39

Begin with the longing, O reader, because before this verse is a teaching it is a cry. Picture a heart that has weighed every prize a soul might ask for and quietly set them all aside. Not liberation. Not the throne of Brahmā. Not the four arms of Vaikuṇṭha. Not even nearness to Kṛṣṇa by some shorter, grander road. One thing only, and that one thing asked again and again across an unbroken chain of lifetimes: to be Hers. Kaiṅkaryam eva, service only, eva, only; mama janmani janmani syāt, let it be mine birth after birth. The Hindi tradition names the verse outright an abhilāṣā, a longing, and that is exactly what it is, a vow renewed every time it is breathed.

See Her first as She is sung here: tasyāḥ paraṁ rasa-vilāsa-mūrteḥ, apāra rasa-sāra-vilāsa-mūrteḥ. She is the very form, the embodiment, of the play of the essence of unlimited rasa. And what is that essence, that taste behind every taste the soul has ever reached toward? The Vedas whisper raso vai saḥ, He is taste itself, and surely all the forms of God carry much sweetness. Yet Śrī Kṛṣṇa above all is named akhila-rasāmṛta-mūrti, the very form of all transcendental rasas, and Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it so in the opening of the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu. He is rasikendra-mauli, the crown upon the head of all relishers, the king of those who savor; and no relationship He keeps is as tasty as His secret, unsanctioned love with the gopīs of Vraja. Who, then, can the essence of unlimited rasa be but Kṛṣṇa, and what is She but the vilāsa-mūrti, the form His delight takes when it leans out and plays? O Rādhe, You are the shape His joy puts on when it falls in love.

And let your heart go soft at what this play does to Him. He is ananda-kanda, the root and source of all bliss; the Upaniṣads say ānandam brahma, ānandam brahmaṇo rūpam, that God is bliss and bliss is His very form; the Bhāgavata calls Him paramānanda pūrṇaṁ brahma sanātanam, the friend of the Vrajavāsīs who is the pinnacle of joy, the full eternal Brahman; and the Laghu-Bhāgavatāmṛta names Him svayaṁ-rūpa, the original form that depends on no other: ananyāpekṣi yad rūpam. And yet, for love of You, this source of all bliss hides. Govinda, who is truth itself and need fear nothing in all the worlds, crouches in a corner of Your courtyard, heart pounding, because old Jaṭilā might be near. He waits in the bowerhouse and watches the road, and every dry leaf that drifts from the trees is, for one trembling instant, You arriving. Truth personified will put on disguises only to come near You: a yogī, a pleasure-seeker, a barber-girl, a tax-collector at the riverbank, a snake-charmer with his flute, "for Your sake I become all of these." Full knowledge Himself, He mistakes a golden vine, a kanaka-latā, for Your body, and embraces it; overwhelmed by that mere creeper's touch Mādhava faints, pierced by Cupid's arrows, murmuring Your name. This, beloved, is what vilāsa-mūrti means: not a philosopher's abstraction, but the source of all bliss forgetting He is the source of all bliss, trembling and disguising and fainting, for the sake of one tender girl of Barsānā.

And She is ānanda-kanda paramādbhuta saumya lakṣmī, the most wondrous and gentle goddess of fortune for that very ananda-kanda. She is His Lakṣmī, His fortune, the wealth of His most wondrous sukha as the Hindi tells it. But mark the word saumya, gentle, and let it correct everything you thought you knew of fortune. The majestic Lakṣmī of Vaikuṇṭha upon her lotus is famed as cancalā, restless, ever in motion, never quite settling. But Vraja's fortune is not restless. Prema-lakṣmī Śrī Rādhikā, the goddess of fortune made of love itself, is saumya: gentle, steady, sweet, unmoving in Her tenderness. She does not flit. She abides. The fortune of Kṛṣṇa is not a flickering grace that comes and goes; it is the settled, gentle, wondrous sweetness of Rādhā, who stays.

