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Begin in a hidden bower at the edge of evening, where the leaves hold still and even the river seems to hush so as not to miss what is coming. Something is about to happen that the whole world, without knowing why, has been waiting for. A girl turns Her head. That is all. The corner of one eye moves, the lashes lift the smallest measure, and a glance slips sideways toward the One She loves. And from that single tilting of the eyes a sea begins to rise.

O what sea is this. The tradition names it the ocean of mahāprema, the great love, and says it is not still water but water at the moment of swelling, nectar lifting itself into wave after wave, each crest a new rasa, each new rasa fresher than the last so that the sweetness never tires and never repeats. This is the ocean She carries behind Her eyes, and when She glances it does not merely shine. It overflows. The waves break out through the corners of Her vision, netrānta-naṭanaiḥ, the dancing of the sidelong glances, and they run in streams across the sky, and the whole universe stands in the spray of it as if She were bathing every living thing in love it never asked for and could never deserve.

See Her color, O heart. The verse calls it taḍit-māla-gauram, golden as a corona of lightning, gold like a hanging garland of lightning-strikes strung one upon another. Her limbs do not merely glow. They flicker and tremble with that shimmer that lightning has against a monsoon cloud, restless, alive, never the same from instant to instant. And against the blue of Her Beloved She is exactly that: the bright trembling line of gold laid against the dark thundercloud of Kṛṣṇa, the two colors that the sky longs to hold together. Acañcalā, the old singers sigh, the limbs cannot keep still, tarala taḍita-mālā, like the quivering corona of a lightning-flash, gauravarṇa, golden-bodied, manohārī, stealing the mind, stealing even the mind of Hari Himself.

And She is new. Nava-kaiśora-madhuram, the sweetness of fresh, just-arriving girlhood, the kaiśora that has only now opened like the first hour of a flower. There is a moment Rūpa Gosvāmī loves to dwell on in his Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi, when Her dear friend Viśākhā looks at Her and teases gently, half in wonder: O Sundarī, Your glances have become like bees that lean and fall from the blue indīvara-lotuses of Your eyes; Your heart has become a young swan parting the water-stems in search of bashfulness; the honeyed sheen of playful words has begun to rise from the lotus of Your mouth. Surely, Viśākhā says, You have arrived at the very season that will become a festival of joy for Mādhava. So new is this sweetness, and yet it is the sweetness in which the entire world is about to be drowned.

Now hold close the secret the Gauḍīya masters guard in the words viśvaṁ snapayad iva, "as if bathing the world." It does not only mean the world. It means Him. For He who pervades all things is Himself called Viśva, the All. When Arjuna saw the universal form in the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā he understood it and said sarvaṁ samāpnoṣi tato'si sarvaḥ: because You pervade everything, You are everything. Viśvanātha Cakravartī seals it: just as gold is present inside and outside every ornament made of gold, the earring, the bangle, so Kṛṣṇa is inside and outside the whole of creation, and so one of His names is Sarva, the All, and so Viśva, the universe. And therefore "bathing the universe with the dancing of Her sidelong glances" is, in its inmost meaning, this: O Rādhe, with the dancing of Your eyes You are bathing Kṛṣṇa. You are pouring over the Lord of all rasa the swelling sea of Your nectarean love, and He, rasarāja, the king of relishers, stands soaked and swaying in the waves of it, agitated, conquered, undone by a look. How many waves of feeling break over Him, each one a fresh rasika agitation in the heart of the One who agitates all.

How small the gesture, how total the conquest. Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī sets it down in his Vilāpa-Kusumāñjali, that with even the faintest tremor at the very edge of Her eyes, in a single instant, the great elephant-king Kṛṣṇa is bound fast and led away. When, oh when, the servant pleads, will I be allowed to worship those eyes, the eyes that shame the restless flitting of the wagtail-bird, by darkening them with kajjala. That is the power of this glance. It does not coax. It captures. The One whom nothing in all the worlds can hold is held by the corner of an eye, and led like a tamed elephant into the bower of Her love.

