251
Verse 251 of 270
चकोरास्ते वक्त्रामृतकिरणबिम्बे मधुकरास्तव श्रीपादाब्जे जगनपुलिनेषु खञ्जनवराः स्फुरन्मीनो जाता त्वयि रससरस्यां मधुपतेः सुखातव्यं राधे त्वयि च हरिनस्तस्य नयनम्
cakorās te vaktrāmṛta-kiraṇa-bimbe madhukarās tava śrī-pādābje jaghana-pulineṣu khañjana-varāḥ sphuran-mīno jātās tvayi rasa-sarasyāṁ madhupateḥ sukhātavyaṁ rādhe tvayi ca harinas tasya nayanam
Plain rendering
O Rādhe, look at what His eyes have become. To the moon of Your face they are cakora birds, the birds that live on moonlight; to Your lotus feet they are bees drunk on the honey there; on the shore of Your hips they are the finest wagtails, never holding still; in the lake of Your love they are quivering fish; in the forest of Your delight they are wandering deer. Kṛṣṇa's two eyes have multiplied into five glad creatures, and every one of them lives on You alone.
The mood is mādhurya, sweet love, savoured from the side of the one whose only wish is to gaze and to feed his eyes on the Beloved.
The inner meaning
Begin with the moment just past. Kṛṣṇa has been dressing Her. With His own hands He has wound Śrīmatī's braid, He has hung the small lalāṭikā at Her forehead, He has drawn the line of vermilion down the part of Her hair. And now He steps back to behold the sweetness of the form He has adorned. O wonder: if He is already enchanted by Her when She wears no ornament at all, who can measure how happy Hari grows now, beholding Rādhikā fully decorated? His eyes cannot hold still and cannot have enough. And the maidservant standing near is given the grace to watch what happens next: she sees how many shapes His unsatiated eyes assume, each one born only to relish one part of Śrīmatī's beauty.
See the first. His eyes become cakora-birds, and they drink the nectar that pours from the moon of Her face. When the moon rises every creature rejoices, but the cakora's joy is of another order, beyond all comparison, for the cakora lives on moonlight and nothing else. So Rūpa Gosvāmī's lineage fixes the picture in the Govinda-Līlāmṛta, that the Creator fashioned Rādhikā's wonderful, unprecedented, full moon-like face for one purpose alone: to please Hari's cakora-eyes. And into that moon he set the dark marks of Her own deer-like eyes, and bound those two restless deer fast with the ropes of Her ears. One moon, made to feed the gaze of the Beloved.
See the second. His eyes become thirsty bees that settle on the honey of Her lotus-feet, and they cling there, strongly attached, refusing to leave that taste. And because Hari so relishes that savour, the tradition will not even let the comparison to a lotus stand. The Govinda-Līlāmṛta plays it out tenderly: the red lotus, kokanada, is named for the way the koka, the cakravāka, wails its grief at night; the lotus called nalinī is named padma, yet padma carries a stain, for pada is mere position and mala is dirt; the petal pales beside the luster of Her soles. With all these faults heaped upon the flowers, how could any lotus be set beside Rādhā's feet? Her feet have no fault at all, and so they stand beyond every likeness.
See the third. His eyes become the finest of wagtails, khañjana birds, frisking and dancing along the shore, the slope of Her hips and the soft rise of Her buttocks. As restless as the flicking tails of those small birds, His eyes too will not be stilled while they take in that beauty; they dart and return, dart and return, and never settle.
See the fourth. His eyes become fish, quivering and alive, and they swim in pure bliss through the lake of Her rasa. And the lineage names that water plainly: it is the rasa of Her mādanākhya mahā-bhāva, Her supreme love, the very mood that is shaping every transcendental limb of Her body. Where else could the fish of Kṛṣṇa's eyes go to swim in joy? There is no other lake. The Rādhāvallabha singers keep the same picture and call this water Her kuṇḍikā, Her own small pool of rasa, and let His eyes dart through it as restless fish.
See the fifth. His eyes become deer, hariṇa, and they wander loose through the forest of Her delight, grazing in topmost bliss with nowhere else they wish to go. The Hit stream lets that forest be Her very body, śrī-vapu, a whole blissful woodland of Her form through which His deer-eyes roam. For the beauty of Rādhikā's form is the one nectar His mind and His eyes will take as food. He fashioned all the worlds, the eye that watches over everything that is; and here that same eye has shrunk itself down to five small glad creatures, content to live off Her sweetness alone. And when the lineage reaches for one last measure of Her, it finds none: kṛṣṇendriyāhlādi guṇair udārā śrī rādhikā rājati rādhikeva, that in delighting every one of Kṛṣṇa's senses, Śrī Rādhikā can be likened only to Śrī Rādhikā Herself.
The two traditions
Here, for once, both streams sing the same scene together. The Gauḍīya reading, leaning on the Govinda-Līlāmṛta, takes each of the five creatures as a window onto Kṛṣṇa's unappeasable hunger to behold Rādhā: His eyes as cakora to Her moon-face, as bees at Her feet, as wagtails at Her hips, as fish in the lake of Her rasa which it names as Her mādanākhya mahā-bhāva, and as deer in the forest of Her delight, so that the gaze becomes not mere admiration but immersion in who She is. The Rādhāvallabha tradition gives us its own gloss on this verse, gathering it under the heading paraspara-prema-āsakti, the mutual love-attachment of the Couple, naming its śikhariṇī meter, and addressing Rādhā directly as it lets Madhupati Śrī Lālajī's eyes become the cakora of Her face-moon, the bees of Her feet, the best wagtails of Her hips, the restless fish of Her own pool of rasa, and the deer of the blissful forest that is Her very body. True to the Hit stream's leaning, it rests in the sweetness and union of the Divine Couple themselves, with Rādhā foremost, dwelling on the loveliness of the moment more than on its theology, while the Gauḍīya voice unfolds the supporting verses and names the supreme love behind the lake.
For the seeker
Sit with one image at a time, O seeker. Let the eye of your own mind become a single cakora that lives on one moonlight, or one bee fixed on one sweetness, and rest there. Watch the way that eye watches: it is not grabbing, not measuring, not hungry to possess. It is only drinking in the beauty set before it, and that drinking is its own whole happiness. The eye that holds the world has become content to hold one face. There is a teaching hidden in that smallness: when our attention scatters into a hundred little hungers, we can borrow this verse and ask for one hunger instead.
These pictures are tender, and they are bodily, and that is on purpose; the sweetness is meant to be felt and not flinched from. Yet this love is not ordinary romance, and it is not yours to step into and seize. You come to it as the maidservant who is given the grace to watch and to serve, the one who hands Kṛṣṇa the vermilion and sets the lalāṭikā right. The clean and proper wish is small: let me help this joy come to pass, let me arrange Her braid and Her flowers, not let me have what He has. This intimate love is approached as a servant. It is to be served, never grabbed.
So make the maidservant's prayer your own. Do not try to be either lover in this bower; only ask to stand near enough to tend it. Let your gaze learn the cakora's single-pointedness and the bee's faithful clinging, and turn that gaze toward serving the love of the Divine Couple, with Rādhā foremost. To serve their sweetness, and not to take it, is the whole of the seeker's part.
Grounded in Gauḍīya commentary (Ananta Dāsa Bābājī lineage); Govinda-Līlāmṛta 11.92, 11.52, 11.118 (as cited in the Gauḍīya commentary); Rādhāvallabha (Hit) Hindi commentary on RRSN 251.
Draft. Opened by the editorial council and grounded in the traditional commentaries, pending final review and a scholarly check of the Sanskrit text.