5

The full-moon night of spring has come, the vāsantī pūrṇimā, and the round white disc lifts over Vṛndāvana, and Krishna raises His eyes to it. Something in that glowing face turns His heart, for it carries to Him another face: the face of Shri Radha, lit from within. He cannot bear the remembering. In great secrecy He comes down to Vṛndāvana, sets His flute to His lips, and lets the enchanting song go out to draw the hearts and minds of the gopīs. And they come, and Radha comes, and on the broad sandbank of the Yamunā they meet Vaṁśīdhārī, the flute-holder, and the Rāsa begins upon the river's bank.

For a while there is only the wheeling dance, Hari embracing this one, kissing that one, gladdening another, His glance the prize each is given. But She who is the inmost treasure of the dance grows quietly proud, and a sweet jealousy stirs in Her, and Radha steps away from the circle and is gone into the forest. And now watch what happens to the Lord of all the worlds. He looks for Her among the faces and does not find Her. He leaves all the other gopīs and goes searching for Her alone, from grove to grove, from path to path, calling, and She is not there. Then He who holds the whole creation in His glance is undone for the want of one girl.

Here the tradition lets us hear what Rāmānanda Rāya once told Caitanya Mahāprabhu, set down in the Caitanya-caritāmṛta: that Hari, wandering everywhere and finding no Radha, fell to lamenting, pierced through by Cupid's arrows, and that not a billion gopīs, not a hundred crore, could quench that desire in Him; and from this one thing, Rāmānanda said, we may measure the glory of Shri Radha. Mark it well, beloved: the countless gopīs are near, the most beautiful, the most loving, each one brimming with mahā-bhāva, and still Krishna swoons, wailing "Hā Rādhe! Hā Rādhe!" and falls. Their nearness is no medicine. Only She is the medicine, because She is not one love among many; She is the very essence of mahā-bhāva made into a person, and the other gopīs can never satisfy Him as She satisfies Him.

Let us be careful here in our adoring, for we must not drag this into our own coarse world. There is no material Cupid in Vṛndāvana; there is nothing material in that abode at all. So when the tradition says Krishna was pierced by millions of Cupids' darts, it does not mean a creaturely hunger. It means this: the eternally self-satisfied, ever-full Supreme, who needs nothing, is always eager to accept the loving service of His devotees, and He manifests His longing exactly to the measure that they love Him. He lets Himself thirst to the height of their love; He becomes faint so that He may be revived by them; He becomes the one who is served. This is the secret tenderness at the heart of God, that He has made His own bliss wait upon Her hand.

And to follow this scene at all, we are taught, we must come the way the residents of Vraja came. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it for us: without following in the footsteps of the dwellers of Vraja there is no perfection in the Vraja-rasa. And whose footsteps are these? They are the maidservants', who stand in the category of mahā-bhāva, so that their absorption is the most intense of all, and we must learn their very expertise in service if we would walk behind them in our meditation. Viśvanātha Cakravartī tells us in the Mādhurya-Kādambinī how that absorption ripens: in the stage of bhāva the sense of "I" has all but entered the siddha-deha, the eternal spiritual body shaped for service, and all but left the body of flesh, while the sense of "mine" turns into bees that begin to drink the honey of God's lotus-feet. And in prema there is no end to the stream of līlās the heart spiritually beholds, the soul wholly drowned in its own true spiritual form. It is from inside such a form that this scene is seen at all.

So now: Radha, having stepped away, wanders the spring-forest, and the beauty of it brings Śyāmasundara flooding back into Her. The kiṅkarī, the maidservant, the very form Śrīpāda takes in his meditation, stays at Her side and serves Her; and seeing how Her Īśvarī yearns to meet Her lover, the maidservant consoles Her and slips off through the trees to find Him. And she finds Him, in the garden called Dhīra-Samīra, the grove of the gentle southern wind, but He is fallen, swooned, lying in the dust. She does not wail the news. She decides only to draw Her Mistress toward Him, and she tells what she has seen in the words of the Gīta-Govinda: O Radhe, Vanamālī, He who wears the forest-garland, is sinking in His separation from You. The malaya breeze of the south, that should be cool and that carries the fragrance of the vernal flowers, only feeds His agony; the moon's cool corona scalds Him as if to kill; the humming of the bees, which is music to the happy, He cannot bear, and He blocks His ears; tonight He suffers more, He cannot endure a single moment without You; He has given up His abode of joy and rolls upon the thorny ground, singing Your name, Your name, again Your name in lamentation. So she speaks, not to wound, but to put out the fire of Śyāmasundara's separation by bringing the only water that can quench it: Radha Herself.

And She comes. She comes to the Dhīra-Samīra grove with Her maidservant and sees Her hero lying there in His swoon, and Śrīmatī's own heart breaks at the sight. Now the line opens like a flower, and we are inside it: divya-pramoda-rasa-sāra-nijāṅga-saṅga-pīyūṣa-vīci-nicayair abhiṣecayanti. She bends to Him and bathes Him, and Her bathing is not water. It is divya-pramoda-rasa-sāra: the quintessence of divine, blissful flavour, the very essence-of-essence of transcendental joy, welling up as pīyūṣa, as nectar, wherever Her own limbs come near His, nija-aṅga-saṅga, the touch of Her own body; and it rises in vīci-nicayaiḥ, in heaped multitudes of waves, and with these She anoints Him: abhiṣecayanti, She sprinkles Him, She bathes Him as one bathes a king at his crowning. She kisses Him; She gathers Him in the soft vines of Her arms; She pours over Him Her fragrance, Her touch, Her flavour. She is the sañjīvanī, the herb that brings the dead to life. As a heroic warrior, fallen under the enemy's arrows, is brought round by cold water dashed upon him and a healing herb pressed to his wound, so the swooned Madhava is revived by the only physician in all the worlds who can revive Him.

And consider the wonder of His name, for Śrīpāda sings it in his own song. He is called Madana-Mohana, the One who bewilders Cupid himself; indeed He is navīna kāma, the youthful Cupid, desire's very beauty; the whole power of attraction is His. And yet this Bewilderer of Cupid lies bewildered for want of Her; this Source of all desire faints under desire's koṭi arrows when He is parted from Radha; and then Śrī Rādhikā, śata bāra, a hundred times over, sprinkles Nanda's son with the nectar-tide of Her nearness and brings Her hero back, serving Him anukūla, favourably, with the joy-giving service that revives Him once and again. Glory, then, the song lifts in its next breath: jaya śrī kanaka-dyuti, glory to the goddess of golden lustre, the fresh new heroine of the bowers, the peerless youthful nāgarī; and Prabodhānanda says she is the very moon of Vṛṣabhānu's house, rasamayī rasera mañjarī, herself made of rasa, a bud thick with rasa, the very mañjarī of love.

When the two are made one again, the maidservants have not been idle. They have made ready beforehand a hidden arbour: there is a couch strung of flowers with a flower-pillow; there is a canopy woven of fragrant blossoms; there are little lamps that burn like golden Campaka-buds in the dark green. Into this secret bower the Divine Couple withdraws, and here Krishna will worship His nikuñja-devī, the Goddess of the grove. And hear the one word that keeps this from being a tale of long ago: jayati. It stands in the present tense. Not "She revived Him once," but She is reviving Him: this victory is happening now and goes on happening, eternal in Vraja, today, tonight, forever, the swoon and the nectar and the bringing-back without end. So the Rādhāvallabha singers too lift this as a jayajayakāra, a cry of triumph in the Vasanta-tilakā measure: jaya, jaya, glory and again glory to some indescribable nikuñja-devī, She who is the sañjīvanī of Nanda's son.