51

Begin where the ocean has no shore. Picture standing at the rim of all the rasa there has ever been, every flavour of love that has ever stirred a heart, gathered into one boundless dark-bright water. Pour a lifetime into it and you will never sound its floor. Now imagine that someone has gone down into that immeasurable sea and brought up, in cupped hands, its single distilled essence: not a measure of it, but the heart of it, the one drop in which the whole ocean is concentrated and surpassed, rasāmbhodheḥ sāraṁ kim api: the indescribable essence of the ocean of rasa. That essence has a name. We call Her Rādhā, rādhākhyaṁ, the One whose very name is Rādhā.

And She is sukumāra, tender beyond the tenderness of any earthly girl. O how delicate She is. In the verse just before, Her limbs were likened to nine jewels, and one might mistake that for hardness, as though She were carved from something cold and faceted. No. Hear how the tradition rushes to correct us at once: sukumāraṁ vijayate, victory to the tender one, glory to the soft and yielding girl whose body is moulded of love and not of stone. The jewels named Her beauty, never Her hardness. She is the softest thing in all the worlds, soft the way the inmost petal is soft, soft the way melted gold is soft before it cools, soft the way a heart is soft when it has surrendered everything. And Her loveliness is no plain thing: divya-cchabi madhura-lāvaṇya-lalitam, a divine luster, a sweet pearl-soft beauty, elegant and lovely past telling, lalita-lāvaṇya-dhāma, a very home of joy to the eyes that are fortunate enough to fall upon Her.

O Rādhe, what has happened to the rules in Your heart? See it: amanda-prema-aṅka-ślatha-sakala-nirbandha-hṛdayā. Every binding, every nirbandha, every duty and decree and ought and must-not that holds an ordinary woman in place, all of it has come loose in You. Not violently torn, not flung off in rebellion. Loosened. Slackened. The knots simply will not stay tied, because the mark, the aṅka, the unmistakable impress of Your amanda-prema, Your not-feeble, never-faint love for Kṛṣṇa, has been pressed so deep into Your heart that nothing else can keep its grip. Where prema this great has set its seal, dharma and adharma cannot hold their shape; for the sake of Śyāma's pleasure She knows neither moral nor immoral, dharmādharma nāhi jāne, and lets every other concern fall away.

Why does this happen in Her and in no one else so completely? The tradition counts the five considerations by which a woman ordinarily loves a man, and watches each one fail to touch Rādhā. One loves for her own happiness, to be made glad by him. One loves out of awe, aiśvarya-jñāna, the sense of his greatness and mastery, the way a subject loves a king. One loves for his qualities, drawn by beauty or virtue as by an ornament. One loves to secure a safe place, the settled shelter of being claimed as a wife. One loves within the careful frame of he is the lover and I am the beloved, each keeping a tidy ledger of giving and receiving. Look now at Rādhā and find which of these moves Her. None of them. Not one. She does not love Kṛṣṇa for Her own happiness, nor for His lordship, nor for His qualities, nor for shelter, nor within any frame that keeps account. She loves Him for no reason that can be named or weighed, and because She is the crown-jewel of all the gopikās Her love is therefore the purest love there is. So it is the most natural thing in the worlds that every Vedic restraint should dissolve the instant it stands between Her and His pleasure. The rules do not break in Her. They simply have nowhere left to hold.

And do not think this softness makes Her small, or that the loosening of decrees makes Her lawless. It makes Her the one place the Vedas cannot reach. Alakṣyaṁ rādhākhyaṁ nikhila-nigamair api atitarām: the whole vast body of revealed scripture, all the nigamas, every Veda straining with all its eyes, cannot so much as glimpse Her. She is alakṣya, unseen, unmarked, beyond their tracking. The Vedas can map the heavens and number the duties and chart the path of liberation, but this delicate girl, whose heart's insistence is woven of love alone, passes utterly out of their sight. Who knows the greatness of such a heart? Ke jāne mahimā tāra: it is nigūḍha, hidden even from the scriptures that know everything else. The very thing that ordinary eyes would call Her transgression is the thing too high and too secret for the Veda to see.

O Rādhe, and You are dayāpāra, mercy without a far shore, the very limit and boundary of mercy. Here is the wonder that should undo us: this same girl, hidden from the Vedas, distilled essence of all rasa, is also the most reachable thing there is, because Her mercy has no bottom and no edge and turns away from no one. She pours it on the surrendered. She pours it, astonishingly, even on the ignorant who do not know to ask. The tradition keeps a small true story to show how far down Her mercy reaches. Not long ago a man from Punjab wandered the holy places around Vṛndāvana, out of his mind not with God but with grief, for he had lost his wife and could not bear the separation. One night he came to Barsānā, Her own parental home, and there in the dark he wept and cried out his wife's name again and again, for his wife too was named Kiśorī, and Kiśorī is a name everyone in Barsānā calls Rādhā. So his broken human crying, O Kiśorī, O Kiśorī, rose up through the night meaning only his lost wife. And the limitlessly merciful One heard it. She turned to Lalitā and said, Lalite, who is this great devotee crying out for Me through the night? Quickly, bring him to Me. And Lalitā, knowing the truth, said, Rādhe, he is no devotee, he is a wretched man gone mad over his wife who happens to share Your name; he is not calling for You at all. And here is the whole ocean in a single sentence. She answered, Lalite, I know that. But what am I to do? My heart melts when I hear that cry of love and I cannot stay calm. Everyone here calls Me Kiśorī. Go, bring him to Me with love, and make him My sakhī. See, O seekers, what She is. The cry was not even meant for Her, and still it melted Her, still She gathered him in. That is dayāpāra. That is mercy with no far bank.

And here the whole order of the worlds turns over. For the One we all approach, even Kṛṣṇa Himself, longs for the nectar of Her mercy and counts Himself blessed when it falls on Him. The Lord, the scriptures and the saints agree, forever desires the grace of His loving devotees; so Sanātana Gosvāmī sets it down in the Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta, that Kṛṣṇa told the Mathurā brāhmaṇa Jana-śarmā, by your grace My family and I are now blessed; I am always waiting for the moment you will bestow your mercy on Me. If even Govinda waits for mercy this way, how much more does He wait upon Hers, whose love is the greatest love that is, and whose mercy is therefore the most desired in all creation. From the lowest fallen soul up to Govinda Himself, the whole ascending order of beings stands with cupped hands beneath the rain of Rādhā's grace.

So gaze once more and let the names settle on Her like petals. Jaya śrī nikuñja-devī: all glory to the bower-goddess of the grove, the quintessence drawn from the ocean of rasa, kṛṣṇamayi, full of Kṛṣṇa and Kṛṣṇa's own dearmost. Her elegant loving beauty is a home of joy to the eyes, and Her golden body, fresh-golden like new gorocana, nava-gorocana-gaurī, is moulded out of nothing but pure love, preme gaḍā sonāra pratimā. For His pleasure She knows neither moral nor immoral and lets every other concern fall away; Her heart's insistence is a greatness no one can measure, and even the Vedas call it hidden. That young, tender, golden Rādhā plays endlessly within the kuñja and shines, always, supremely, sarvotkarṣe, on Śyāma's left side. Divine luster, sweet pearl-soft loveliness, mercy without limit, hidden from all revelation, softest of the soft, essence of the shoreless sea: glory, and glory again, jay ho, vijay ho, to this indescribable tender girl who conquers all.