this is where you are being led. Past the rind to the fruit, past the fruit to the sweetness, past the sweetness to the single Name in which all sweetness is gathered and kept.

Take first Her loveliness, lāvaṇya, the quintessence of lustre. There is a beauty assembled feature by feature, and there is a beauty that pours, that flows over the limbs like light over water and was never built because it has no parts. That overflowing radiance is lāvaṇya, and the scriptures already strained to praise it in Kṛṣṇa Himself. The Bhāgavata calls His loveliness lāvaṇya-sāram asama-ūrdhvam ananya-siddham. Ask, is this lustre not in other forms of God as well, and the answer comes back asama-ūrdhvam, no lustre equal to His, none higher. Ask where then His lustre is sourced, and the answer is ananya-siddham, from no source other than Himself, self-perfect. And yet. Even that self-perfect splendour, the tradition whispers, finds its own quintessence in Rādhā; She is the empress of lāvaṇya, the one place where the radiance that needs no source goes to find its source. The tradition lets Kṛṣṇa Himself confess it: that the Creator gathered every spotless lovely thing the worlds contain and pressed them all together to fashion Her body, and that the rays streaming from Her limbs defeat even the splendour of mirrors cut from jewels. O Rādhe, O doe-eyed one, the comparison dissolves into the thing compared. The jewel held up to Your skin forgets it was ever a jewel.

Now Her flavour, Her rasa, for She is rasa-sāra-sukhaika-sāra, the one delicious happiness of the very essence of rasa. And who is that essence? Śrī Kṛṣṇa. The Upaniṣads sang of the Supreme, raso vai saḥ, "He is rasa," the relish of being itself, and Kṛṣṇa is precisely this, akhila-rasāmṛta-mūrti, the form of all nectarean flavours. The tradition cries mādhuryam eva nu, He is sweetness and nothing but, so sweet His sweetness steals the hearts of all that moves and all that does not, so sweet He enchants even Himself. Govinda is the quintessence of rasa. And what is then dared? That She is the quintessence of His happiness, the bliss of the One who is bliss. Picture it, O heart: Govinda who needs nothing tasting His own joy through Her, for the Lord whose form is bliss tastes that bliss, and to gladden and nourish His devotees the cause is hlādinī. The essence of rasa is camatkāra, astonishment, the gasp at what could not be foreseen, and Her love is the most astonishing rasa of all, that highest pitch the tradition names mādana-mahā-bhāva, love so total it stuns even the Beloved. She can be compared only to Herself, for with Her every attribute She gives delight to every sense of Kṛṣṇa. Stand the whole creation beside Her and the simile fails; She is, simply, the essence of bliss.

And She is the essence of compassion, kāruṇya-sāra. Pause here, O heart, for compassion is not a sweetness like the others; it is a melting. Rāmānujācārya fixes its meaning in his commentary on the Vedānta: dayā is svārtha-nirapekṣa para-duḥkhāsahiṣṇutā, the giving up of all self-interest and the sheer inability to bear another's pain. It cannot be felt toward dead matter, only toward living souls, and the soul, though by nature transcendental and luminous, lies under the full control of time, karma, māyā, and God. Compassion is the heart that cannot leave such a one suffering. And the most marvelous thing the tradition tells us is that even God, full and Self-satisfied, still loves to accept the service of His devotees, kindling in fortunate hearts the very longing to serve Him, His own heart melting with the wish to lift the conditioned. By what does He nourish them? Through His pleasure-potency, hlādinī dvārāya kore bhaktera poṣaṇa. And that pleasure-potency, O heart, is Rādhā. The greatest gift is love, and love is what She is and what She gives. The tradition sees this same compassion descend in this dark age as Gaura, golden, having taken on Her very lustre and mood, walking the earth to fling open the storehouse hidden in the nikuñjas of Vraja and pour out the buried treasure of rāgānugā-prema to all who would receive it. Compassion, then, is not a quality She holds; it is a thing She is, and She is its inmost essence.

And She is the essence of every sweet and lustrous form, madhura-cchavi-rūpa-sāra, where cchavi means colour, lustre, beauty. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes the word rūpa in the Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi: it is the natural beauty of one who looks as lovely unadorned as adorned, who shines ornamented even when bare. And the tradition lets Kṛṣṇa tease Her with it: the dark musk-pictures painted on Her brow merely repeat the dark of Her own curling locks, and just as a word needlessly repeated is a fault, a punar-ukti-doṣa, which the rasikas circle in red, so Her tumbling tresses circle the painted musk to mark that no further darkness was ever needed; the blue lotuses tucked at Her ears go pale and useless beside the deeper blue of Her eyes; the soft light of Her slight smile grinds the lustre of Her pearl necklace to powder. "O Rādhe," He laughs, "what is the use of all these decorations when Your own limbs already blaze?" This is Her abhirūpatā: Her radiance is so wonderful that every object brought to compare with it attains sārūpya, takes on Her very form, and disappears into it. And there is a second, sweeter meaning folded inside this one. Nothing in all the worlds is as sweet as love, and from Her lustrous form love is forever welling up and spilling over, so that whoever meets this form of Hers is blessed with prema with no further striving. This is the secret the tradition guards: Mahāprabhu descended carrying exactly this gift. Kṛṣṇa rises of His own accord within everyone who beholds the lustre Mahāprabhu had taken from Rādhā.

And She is the essence of cleverness, vaidagdhya-sāra, that quick artful grace in word and glance and gesture that makes every meeting shimmer. Even Kṛṣṇa, who is the teacher of all the arts, cannot swim across the ocean of Her artfulness. Rūpa Gosvāmī sings it, vaidagdhī-prathamācārya cāru-cāturya-carcitā, that She is the first teacher of cleverness, adorned with beautiful expertise; and the tradition unfolds it, that all the arts, dancing and song and the rest, flow first from Rādhā the primeval teacher, and are blessed because they are turned to His service. She is expert in every art of meeting with Kṛṣṇa: in the seeing and the speaking and the touching, in the playful stopping of the path, in the Rāsa dance and the watersports and the boat upon the river, in the game of dice, in the sipping of honey, in the feigned sleep and the tug at the garment, in the drinking of the nectar of His cherry-red lips, and in union itself. Her cleverness is no coldness; it is love grown so intelligent that the Beloved is forever delighted and forever outmatched.

And rati-keli-vilāsa-sāra, She is the essence of love's tender play, of all the amorous games and graceful enjoyments of the grove, the very heart of that sweet pleasure in which Govinda's own happiness is fulfilled. Then the necklace is closed and clasped: She who is named Rādhā is akhila-sāra-sāra, the essence of all essences, the essence of the essence. Govinda is the essence of everything, the life of life through His pastimes and forms and attributes and fortune and amorous play; He is the last word, the innermost heart of all that is. And She is the essence of Him. The Hit stream says it whole, naming Her the one sārāti-sāra-svarūpa, the essence-beyond-essence, the single tattva in whom every essence is gathered and kept. She is the life of the Life of all life, the sweetness of Sweetness itself, the rest at the center of the center. O my heart, this is why the prayer is so simple and so absolute: rādhābhidhe mama manaḥ astu, let my mind dwell in this jewel of all qualities whose name is Rādhā, and ever take its delight in Her. Not in many things, not even in the One thing, but in the essence of the One, in Her. Let it dwell there and never leave.