46

Picture it. The pastimes have run their course and a hush has settled over the kuñja. The leaves have stopped their whispering. The two who play in the heart of Vṛndāvana rest now, and a fine dew of fatigue glistens on Their limbs like crushed pearls scattered over twilight and dawn. By Śrīmatī's own grace the vision is given, and into this stillness a servant slips, small and silent, in her kiṅkarī-form, the form of one who lives only to tend Them. She lifts the fan. She moves the cool air across Their bodies to dry the tender sweat-drops of Their play. She holds ready the cool water, the folded betel-leaf. She asks nothing. She watches, and serves, and her watching becomes our window.

And what she sees undoes her. Śrī Rādhā is seated upon Śyāma's lap, aṅka-sthitā, fixed upon the lap of Her dayita, Her dearest. There is no space between Them. His arm is around Her; Her form rests against the form She loves more than Her own breath. By every reckoning of this world, this is the fulfillment of all longing. The Beloved is here. He is held. He is touched. The aching is over.

And yet, akasmāt, suddenly, from nowhere, from the very depth of love itself, a cry breaks out of Her: "Hā Mohana! O Enchanter, where have You gone?" She begins to lament as one made mad. She embraces the chest of Her Prāṇanātha, the Lord of Her very breath, and from Her trembling mouth pour the sweetest, most useless words: "O Śyāma! O Jewel of all qualities! O Mohana, where are You? O Madana-Mohana, where?" She searches for Him while Her cheek lies against His. She weeps for the absent One who is at this very moment holding Her close.

O wonder beyond all wonders. Do you see what love has done? This is no forgetting of a dull or scattered mind. This is prema raised to its most secret peak, the mood the tradition, through Śrīla Rūpa Gosvāmī, names prema-vaicittya, the bewilderment of love that feels separation in the very arms of the Beloved. For prema itself, the masters say, is this: to forget everything in the absorption of thinking on the beloved. As a poor man who has suddenly regained his long-lost wealth can no longer turn his mind from it, so the heart steeped in prema can never once forget the beloved deity it has beheld. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes the very definition of this rarest mood in the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi, in the Śṛṅgāra-bheda, that when by the sheer excess of love one feels separation from the priya even in his presence, that is called prema-vaicittya. And the broken, useless speech that pours from such a heart, Rūpa Gosvāmī names pralāpa, vyarthālāpa pralāpa syāt: meaningless talk is pralāpa, and this cry of Hers is exactly that, a sweet senseless babbling, the most precious sound in all the worlds.

How can nearness give birth to longing? Hear how Viśvanātha Cakravartī unfolds it for the dull of heart. Prema-vaicittya, he says, is the very limit of eager loving desire, the desire that makes the long-familiar Beloved seem as though never once beheld. He gives homely pictures so that we might catch a glint of it. There is the brāhmaṇa, accustomed to eating his fill, who feels he has eaten nothing at all though he has eaten much; so the anurāgī devotee feels he has never tasted Kṛṣṇa's sweetness, though he has tasted it a thousand times. There is the one burning with cholera who has drunk his belly full of water and still cries, "Water! Water!" There is the cloth worn so thin that the rent in it grows too fine for the needle to pass through twice. So it is with a heart soaked in anurāga: its intelligence grows so subtle, so impossibly refined, that it can no longer hold Kṛṣṇa and the sweetness of Kṛṣṇa at once. When She drinks in His person, the thousand-fold sweetness of His attributes slips beyond Her grasp; when She drowns in that sweetness, the One who wears it seems to vanish. "Here is my lover, adorned with every grace," She thinks, and the next instant, "Ah, where now is this unlimitedly lovely One of mine?" And the whole of Her turns into a single anxious searching, while He stands, while He sits, in Her own embrace, unseen.

And what does the most clever Enchanter do, the most tender of all consolers? He does not laugh at Her. He gathers this jewel of His, this girl whose every limb is overpowered by love for Śyāma, and He lovingly soothes Her, and the soothing only deepens the sweetness, for it is His nearness that quickens Her longing, and Her longing that quickens His nearness, and round and round the rasa wheels with no rim and no end.

Linger on the words the verse has set down. Mada-vihvala, it says, overwhelmed by intoxication: and mada, Rūpa Gosvāmī teaches in the Bhakti-Rasāmṛta-Sindhu, is viveka-hara ullāsa, the bliss that steals away one's power of discrimination, the rapture that takes the ground from under reason. She is drunk, then, not on any wine of this world but on śyāmānurāga, the unbroken, ever-fresh love for Śyāma itself, and that drunkenness is so total that the very lover before Her eyes dissolves into the longing for the lover. She is called mohanāṅgī, the girl whose limbs themselves enchant. And She is called Śyāmā, and the tradition tells us why: a Śyāmā is the heroine who is warm through the cold of winter and cool through the heat of summer, whose face breathes the fragrance of lotuses. Among all such Śyāmā-girls She is the maṇi, the one jewel, the śyāmā-maṇi, and the verse will not even name Her outright but calls Her kāpi, "some indescribable one," for no name can hold Her.

Mark this most astonishing teaching of the Gosvāmīs, for it overturns everything the world believes about love. They hold that separation from Kṛṣṇa is a stranger and a greater ecstasy than meeting with Him; this is why they dare to call prema-vaicittya itself a rasa, a flavor to be relished, the very crown of love. Even the queens of Dvārakā knew its touch, the Śrīmad Bhāgavata sings it of them. But the prema-vaicittya of Śrī Rādhā, who is the very form and fountain of mahā-bhāva, towers immeasurably above all. Hers is the love that aches in fulfillment, that thirsts in the drinking, that searches in the finding, and in that endless searching She becomes most fully Herself. And let it be remembered: by surrendering at Her lotus-feet, Govinda is of Himself attained, for the friend of Govinda is won through Her shelter alone.

So the servant fans Them and weeps for joy at what she serves. And the vision drips on, drop by luminous drop, into hearts made ready to receive it. Jaya, she sings, jaya to the nikuñja-rānī, the queen of the bowers, the mohanāṅgī, the jewel of the Śyāmā-girls with enchanting limbs. Jaya to the ratna that is Her very mood, this prema-vaicittya, this bewilderment of love. Jaya to the moon of King Vṛṣabhānu's house. Glory, glory to Śrī Rādhā's Beloved, to Rādhā-ramaṇa. And here, on the very border of the secret kuñja, the śyāmā-maṇi shines supremely, unmatched, unconquered, victorious, the hidden jewel of Vṛndāvana. In this way the spiritual vision drips on.