27

Begin with the heart itself, the seeker's own heart, turned and addressed in the dusk as if it were a dear companion sitting close. O sādhu cetaḥ, the tradition whispers, O saintly mind, here is the thing your whole long wandering has been for. Do not deliberate, do not first arrange your worthiness, do not wait until the grove is convenient. Drutam, quickly, take shelter. There is an urgency in this prayer, and it is not anxiety but love. It is the urgency of one who has tasted even a single drop and now cannot bear that the heart should stand one more instant outside the gate.

And the prayer is honest about where it comes from. Just before this, the tradition tells us, Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī had begged his most coveted Rādhā to shine forever in the casket of his heart like a shimmering jewel, and that prayer rose straight from his svarūpa, from his very form as Her maidservant; that is why it is so sweet. Jīva Gosvāmī marks the difference in the Durgama-saṅgamanī: a devotee whose bhāva has not yet awakened offers prayer, but a devotee whose bhāva has arisen offers prayer drenched in yearning. Prabodhānanda dwells in the kingdom of mahābhāva, and so even in his outward condition there is a deep twanging of his status as Rādhā's dāsī. For those who have relished even a little nectar in their sādhana, a want for Her opens in the heart; the pangs of separation begin; and Her form, Her qualities, Her pastimes, the very sound and touch of Her, come in meditation, in dream, in inner vision, lighting the heart with the lamp of hope. The nitya-siddha Gosvāmīs feel this separation most urgently of all, and the whole sweetness of this prayer is the sound of that urgency.

Why does he dare to call his own heart sādhu? Because a saintly heart is simply a heart fixed without distraction upon the beloved deity. Jīva Gosvāmī teaches that the sādhus are those who have flung away every cheating propensity, even the most respectable one, the desire for liberation: sādhubhiḥ projjhita-kaitavaḥ, free of all longing right up to mokṣa. And Prabodhānanda speaks here from his own healing, for he too was once a mukti-vādī, a seeker of liberation, until by the boundless grace of Mahāprabhu he was loosed from the grip of that witch and set his aim instead on the rasa of Vraja. So it is wholly fitting that he prods his rescued heart: be the sādhu you now are, and surrender. For surrender is the very life-force of devotion; where it is not firmly set, the Lord's lotus-feet cannot be served at all, and only by it is the soul released from the tangle of its anarthas. Jīva Gosvāmī numbers the two ways exclusive surrender ripens, in the Bhakti-sandarbha: by knowing no shelter but the feet that give fearlessness and deathlessness, and by giving up a shelter once mistakenly taken to cling instead to the Lord alone. Yet hear the secret turn the tradition adds: the maidservants of Śrī Rādhā are not content even to surrender to the Lord's own feet. They surrender exclusively to Rādhā's lotus-feet, and by that surrender alone they reach the topmost relish of all, the sweetness of His service tasted from within Her camp.

And to whom is the heart being run? To a Person, and Her name is the whole of it: Rādhā. Hear first that She is mañju-svabhāva, sweet and soft to the very root of Her nature, baṛā hī komal, the gentlest substance there is. Not sweet because the day went well, not sweet to the pleasing and cold to the rest. Sweetness is what She is made of. To Śyāmasundara She is sweet, and to Her sakhīs, and to the humblest maidservant carrying water through the bower, and, O wonder, to the whole stumbling world without first weighing who deserves it. How selfless is Her love for Govinda, and that selflessness is the measure of Her sweetness. Krishna Himself confesses in the Gītā that He stands equal to all beings, hating none and favouring none, yet controlled by the love of those who love Him; and He says plainly, ye yathā māṁ prapadyante, that He returns love in the exact measure it is given. But sweet-natured Rādhā does not weigh and return. She pours Her tenderness on those who have not yet learned to ask. And the tradition remembers that in this very age She has come down wearing Her own golden mood and complexion as Śrī Gaurāṅga, scattering prema upon the unasking like a rain-cloud that does not first inspect the field.

