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It is the night itself you must enter first. The full autumn moon has poured its silver heart over Vṛndāvana, and its pleasing rays flood the surface of mother earth until the whole forest goes pale and luminous, smiling with white kunda and jasmine, white blossom upon white blossom. The Yamunā, though she is called Kṛṣṇā, the Black One, has turned white as milk, brimming with blossoming white lotuses and lilies that float upon her, and the sand along her banks lies soft and fragrant as ground camphor underfoot. Even the demigods have leaned down out of their high seats and strewn white flowers across the dancing-ground. And into this whitened, sweetened world a circle of gopīs has formed, and at its very heart She dances, our Svāminī, with Vrajendra-nandana, the son of Nanda, and the Rāsa has begun.

Watch how They dance, and how the dance is born. Rasarāja and the Rāsa-heroines look upon each other's sweet motion and their lips bud into smiles, for this dancing rises straight out of the mood of rati. Foot answers foot in measured tread; the hands lift and sway; the eyebrows arch in graceful play; waists bend, breasts tremble, skirts flare and float; the earrings swing and tap against the cheeks; the braids loosen and the girdles slip with the swiftness of it all; and over the perspiring faces the song of His glories rises. Śuka Muni fixes this very picture in the Bhāgavata, that the wives of Kṛṣṇa, singing as they danced, shone out like flashes of lightning flung through a mass of dark monsoon cloud. Golden brilliance leaping through the deep blue of Śyāma: that is exactly how They look.

And mark the word for it: this is vilāsa. The Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi teaches that vilāsa is the special distinction that comes over the face, the eyes, the whole bearing and gesture of the hero and the heroine, a splendor born only of the presence of the beloved, worn nowhere else and never otherwise. So every glance here carries an extra glory; the smiles bud, the brows play, and the two of Them go on enchanting and astonishing each other with song and dance until enchantment is the only weather there is, sahāsa, full of laughter, mohana, adbhuta, wonderful past telling.

Do not imagine the gopīs are merely danced-upon, swept along by His charm alone. The previous remembrance showed how the Rāsa intoxicates Śyāmasundara Himself; here the wonder runs both ways. He enchants them and they enchant Him; the astonishment is mutual, the rapture is shared. We have heard the gopīs themselves say it later, in their grief, when He had gone far away to Mathurā and Uddhava came with his cool counsel. O Uddhava, they cried in the Bhāgavata, your Lord must surely have forgotten us; but has He forgotten the nights? The nights He danced the Rāsa with us, the nights whitened by the full autumn moon, when the whole forest smiled with kunda and jasmine, when the Yamunā ran white and the gods rained flowers on the dancing-ground, when our every step set our sashes of bells and our wrist-bangles and our anklebells ringing out sweeter than any instrument we played? We go mad to remember it, they said. That very madness of remembering is the door this verse asks to enter.

Now feel how long They have danced. Hour upon laughing hour, a thousandfold enchantment, vilāsa heaped upon vilāsa, until at last the divine exertion shows itself in the tenderest place of all. śrama-jala: the dew of fatigue beads upon Their cheeks. The gaṇḍa-sthala, the soft slope of the cheek, glistens moist and warm with this wonderful, incomparable tāṇḍava, vicitra and vara, the dance past all dances. O Rāseśvarī, O Rasika-śekhara, even Your tiredness is sweet; even the perspiration of Your play is nectar. And it is precisely here, at this moistened cheek, that the heart of the worshipper breaks open into longing, for here at last is something to be done. Here is service. Śrīpāda, in his kiṅkarī-form, sees the wet cheeks and at once is fanning Them, the soft breeze of his vījana drying the dew, easing the Beloveds, asking nothing, only cooling Them.

And then the Rāsa quiets. The great dance is over, and Rādhā and Mādhava sink down to rest upon a jewelled throne, eyelids half-lowered, limbs lovely and tired with all that play. The maidservant kneels at Their feet. lālanā, the word says: to keep with affection, to hold and tend lovingly. She takes the lotus-feet that have danced the whole night into her hands and begins to press them, to massage away the ache, and as she does, time itself dissolves for her; she forgets the hour, forgets herself, forgets that there is any other taste in all the worlds than this, the taste of these two soles beneath her palms. The half-closed eyes of the Couple soften further under her affectionate touch, and there is no measuring the ecstasy that floods her then. This is what it is to make one's life lovely, lalita-jīvanaṁ kurvatī: a life is made lovely not by being adored but by adoring, not by being served but by being allowed to serve, the whole of existence narrowed to one sweetness, to fan the dew from Their cheeks and to cherish Their feet.

This is why the tradition guards such remembrance with both hands, and why Śrīpāda warns that this vision cannot come while one is still adrift in external, mundane consciousness. He sings it himself in his own Saṅgīta-Mādhava, and his song is a confession of where this rasa lives. This pastime bears the nectar-rasa of laughter, he sings, and is yearned for by Śukadeva, Brahmā, Śiva and Nārada; may the play of Rādhā and Mādhava enter my mind and increase my love. It takes place only in the Vṛndāvana forest and is reflected only in the hearts of those soaked in this fresh rasa, and in no one else. It makes the taste of mukti turn bitter on the tongue, for who would want mere liberation who could shelter at the glistening feet of Śrī Hari? Its amorous transformations swell at every moment, an ocean of the quintessence of nectar; it is beyond the three modes of material nature, tuccha triguṇa jaḍa prakṛtim atīte, and it is sung by the greatest sages, who would spit even on the throne of Brahmā for one drop of it. It can be seen only by Rādhā's dear devotees and is not disclosed even to the Vedas, and even the great souls cannot find the end of all its loving gestures. Keep the heart always absorbed, the song closes, in this supreme jewel. That is the whole instruction.

And then, as such visions do, it lifts and is gone, and the worshipper is left where she began, on this near side of the longing, and so she prays the plainest, most piteous prayer there is. kadā nu: when, oh when? When will You bless me with the fanning and the foot-pressing? Not someday in a far heaven claimed by right, but now, by Your mercy, set me at Your tired feet and let me tend them. The whole verse is that one ache, held open and unhealed, which is itself a kind of nearness.