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Begin where the eyes betray you. Walk the lanes of this dhāma and you will pass beings the world has already sorted and shelved: this one cruel, that one a thief, this one ruined by greed, that one whom the careful and the pious would cross the path to avoid, would neither look upon nor exchange a word with. And the voice of this verse, rather than turning its face, stops before each of them, folds its hands, and says: you are most worthy of my worship. It is the most startling reverence in the whole garland, and it is no sentimental excess. It is a teaching about the very ground you are standing on.

For there is nothing dull, nothing merely material, anywhere in Vṛndāvana. Not one clod of earth, not one creeping thing, not one face however coarse. The tradition is unbending here: any devotee who does not hold this faith is certain to stumble into offense, and offense alone is enough to throw him off the path of rāgānugā bhakti while his feet still tread the holy dust. So the seeming sinner the eyes report is not the being who is there. Look "vastutayā," look at what actually is, and the real form rises: sad-yogīndra-sudṛśya, beautiful as the true kings of mystics; sāndra-rasad-ānandaika-sanmūrti, a single embodiment of dense, taste-giving bliss. This is the meeting Vṛndāvana stages, O wonder of wonders, the gathering of all the moving and the unmoving in the divine cintāmaṇi realm, every one of them a great soul whose mere sight delights the eyes.

Prabodhānanda, the tradition holds, would not let you take this on his word alone, so he opens his own Vṛndāvana-Mahimāmṛta and sets the warning before you twice. In the seventeenth canto he writes that as long as you do not see that every creature dwelling in Vṛndāvana wears a blissful transcendental form, you will not reach the supreme goal, though your body may already have entered the abode. Presence is not arrival. And then the sweeter half of the same breath: the very moment a man honestly sees all the moving and unmoving residents of Vṛndāvana as endowed with delicious transcendental forms, in that moment he attains rādhā-priya-sevi-rūpa, the form of Rādhā's own beloved maidservant. See the dhāma truly and you are given a place at Her side; this is the wage of the cleansed eye.

But whose eye can do this? Not the calculating one. "aprākṛta vastu nahe prākṛta gocara," the Caitanya-caritāmṛta says: a transcendental thing simply does not fall within the reach of the material gaze. So when this verse names the one who sees, it names a sat-yogīndra, and the tradition glosses him precisely: a bhakti-yogī, a soul saturated with God-consciousness. The karmī cannot see it; the jñānī cannot; the master of the eightfold yoga, for all his stilled breath, cannot. The Lord Himself settles the ranking, for the tradition fixes it in the Bhagavad-Gītā, in the forty-seventh verse of the sixth chapter, that of all yogīs the one who worships Him with faith, his innermost self poured toward Him, is "yuktatamo mataḥ," held by the Lord to be the highest yogī of all. It is that yogī, and that yogī alone, the offenseless lover, who looks at what the world calls a cruel sinner and beholds instead a great king of mystics shining in a sweet, blissful body.

And how fierce the guard around this seeing. The tradition presses it through Prabodhānanda's own thunder in the same canto: O brother, though the residents of Vṛndāvana be attached to stealing another man's wife or his wealth, though they do violence to the whole world in a hundred ways, though greed has unstrung their very wits, still you must not disregard them as common sinners. The man who does, who looks at the splendor of Vṛndāvana's people and sees only filth, is "divāndha," blind by day, an owl who cannot bear the rays of the rising sun and so denies the dawn. The fault is never in the dawn. It is in the night-bound eye. And the sweet Bengali songs gathered into the same praise sing it once more: every one of them, even the cruel ones, carries a particularly divine, wonderful, bliss-soaked form; every one of them is "vandanīya sarva-kṣaṇa," worthy of homage in every instant; and whoever hates them works only his own ruin, sarva-nāśa, the undoing of his whole self.

So the verse closes upon a vow, and the tradition lets Prabodhānanda speak it in his own name: let all these people of Vraja be parama-svārādhya to me, most worthy of my worship, even those a noble man would not look upon, even those he would not touch. The Rādhāvallabha telling, when it renders the same śloka into Hindi, does not deviate by a hair: those whose company is with wondrous, glory-filled, sweet Vṛndāvana, be they cruel, sinful, unfit for the sight or speech of the good, are yet beautiful to the gaze of the lords of yogīs, dense givers of rasa, the one embodiment of bliss; seeing them in their real form, the heart bows them in as supremely worshipable. Two streams, one confession: in this land, O seeker, the lowest you can find is higher than your highest praise.