Then the second sweetness folded into Her: She is the kalpalatā-nikuñja, the bower thick with wish-fulfilling vines, presiding over it, seated within its hidden grove. A single wish-vine, the old texts say, is enough to grant every desire a soul could form. But Śrī Rādhā is not one such vine; She is a whole arbour of them, every creeper bending with fruit and flower for whoever steps beneath the shade, showering compassion on the surrendered without counting their merit. And the desires She satisfies first are Śyāmasundara's own; She is the wish-vine of His wishes, the fulfilment of the Fulfiller, the place where even Krishna's longing comes to rest.

And so the heart is told the third and most astonishing thing: vyañjantam adbhuta-kṛpā-rasa-puñjam eva, She reveals nothing but a wondrous, heaped-up abundance of the rasa of mercy. Consider how the Bhāgavata itself praises even Krishna in this measure: no one is dear to Him, no one His dearest friend, no one hateful or beneath His notice, yet He loves His devotees just as they love Him, like a wish-tree that grants men's desires only when they come to it. The tradition catches the marvel in it: an ordinary kalpadruma is not the servant of those who shelter under it, but the Lord makes Himself their servant, and gives not merely gifts but His very Self. Yet here the eyes are lifted higher still. If Krishna's mercy is already that vast, Śrī Rādhā's is greater, for She is prema-lakṣmī, the very treasury of love for Govinda, and what She bestows is the topmost gift of all, the capacity to love Him. Her compassion is no trickle doled out by desert; it is rasa in heaps, mercy grown so vast it overflows its own banks. The Gauḍīyas remember how, when this same Rādhā-mood descended as Gauracandra, His compassion rose like a golden cloud raining torrents of prema, hema-jalada-kāya prema-dhārā varisaya, and grew so mighty it overruled His own will. Kavi Karṇapura sets it in the Caitanya-candrodaya: though God's mercy is bound to His will, sometimes His compassion swells until His will becomes only its helper; and so, the Caritāmṛta sings, His mercy succeeded even where it was never aimed.

Now come to the great image that gathers all of this into one: premāmṛtāmbudhim agādham avādham etam, this deep, unbridled, shoreless ocean of the nectar of love. O Rādhe, You are an ocean, and the heart is told to fling itself in. But mark how this ocean differs from every sea the world has known. The salt oceans rise and fall, and one day they will dry; this love-ocean only swells, never losing a single drop, forever increasing Her own volume, and so She is called agādha, deep beyond any plumb-line the mind can drop. And the salt oceans hide crocodiles and sharks beneath their shimmer, lurking dangers that seize the swimmer; but in the nectar-ocean of Rādhā's love there is no such beast, no hidden hunger for private enjoyment, no shark of the craving for liberation waiting to drag the soul down. The water is pure shelter all the way through, and so She is avādha, unobstructed, unbridled, a sea with no menace in it but only love. She is the shelter of all the innumerable devotees of Krishna, and into such water the heart may safely throw itself entire.

And then the tradition tilts the whole verse to a second light and says: rādhābhidha is also Her holy Name. O saintly mind, take shelter of the Name of Rādhā. For the Name too is mañju-svabhāva, sweet to its very root, and Śrī Rādhā has descended bodily into the syllables of Her own Name, for nāma is precisely that which makes the named one descend, namayatīti nāma. Whoever shelters sincerely in this Name calls Her down to stand before him. And the Name never sets aside its merciful nature: anyone who has once let that sweet sound, Rādhā, cross his lips can never afterward give it up, for the thirst for its nectar only deepens with every utterance. This Name too is a grove of wish-vines, and it fulfils even the wishes of Krishna, for the Brahma-vaivarta Purāṇa tells how, the moment Mādhava merely speaks the syllable rā, He blooms with joy, and the moment He hears the syllable dhā, He runs headlong, breathless, after the one who spoke it. So Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī taught the thirsting tongue to drink the fresh, delicious wine of Rādhā's name and the amazingly sweet condensed milk of Krishna's, cooled with the fragrant ice of pure love, and to drink only that at every moment. And whoever takes full shelter of Her Name will surely attain Her most cherished service in the bowers of Vraja. O heart, this is the shelter. Do not delay. Run to Her, to Her ocean, to Her Name, and stay.