64

Begin with the longing, for that is where this verse begins. Not with satiety, not with rest, but with an ache that has no bottom. O Rādhe, O Mādhava, the tradition calls You cira-ārti-spṛśau, the Two touched by a long, abiding pain; from Your tender first youth You have carried this thirst for one another, and the years have not slaked it, and the meetings have not slaked it, and the touch of hand to hand has not slaked it. Picture two who stand close enough to breathe one another's breath and who are still, in that very nearness, undone by missing. This is not the poverty of separation. It is the wealth of a love so vast that no closeness can fill it. And the Rādhāvallabha sweetly tells us what that ārti does: it is the very longing that makes the Two reach again and again to touch one another's holy limbs, never content, never finished, forever beginning again.

Now let the sweetness rise. The word is unmīlat, the opening, the unfurling, as a bud opens petal upon petal and never reaches a last petal. Their anurāga, Their mithuna-anurāga, the constant mutual deepening of love, is fixed by Śrī Rūpa Gosvāmī in his Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi: anurāga is the love experienced by the lovers as ever-fresh at every moment, sadā anubhūtam api yat kuryāt nava-navaṁ priyam, the love that makes the beloved seem new-made at every instant, reborn to the eye though seen ten thousand times, and therefore wonderfully variegated at every moment. So picture Mādhava crossing the path by Govardhana, where the gopa boys keep their playful toll-station, and Śrī Rādhā watching Him as She has watched a thousand mornings; and Rūpa Gosvāmī sets the scene for us in his Dāna-Keli-Kaumudī, that She turns to Vṛndādevī breathless: O friend, Hari has crossed the path of My eyes many times before, but I have never once seen Him with such unprecedented sweetness; My eyes cannot relish even an atomic fraction of the sweetness of a single one of His limbs. This is the great glory of anurāga. Not love grown stale with familiarity, but love in which familiarity has become impossible, because the Beloved is reborn in beauty faster than the heart can keep account.

And so Their sweetness is named udāra: noble, beautiful, great, generous, and the gosvāmīs are careful to say it is completely free of any desire for personal gratification. There is nothing in it of the small lover who loves to be filled. It is garima, greatness; it is a dhārā, a stream; and the tradition heaps the words to weigh it, sāra, its very essence, dhurīṇa, the foremost torrent that bears all other torrents, divya, divine and transcendental, lalita, delicate and amorous. Lalita, Śrī Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu: śṛṅgāra-pracura ceṣṭā yatra taṁ lalitaṁ viduḥ, an abundance of amorous activity, a richness of love's tender gesture. And anaṅga-utsava is the festival of the bodiless one, Cupid's own holiday kept in the bowers of Vraja. O the kuñjas of Vṛndāvana, hung with the breath of jasmine, where the moonlight falls in threads through the leaves. There the festival is held, not once but ever, a holiday that has no evening and no closing. The Rādhāvallabha stream cannot help but exclaim it: aha, how sweet are these Two, Śrī Rādhā and Mādhava, in whose hearts this most exalted, generous anurāga is unfolding, from which the very essence-stream of sweetness pulses out as Their divine lalita play.

Hear how deep the thirst runs, for the tradition lets the gopīs sing it. One who has gazed on His form since the day she was born finds her eyes still not sated, janama avadhi hām rūpa nehārinu, nayana nā tirapita bhelo; she has held Him in her heart for hundreds of thousands of ages, lākho lākho yuga hiye hiye rākhalum, and her heart is still not cooled. She drinks the nectar of His words at every instant, vacana amiyā rasa anukhana piyalum, yet it is as though the sound has not yet touched her ears; she has spent how many flowering vernal nights in His company, and still she says she has not understood His play. Here is the reciprocity-law the tradition speaks aloud: as much thirst as there is, that much savour there will be, and as much savour as there is, that much thirst. This is the secret hidden inside the longing, that the longing is the love's own measureless body. To be filled would be to end, and this love does not consent to end. So it stays thirsty forever, and is forever the richest thing in all the worlds.

Now come to the tenderest turn of all. The tradition reads kaumāra as Their first adolescence, that threshold morning of love, and points us back to verse fifty-seven for the reading; and here something astonishing is revealed. The words gather: nava, ever-new; keli, love-play; śilpa, an art, a craft, an architecture; laharī, in waves; śikṣā, instruction; and dīkṣā, initiation. This love-play is itself a school. Picture the Two of Them in the kuñja, and the love-sport a teaching, and each by turns the teacher and the taught. Śrī Vṛndādevī once told Kṛṣṇa, and Rūpa Gosvāmī keeps her words in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu, that His beginning adolescence is itself the guru of the Gaurīs, the gopīs of Vraja: kaiśorena tava adya kṛṣṇa guruṇā gaurī-gaṇaḥ pāṭhyate, Your budding youth, O Kṛṣṇa, is the master who instructs them how to whisper secrets ear to ear, how to offer their hidden prayers, how to outwit their husbands, how to find the one path through the night to the bower, how to grow deaf to the words of their elders and keep their ears open for one sound only, the song of Your flute. His very kaiśora is their teacher.

And then turn it the other way, as the tradition turns it, for the deeper guru is Rādhā. Mādhava Himself confesses it in the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta: rādhikāra prema-guru, āmi śiṣya-naṭa, Rādhikā's love is the guru and I am the disciple, a dancer made to dance, sadā āmā nānā nṛtye nācaya udbhaṭa, and She forever sets Me to ever-new and astonishing dances. O wonder, the Lord of all becomes the pupil, and the kiṅkarī watches Prāṇeśvarī teach Him the arts of love, wave upon wave, laharī upon laharī. And the Rādhāvallabha names this very thing, the mutual teaching, parspar upadeśa-rūpa śikṣā-dīkṣā, each instructing the other. In our world we receive dīkṣā and śikṣā first, the initiation and the training, and only afterward do we begin our bhajana. But in that world there is no first and after; the initiation is the rasa, the instruction is the rasa, the learning and the teaching are themselves the sweetness, with nothing held back for some later fruit. The schooling is the savour. The lesson is the love.

And this is why the kiṅkarī prays as she does. Remember where she stands: in the verse before, in her kiṅkarī-form, she beheld Śrī Rādhikā's sixfold dexterity in the love-play, the six arts by which Rādhā gives the highest savour and the highest joy to Śrī Kṛṣṇa, and she glorified them; for just as the reverential love of Lord Viṣṇu's associates in Vaikuṇṭha swells when they behold His six opulences, so the sweet love of the kiṅkarīs for Rādhikā swells when they behold Her six dexterities. Śrīpāda, the greatest receptacle of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu's grace, who lives in the highest rāgānugā-bhakti called mañjarī-bhāva, now speaks in his sādhakāveśa and his prayer comes out naked: paraṁ bhavatu naḥ citte, let it be supreme in our hearts. The maidservant who waits at the edge of the bower asks nothing for herself, no place in the play, no share of the embrace. She asks only that this rasa take up permanent dwelling in her heart, the consciousness of Their sweet forms, Their qualities, Their pastimes, the ever-opening sweetness, the bottomless thirst, the festival of teaching-love that never closes. May that, and that alone, be the highest perfection her heart will ever know.