And this is why the wise pray Her glance upon the whole world. Rūpa Gosvāmī, opening his play the Dāna-Keli-Kaumudī, asks in the line rādhāyāḥ kila kiñcita stavakinī dṛṣṭiḥ śriyaṁ vaḥ kriyāt, that Rādhā's glance flecked with that trembling, half-shy, sweetly disordered kila-kiñcit mood scatter its good fortune upon us all; for whoever meditates on Rādhā's glance toward Kṛṣṇa is given the one treasure worth having, love for the lotus-feet of the Divine Couple. One may still wonder: a glance may pour love into the heart of a devotee, but how does it bathe the whole world. Rūpa Gosvāmī answers in his Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi, where among the signs of Rādhā's mohana-bhāva he names brahmāṇḍa-kṣobha-kāritva, the power to agitate the entire universe, and gives the verse pūrṇānande'pyuṣitvā: the very vapor that rises off the ocean of Her prema drifts in every direction and makes even beings who already dwell in fullness ache for more, ache with the sweet agony of love. Jīva Gosvāmī adds that from these very words, "full bliss," we understand the universe itself stands brimful of Her prema, soaked through, every quarter of the sky dripping with what spilled from a single sidelong look. And lest we mistake the meaning, the masters add a sober note: this flooding does not make every soul liberated; in the universe where Her pastimes are manifest the living beings may be drowned in prema, yet when those pastimes pass from sight, countless dormant souls from other universes are brought there again with their works still upon them, so that the līlā has fresh hearts to flood.

Hear, too, how the verse names Her the jewel of jewels. Nava-ratnam: the new jewel, the never-before-seen gem, and also the nine jewels, for the tradition delights to place a gem at every limb of Her body, ruby in the luster of Her skin, pearl in Her lotus-face, coral at the edge of Her lips, the harita-gem in Her heart, diamond in Her teeth, sapphire in Her eyes, jacinth in Her marrow, emerald in Her bones, so that She shines through the play-bowers of Vṛndāvana with Nanda's son as a walking treasury, the living crown-jewel set into the headdress of every lovely woman of Vraja. Puraṁdhrīṇāṁ cūḍā-bharaṇa-navaratnam: the crest-ornament, the topmost gem of all the gopīs, who does not eclipse their beauty but kindles it, so that each one is lovelier for standing near Her. She is the jewel that makes the other jewels burn brighter.

And the masters cannot speak of this flood of love without remembering how, in this very age of quarrel and forgetting, that same ocean came visibly to earth. Taking up Her mood and Her golden color, Śrīman Mahāprabhu carried the flood of Her loving glances into the streets, and the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta sings in its Ādi-līlā how the flood of prema swelled and surrounded the four directions and drowned them all, women and the aged, children and the young, the good and the wicked, the lame, the dull, the blind, every soul of the world pulled under by that flood of love. The same waves that broke from the corner of one girl's eye in a hidden Vraja bower came rolling at last through the lanes of Nadia, that no one be left dry.

So return now to where we began, to the still bower and the turning head. In a secret nikuñja proud Rāi makes Her sly tender gestures to Hari with the dancing of Her sidelong glances, and on the ocean of nectar-love She raises wave upon wave until they flood across the floor of the earth itself. Āhā āhā mari mari, the old singers stammer, the beauty of Her enchanting kaiśora steals away the heart of Hari, Her golden limbs flicker like lightning, Her sweetness is the very honey of mohana. Look, sings Prabodhānanda, look at this supreme bliss, this rasika nāgara and His nāgarī; behold the crest-jewel of every lovely woman of Vraja, the new gem, the ever-fresh Kiśorī. She is victorious. She triumphs. Vijayate. Forever, in the bower and in the heart, Śrī Rādhā is victorious.