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Begin not with the river but with the heart that looks at it. Śrīpāda stands at the bank and turns his gaze inward, and what he finds there shames him. "Alas," he sighs, "my mind is so thick with ordinary wants that it cannot even hold the tender, secret pastimes of Rādhā and Mādhava. How shall I wash a heart like this? How shall it ever grow fit to remember such sweetness?" Notice that the prayer is born here, in honest failure. He does not pretend to be ready. He confesses that he is not.

And then he remembers the water in front of him. This is not any river. Picture Rādhā at play in these waters, absorbed in jala-krīḍā, the games of splashing and laughter, and as She plays the kuṅkuma, the saffron-vermilion smeared upon Her pitcher-like breasts, kuca-kalaśa, loosens and melts and runs into the current. The Yamunā grows cloudy with it. And that clouding is her glory, for the vermilion she now carries is no cosmetic stain: it is atula-prema-rasada, the bestower of a love whose taste has no equal. The water that looks merely muddied is in truth thickened with the highest love in all the worlds.

Why does Rādhā's breast-saffron carry such power? The tradition fixes it in Śrīmad Bhāgavata, the very book it calls the ripe essence of Vedānta, at 10.21.17. There the Pulindī women, the outcaste forest girls, are called fulfilled, pūrṇāḥ. Tormented by longing at the sight of Kṛṣṇa, they find the vermilion that had been pressed upon His beloved's breasts and then transferred to His feet and to the blades of Vṛndāvana's grass, and they smear it upon their own faces and breasts, and their agony of desire is stilled at once. Even the gopīs, hearing this, lament that these lowly girls are more fortunate than they, for the outcastes had touched that saffron while the gopīs themselves had not yet received it. Such is the medicine the river now holds.

And who is the "beloved" whose breast bore that saffron? Following Śrī Jīva Gosvāmī, the tradition reads the single dayitā of the verse, marked out by the very word Śrī, as Śrī Rādhā and no one else. Jīva gathers his witnesses into a garland: the Matsya Purāṇa, that "in Dvārakā Rukmiṇī is the chief consort, and in Vṛndāvana Rādhā is", rukmiṇī dvāravatyāṁ tu rādhā vṛndāvane vane; the Brahma Saṁhitā, that in Vraja the consorts are Śrī and the gallant is the Supreme Male; and the Bṛhad Gautamīya Tantra, which lifts Her highest of all: devī kṛṣṇamayī proktā rādhikā para devatā: the supreme goddess is Rādhikā, fully absorbed in Kṛṣṇa, in whom all the goddesses of fortune reside, the supremely enchanting consort. And lest one think other Lakṣmīs might rival Her in Vraja, the wives of Kāliya themselves confess in the Bhāgavata, kasyānubhāvo'sya na deva vidmahe (10.16.36), that they cannot fathom how to attain Him there. So the saffron in the Yamunā is the very dust of Her, the chief of all, in whom every sweetness pools.

A tender riddle waits here, and the tradition does not flinch from it. The Pulindī verse stands at chapter twenty-one; the Rāsa dance, the first open meeting of Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs, comes only at chapter thirty-three. How then did any gopī's breast-vermilion reach His feet before the Rāsa had even begun? Śrī Jīva answers with a līlā of aching beauty. One day Rādhā, hearing the flute, swooned away, and the gopīs could not bring Her back. In desperation they ran to Paurnamāsī in her straw hut, and the elder told them the one and only cure: the touch of Kṛṣṇa's sprout-soft feet upon Her breast. Kṛṣṇa came and set His lotus-feet upon Her perspiring, vermilion-marked breasts, and Rādhā revived; and then, shy, He ran away, and as He fled the saffron clinging to His soles printed itself on the grass of Vṛndāvana. That is how the kuṅkum reached His feet, and the feet the grass, and the grass the longing forest girls, long before the night of the Rāsa.

So Śrīpāda's whole prayer comes round. "When I bathe in this purified water," he says, "this water colored like a freshly opened blue lotus, vikasita-nava-indīvara, this water thickened with the rasa-bestowing saffron washed from Rādhikā's breasts, then my mind, soiled with every kind of material desire, will be made clean, and swiftly, swiftly it will grow qualified to meditate upon the most confidential pastimes of Rādhikā and Mādhava. O Kālindī, daughter of the sun, bless me only in this way." The old devotional songs take up the cry: that no one in the three worlds is so fortunate as Yamunā Devī, in whose blue-lotus waters Rādhikā's brilliant breast-vermilion is washed; that this saffron gives away an incomparable treasure of prema-rasa in free charity; and that the daughter of the sun is begged to illuminate the heart with her own native glory. The tradition sets the seal: Śrīpāda Prabodhānanda gladdens devotees' hearts with these sweet prayers, and the servant who treasures this jewel holds it close and longs only for vrajavāsa, to dwell forever in Vraja.