269

Begin at the very end of a long pilgrimage. Śrīpāda has walked through hundreds of verses, building bower after bower of praise, naming Her splendor, Her sweetness, Her play, and now he sets down his pen at the last threshold and turns the whole book back toward Her face. O Śrī Rādhe, he breathes, sad-vaibhave, You whose true opulence the śrutis hunt for and cannot seize, whom the budhāḥ, the wise ones, chase down every road of their learning and lose, whom even Bhagavān Himself goes searching after. Hear that carefully. Not Her ornaments, not Her bower, but Her very glory outruns the Vedas, outruns the sages, outruns the Lord's own knowing.

And what is this vaibhava, this opulence that no one can compass? The Gauḍīya teachers lay the secret bare: prema is the real wealth. Love itself is the greatest opulence, for it is by love, and by nothing else, that a soul may relish Kṛṣṇa's sweetness to the very utmost. The one who loves most owns the most. And who has ever loved as Rādhā loves? So She is the richest being in all the worlds, sad-vaibhave indeed, and Her riches are simply the bottomless love in Her own breast. This is why the searching never ends. The Vedas and the Upaniṣads, the wise men, even Kṛṣṇa Himself, lean toward Her glory and cannot reach its floor. Only those who walk in the footsteps of the sakhīs and the mañjarīs, the close handmaidens of Her bower, are given so much as a glimpse of Her. To everyone else She remains the unfound treasure. The tradition fixes it in the Caitanya-caritāmṛta with a line that closes every mouth: kṛṣṇa yāra anta nā pāy jīva kon chāra, even Kṛṣṇa cannot find the limit of Her glories, so what of an insignificant little soul?

Set that against what he does next, and you feel the floor drop. He has just poured out an entire stotram for Her, and now he calls himself unfit to have written a word. Sahaja-ayogya, naturally unqualified; sadā-aparādhinī, a constant offender; one who has gone against mahat-mārga, the great true path of the saints. Hear his own cry. O Rādhe, how shameless an infidel like me was to try to describe glories that Nārada and Śuka and Sanaka could not describe. I have only heaped offenses at Your lotus feet by writing these verses. What destination is left for one who has offended so?

Then the gentle quarrel folded inside the prayer steps into the open. Someone comes forward and objects: Śrīpāda, why this despair? In the old ages, yes, the sages and the scriptures searched for Her glories in vain. But now, in the age of Kali, those very glories are spilling into the open by the grace of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu. You said so yourself; you preached it in your own Caitanya-candrāmṛta. How then can you stand here and call yourself an opposer of the true path? And he answers, and his answer turns the objection into deeper surrender: even so, I am completely unqualified. That same Rādhā whom I have glorified, She is the one who made the glorifying possible, by Her grace alone. The skill was never mine. The words were never mine. So my prayer is not for reward; my prayer is only this, that She be satisfied with verses an unfit man composed by no power but Her own.

And here the bower opens. For Śrī Rādhikā is a shoreless ocean of compassion, and when this weeping reaches Her She can no longer keep to Her hiding. She comes. The tradition sees Her stand before Her servant with tears of Her own welling and spilling from Her affectionate eyes, sneha-jala-ākula-akṣī, eyes wet and trembling with love, and She asks softly, Why do you cry so anxiously for Me? And he answers from the dust: O Rādhe, O You whose anguished eyes brim over with tears of tenderness, I sit here with no hope but Your coming. I know no one else but You, not in waking, not in dream, not in dreamless sleep. I want nothing but Your satisfaction. Give one drop, only one drop, of Your indescribable mercy to this poor maidservant of Yours. His voice breaks in his throat, kim api prītim, some love beyond all words, prasādī kuru, grant it as Your own grace, and he rolls in the dust before Śrīmatī's lotus feet. You are my one and only hope, tvad-eka-āśe, and that is where the whole poem comes to rest: a servant face-down in the dust, asking not to possess Her but only to please Her.