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Begin at the rim of the grove, O heart, at the sīmani, the thin border where the open world ends and the kuñja begins. The outer paths of Vṛndāvana run out here; past this edge the bowers thicken, leaf folding into leaf, vine drawing its green curtain across the secret. Stand at that threshold and watch, for something is about to come, not to arrive, not to be announced, but to rise, udeti, the way dawn rises, the way a fragrance lifts off a flower before you have even found the flower. On the very border of the nikuñja a wonder is coming into being.

And the tradition does not even dare to name Her at first. It says only kā api, some woman, someone indescribable, a She beyond all reckoning. This is not ignorance; it is reverence trembling at its own limit. The heart that has glimpsed Her cannot get its words around Her, so it confesses the failure honestly: there is one here, some surpassing one, and language lays down its arms at Her feet. She is mohinī, the Enchantress, the great anirvacanīyā beauty of whom Swami Śrī Hitdās ji sings in his Hindi rendering of this Śārdūlavikrīḍita verse, and even that name is too small a cup for the ocean it tries to carry.

See first the lightning. Her aṅga-jyoti, the effulgence of Her limbs, is like koṭi, ten million, vines of lightning flashing at once, vidyul-latā, the slender creeper of the storm flung bright across the whole quarter of the sky. Picture it, O seeker: not one bolt but millions of them braided into vines, and every vine pouring light, until the grove goes white-gold with it. And here the loving mind grows afraid for a tender reason. Lightning hurts the eyes. If Her limbs shine like ten million lightning-vines, how shall our poor eyes bear to look upon Her? Will we not be struck blind by the very glory we have come to drink?

The tradition answers the fear with one cooling phrase: sāndrānanda-rasāmṛta-srava-maṇiḥ: She is a gem from which streams the nectar of dense, packed-tight bliss, the amṛta of love-rasa flowing without pause. The light that pours from Her is not the dry hard glare of the storm; it is liquid, it is nectarean, it is cool. It does not scorch the eye that beholds it; it bathes that eye, it soothes it, it feeds it. Her radiance and Her tenderness are one and the same outpouring. The brightness that should have wounded us instead anoints us, because it is made of mercy and of mādhurya, of sweetness itself.

And there is a scene that makes this cool nectar real, too lovely to leave folded. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it in the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi, at the eighty-fourth verse of the section on the abiding moods, in the verse that opens tīvrārka-dyuti. Picture Lalitā, far off, catching sight of Her sakhī and calling out to the other girls in wonder: Look, friends, look! There She stands on the mountain ridge, and Her lotus feet are set upon the sun-stones, those mārtaṇḍa-crystals that the midsummer sun has heated until they are sharp as sword-edges and burning as fire. Yet She does not flinch. She stands as though Her feet rested upon cool blue indīvara-lotuses spread for a bed. How can this be? Because across that ridge stands the prince of the cowherds, dark Śyāma, and the joy of seeing Him has flooded Her so wholly that the burning stones cannot reach Her at all.

And afterward, the sakhīs went looking for the blisters that such stones must surely have raised on Her soles, and found none. None at all. Why? Viśvanātha Cakravartīpāda tells it gently: as a sleeper does not feel the mosquito that bites him in the night yet wakes to find the welts upon his body, so the sakhīs expected to find the marks of pain on Her feet once the rapture passed. But there were no marks. Her feet are softer and lighter than carded cotton, and cotton a sword cannot cut. Yet fire can burn cotton, someone objects, and these stones were hot as fire. To this the answer returns once more to our verse: sāndrānanda-rasāmṛta-srava-maṇiḥ. From Her very feet streams the cool nectar of blissful rasa, and nectar is by its own nature cold. That is why the burning sun-stones felt to Her as blue indīvara-lotuses. And mark this, O scorched soul: the cool stream that flows from Her lotus feet is the very stream that quenches the threefold burning, the tāpa-traya, of every conditioned soul caught in this world of fire, the fevers of body, of circumstance, of mind. O feet of Rādhā, founts of coolness, let that nectar reach us too where we stand parched.