Now lift your eyes to the third line and feel how far above the heads of the great this sweetness rises: brahmādi-durgama-gateḥ. Her path is durgama, hard to enter, impassable even to Brahmā and the gods who lead the worlds. Hear how the tradition tells it, and let it humble you and thrill you at once. Brahmā, who sits at the head of creation, could not so much as understand Kṛṣṇa's paugaṇḍa-līlā, the boyhood years of tending the cows and sharing picnics on the bank of the Yamunā with the cowherd boys. It baffled him so completely that he stole away the calves and the boys to test what he could not comprehend, and the Bhāgavata keeps the whole offense in its tenth canto. If the simple sweetness of the cow-pastures was already beyond Brahmā, what then of the kiśora-līlā, the adolescent love with the gopīs, and beyond even that, the intimate nikuñja-vihāra, the secret bower-play with Rādhārāṇī Herself? It is not merely hard. It is sealed; the lock has no key that awe can turn.

And here the tradition gives the reason, and the reason is the whole secret of Vraja. Sanātana Gosvāmī sets it down in the Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta, where Śrī Nārada teaches Gopa Kumāra who is fit to enter Vraja's mellows: those who see Kṛṣṇa as the Supreme Lord and so approach Him always with bhaya and gaurava, with fear and reverence and the weight of His majesty pressing on them, can never enter the loving moods of Vraja; but those who see Him as a laukika sad-bandhu, a dear and ordinary friend of everyday life, reach the perfection of Vraja-prema. Though the love of the Vraja people looks worldly, it is in truth wholly transcendental, lokottara, beyond the world even while it wears the world's familiar clothes, and it is the great treasure of the very greatest souls. Awe cannot enter where intimacy lives. The reverence that builds temples cannot walk into the kuñja. And the highest love of all within Vraja is not even the lover's own; it is the love of Rādhikā's girlfriends and maidservants, who serve the loving of the Divine Couple and ask nothing for themselves. That, precisely that, is what is durgama to Brahmā and Śiva and all the lords of the worlds.

So now you understand what is being asked, and why it is the only worthy thing to ask. The tradition's own song carries it: Vrajendra-kumāra, the prince of Vraja, is the essence of unlimited relish, and Rādhārāṇī is the form of His pastimes, the root of the tree of topmost bliss, the wondrous cintāmaṇi-gem of rasa; the bliss of Rādhikā's service, Her forms and qualities and pastimes, lies utterly inaccessible to Brahmā and other reverential devotees, and so, birth after birth, the heart prays to the tender daughter of Mahārāja Vṛṣabhānu, "my mistress, Śrī Rādhā." Knowing that this realm is sealed to Brahmā, knowing that majesty itself is turned away at the threshold, the heart does not reach for majesty. It reaches lower, which in Vraja is higher. It does not ask to be Kṛṣṇa. It does not ask to embrace Rādhā. It asks to be Her kiṅkarī, Her handmaid: "Being Rādhā's maidservant I will go to the secret kuñja and serve Her lotus feet." To slip into the nibhṛta-nikuñja and tend Her feet, to fan Her, to string Her garlands, to carry the message, to watch the Couple meet and weep with joy at a love that is not the servant's own and is therefore wholly the servant's own. Kaiṅkaryam eva, service only, eva, only, with no other reward smuggled in behind the asking.

And then the tender close: mama janmani janmani syāt. Let it be mine, birth after birth. Not once. Not as a final escape from birth. Through life after life after life, let this be the single thread that runs unbroken: that I am Hers, that I serve Her feet, that I belong to the tender daughter of Vṛṣabhānu, Śrī-Vṛṣabhānu-nandinī. And the tradition seals the longing with a cry to Kṛṣṇa Himself, the moon over Barsānā's sky: he bhānukula-canda, O Moon of Vṛṣabhānu's dynasty of love, please fulfill this one desire. Let the servant of Your beloved never be anything but the servant of Your beloved, world without end.