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Hear the shape of it first: four vows, and a single word stitched through all four like a golden thread, sadā, always. Always sing. Always tell. Always stay. Always meditate. And inside each vow a word is doubled, gāyaṁ gāyaṁ, sthāyaṁ sthāyaṁ, dhyāyaṁ dhyāyaṁ, singing and singing, staying and staying, meditating and meditating, because a heart that has once tasted this cannot do the thing only once. The taste does not wear thin. It comes nava, fresh, every single round, so there is no last verse to the song, no final hour in the bower, no closing of the eyes that finishes the meditation. The repetition is not a poet padding his lines; it is the helpless overflow of a heart that has found what it will never finish loving.

Begin with the first vow. Always singing, over and over, the madhuratara, the sweeter-than-sweet, the beloved glories of Śrī Rādhā. Not glories admired from a distance, but priya-yaśaḥ, the dear praises, sung the way you would sing the name of the one your whole life turns toward. And then the second: always speaking the sāndrānanda, the densely blissful, the ever-fresh and taste-bestowing stories, rasada, of Rādhā's own Lord, of the love that is theirs alone. These are kathā that give new rasa each time they are told, so the tongue never tires and the ear never has its fill.

And where is all this sung and told? In the third vow: always abiding, staying and staying, in the nava-nibhṛta-rādhā-rati-vane, the ever-new, secret, solitary love-forest of Śrī Rādhā. The Rādhāvallabha rendering opens that forest for us by name: the nava-nibhṛta keli-kuñja-kānana, the fresh secret play-bower-grove, and it lets us hear the voice that is speaking. It is a woman's voice, a first-person longing from inside the kuñja itself: while I abide here in Rādhā's secret new grove, while I sing again and again the dear glories of Rādhā and the stories of Her Lord, while I meditate forever on the nectar of Rādhā's feet, when, oh when, shall I become helpless of heart? The whole verse, in that reading, is one long ache of when.

Then the fourth vow, set last and set lowest on purpose: meditating and meditating until the heart is vivaśa, overwhelmed, helpless, undone, upon the rādhā-pada-sudhā, the nectar that flows from Śrī Rādhā's feet. Last, because the feet are the servant's place; lowest, because the servant asks for nothing higher; and therefore highest of all, because the heart that goes down there to the dust of Her feet is the heart that loses its own grip and is carried.

The Gauḍīya tradition titles this the exclusive worship of Śrī Rādhā, and reads the verse as the moment Śrīpāda returns to sādhakāveśa, to the practitioner's own external consciousness, and makes his vow: to live in Rādhikā's sweet playground, Vraja. This is no small thing. Śrīla Rūpa Gosvāmī numbers dwelling in Vraja among the five chief limbs of rāgānugā devotion. And the tradition teaches the seeker to hold it in two hands at once. Inwardly, conceive your own siddha-deha, your true awakened spiritual form, serving the divine Couple in the cinmaya Vraja, the conscious eternal land, day and night without pause. Outwardly, as far as you possibly can, come to live in the earthly reflection of that land, for even its touch ripens love. An offenseless soul, the old teachers say, attains prema simply by touching this sacred ground. The Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa fixes it: parānanda-mayī siddhir mathurā-sparśa-mātrataḥ, simply by touching Mathurā one gains the perfection that is the very pinnacle of bliss; and Śrī Jīva Gosvāmī, glossing it, tells us what that supreme bliss is, parānandamayī prema-lakṣaṇā, the highest bliss is the bliss of prema itself. And if your body cannot be there, then let your mind live there, ceaselessly.

How fiercely the tradition holds this can be heard in Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī's own astonishing vow in the Vṛndāvana-Mahimāmṛta: I would rather live in Vṛndāvana as a worm than wear a transcendental body anywhere else; rather be the poorest beggar in Vṛndāvana than command unlimited wealth elsewhere; rather dwell in Vraja doing no bhajana at all than go away, even out of greed for the bliss of worshiping the lotus feet of the lover of the gopīs. So the seeker forgets the material body and all that clings to it, comes to live in Vraja in the awakened siddha-deha, and sings Rādhikā's glories in ecstasy, and in this way, the tradition promises, he will surely win Her mercy.

And the last line, the Gauḍīya teachers hear as a question the way the Hit voice does: when will I be overwhelmed by ecstasy, always meditating on the nectarean feet of Śrī Rādhikā? This meditation is no vague reverie. Śrī Jīva Gosvāmī marks it precisely in the Bhakti Sandarbha, viśeṣato rūpādi cintanaṁ dhyānam, that the stage called dhyāna is the specific remembering of the beloved's forms, qualities and pastimes. To want this always, sadā dhyāyaṁ dhyāyaṁ, is to ask for the fourth stage, dhruvānusmṛti, unbroken remembrance; and past even that lies samādhi, full absorption. All of this is already natural and native to Śrīpāda. He owns it. And still he prays for it as though he were a beginner stumbling at the gate, which is the whole tenderness of the verse: the perfected one begs to be fixed in bhajana like the least of seekers, so that the longing itself will never go cold.