Now lift your eyes from Her feet to Her face, and watch the smallest thing in all of Vraja, and the most powerful. Her eyebrow moves. Only that. Nava-premānubhāva-bhramad-bhrū-bhaṅgī-lava: the faint, wandering arch of the brow that the awakening of ever-new love sets trembling in Her. It is not a gesture She performs. It is something love does to Her, the involuntary stir of a heart waking again into love as if for the first time, and that waking ripples up into the bow of Her brow and bends it, just slightly, just a hair. Lava means the merest fraction, the least lift. And with that least lift She enchants the Jewel of Vraja.

Taste how staggering this is, O heart. He is the vraja-maṇiḥ, the Jewel of Vraja, whom Swami Śrī Hitdās ji names as Śrī Lāl-jī, dark Śyāma Himself. He is the one whose mere name, the Śrīmad-Bhāgavata sings in the line śruti-mātre'pi yaḥ strīṇāṁ prasahyākarṣate manaḥ, drags the minds of all women to Him irresistibly the very instant it is heard. He can steal the hearts of millions of gopīs without lifting a finger; He is the thief of every heart in the three worlds. And this thief of all hearts is Himself captured, helplessly, by the faintest tremor of one girl's eyebrow. The plunderer is plundered. The one no one can resist cannot resist Her.

The tradition lets Kṛṣṇa say it Himself, in the Lalita-Mādhava, in the tenth act, where He tells Her: O restless-eyed one, there may be in this world a thousand girls with beautiful brows who can play archery with their sidelong glances, sending out every mood like aimed arrows. Let them have their skill. But as the moon, though ringed about with all the lovely stars of night, cannot stand before the blazing sun of high summer, so no other girl can stay in My heart while You are there. He calls Her vṛṣabhānujā, and the word holds two suns in one breath: the daughter of Vṛṣabhānu, Śrī Rādhā, and the sun in its fiercest month of June. So He says: You are the summer sun in My heart, and beside You every other light is only a pale moon that must fade. Even Candrāvalī, lovely as the moon her very name declares, cannot remain where Rādhā's sunlight has risen.

This is why She is bhakta-eka-cintāmaṇiḥ, the one and only wish-yielding touchstone of Her devotees. The cintāmaṇi is that fabled jewel which grants whatever the heart conceives; touch it and the wish becomes real, and Swami Śrī Hitdās ji calls Her exactly this, the single cintāmaṇi who fulfills the manorathas, the heart-wishes, of those who love Her. She is the sole wish-gem, constantly playing in their hearts. And the word eka, only, sole, carries two graces at once. First, She alone is their treasure, for She throws every other thought clean out of the devotee's mind; She fills the heart so wholly that no rival longing can keep its footing there. And second, eka marks the very path of those who walk in Her shelter: the Gauḍīya hearts turn first and foremost to Śrī Rādhā, and only through Her to Śyāma, to the sakhīs, to all the dwellers of Vraja. For the tradition holds it plainly, vinā rādhā-prasādena kṛṣṇa-prāptir na jāyate: without Rādhā's grace the gaining of Kṛṣṇa does not come to pass. Simply by thinking of Her, love of Kṛṣṇa is attained. Reach Her, serve Her, please Her, and Kṛṣṇa is given as Her own gift.

And so She is ramaṇī-cūḍāmaṇiḥ, the crown-jewel set above all lovely women, the cūḍāmaṇi that rides at the very crest. Hold the two truths side by side and behold the whole secret. The Bhāgavata says Kṛṣṇa, by His name alone heard once, draws the minds of all women to Himself. Turn it around: that same all-drawing Kṛṣṇa is Himself drawn, captured, undone, by the least motion of Her brow. The one who attracts all is attracted by Her. That is why She wears the crown.

So the prayer of this verse is the simplest and the most daring of all. May She rise. May that indescribable One, that fountain of cool nectar, that lightning made of mercy, that captor of the heart-thief Himself, rise into being on the very border of Vṛndāvana's bowers, here, now, where this longing waits at the threshold. O Rādhe, kā api, You whom no name can hold, rise; let the grove fill with the wonder of You; and let these eyes, washed in Your nectar so that they will not be struck blind, be given the grace to behold You there.