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Begin with the eyes. Not the form yet, but the eyes that go looking for it. See how they will not be still. They turn this way and that, they sweep the kuñjas, they lift toward every flowering bower, they cannot settle on anything, because the one thing they want is no ordinary sight. Something has happened to these eyes. They have heard of a beauty that exists only here, in this small ring of forest on the Yamunā's bank, and now nothing else will satisfy them. Lolāyamānaṁ: restless, rolling, aching, they have become beggars, they have become wanderers, because they are searching for Her.

And what is it they seek? A rūpa, a form, that is gocaram, perceptible, in Vṛndāvana alone, vṛndāvana-mātra. Mark that word: alone. Not in Mathurā, though Mathurā lies only seven miles away. Not at Kurukṣetra, where Kṛṣṇa stood crowned and armored, a king among kings. The tradition keeps a tender memory of this, drawn from Śrīmad Bhāgavata's tenth canto, its eighty-second chapter. When Kṛṣṇa appeared at Kurukṣetra in royal majesty, the gopīs were not consoled. His splendor, His chariots, His warrior's glory could not reach the place in them that was burning. They remembered His sweet pastimes of Vraja, and they prayed Him back into the groves. Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu took on this very mood of Rādhā and the gopīs as He danced before the chariot of Lord Jagannātha, and Kṛṣṇa Dāsa Kavirāja set His heart down for us in the Caitanya-caritāmṛta. For others, He sang, the heart may be only the mind, but My mind is Vṛndāvana itself; that forest and My mind are one single thing, and if Your lotus feet would only appear there, that, only that, would be Your full mercy. O Lord of My life, listen to My earnest prayer: Vraja is My home, and if I cannot have Your association there, I cannot remain alive. Once You taught us yoga and jñāna through Uddhava, and now again You teach me to see You everywhere with no need of Your presence; but You are clever and merciful, You know My heart, You should not speak to Me so. Vṛndāvana, Govardhana, the forest on Yamunā's bank, the kuñjas, the Rāsa-dance, the people of Vraja, Your mother, Your father, Your friends, how amazing, how could You forget them? Now You wear a different dress, You keep other friends, You live in another country; but this never appeals to the people of Vraja. They will not leave Vrajabhūmi, and if they do not see You they will die. And so, even when Kṛṣṇa lingered close by in Mathurā, only seven miles off, the gopīs would not go to look upon His majesty there, burning though they were in the fire of separation, for majesty could not quench what only sweetness could. The tradition draws the lesson out like nectar from a flower: whoever longs to see Śrī Rādhā must take exclusive shelter of Vṛndāvana, and nowhere else. She is not found in the palaces of grandeur. She is the secret of the grove.

O wonder, says the heart, aho. And then it lifts a still greater wonder: yan na śrutīkaṁ śiro'py āroḍhuṁ kṣamate. This form the Vedas cannot carry upon their heads. Picture the śrutis, the oldest scriptures, and the very crown of them, the Upaniṣads, bowing with their lofty heads, straining to lift this sweetness up onto themselves the way one carries a precious thing upon the head in reverence; and they cannot. They are not able. For Śrī Rādhā is the greatest secret of all. The Vedas teach the work of sacrifice and fruitive action; the Upaniṣads teach the wisdom that frees; but loving devotion is hidden, kept back, breathed only in veils, and Rādhā is that highest love made into a body, prema itself standing in a girl's form on the riverbank. How shall the scriptures of duty and the scriptures of knowledge describe Her? Here and there the Upaniṣad dares to whisper of Her majesty: the Gopāla-tāpanī says tasyādya prakṛti rādhikā nitya nirguṇa yasyāṁśe lakṣmī durgādikā śaktayaḥ: Rādhikā is the Lord's own first nature, eternally transcendental to the material modes, and energies like Lakṣmī and Durgā are Her mere fragments. But that is Her grandeur only. Her sweetness the books do not reveal; it stays veiled, too intimate to be set down in the scriptures of awe. And so the tradition holds that in this dark age of Kali the Lord Himself came wearing Her mood and Her golden hue, Śrīman Mahāprabhu, precisely to give away this hidden sweetness; and the ācāryas He empowered have dared, in their books, to sing what the Vedas left unsung.

Now lift it higher still: na yac chiva-śukādīnāṁ tu yad-dhyānagam. Even Śiva, lord of yogis lost in the deepest absorption; even Śuka, the sage whose every breath was the Bhāgavata; even these cannot reach Her sweetness in their meditation. Hear the tenderness the tradition keeps about Śuka. Sanātana Gosvāmī fixes it in the Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta, that when Śuka spoke the great Bhāgavata he would not pronounce the names of the gopīs. Why? Because to speak their names would be to remember them vividly, and the love of the gopīs blazes so fiercely, the high flames of their separation rise so far, that a single spark of that fire, touching his remembrance, would have burned him, agitated him with unbearable pain, undone him utterly, so that he could never have finished the song he had vowed to complete. So he held their names back, not from forgetfulness but from the sheer, scorching greatness of their love. This is the love Śrī Rādhā crowns and surpasses. No wonder Śiva and Śuka, for all their tapasyā, cannot bring Her sweet form before the inner eye. They reach Her power. They do not reach Her honey.

And what is that honey? Yat premāmṛta-mādhurī-rasamayam yan nitya-kaiśorakam. Her form is made of the very nectar of love, mixed and saturated through every limb with the rasa of mādhurya. The Caitanya-caritāmṛta sings it: premera svarūpa deha prema vibhāvita; kṛṣṇera preyasī śreṣṭha jagate vidita: Her body is love's own essence, made luminous by love, and She is renowned through all the worlds as Kṛṣṇa's foremost beloved. And She is nitya-kaiśora, eternally at the threshold of girlhood, that fresh adolescent bloom that never fades, never ages, never tires. Sweeter than sweet, the songs sing, ever rising into fresh festival. O Rādhe, forever the kiśorī on the bank of the Yamunā, Your beautiful form fashioned as if by a craftsman named Cupid himself, the ladylove of the prince of Vraja, whom by many pious acts and the grace of the divine Couple alone one may behold in the play-bowers of the groves. This Rāi is the delight of Śyāma in a great festival of play, marked with the very signs of His loving, and Her youth is no season that turns. It is the permanent springtime of love itself.

And so we come back to the eyes. Tad rūpaṁ pariveṣṭum eva nayanaṁ lolāyamānaṁ mama. For that form, and that form alone, my eyes go searching, greedy, restless, wandering the groves. The tradition does not flinch from the word greed here, for this greed is the holy thing, the very doorway of rāgānugā bhakti, the path of spontaneous love. Intense lobha, intense longing, is itself the means by which that path is attained. Jīva Gosvāmī sets it gently in the Bhakti-sandarbha, that just as the materialist's eye is drawn, helpless and natural, to whatever it finds beautiful, so the devotee's eye is drawn, just as helplessly and just as naturally, to the beautiful form of the Lord; and this natural drawing is the devotee's rāga, attachment, toward Bhagavān. It is no calculation, no discipline grimly held. It is the heart simply unable to look away. And so the seer of this song confesses with his own dim, world-worn eyes still aching toward the jewel he longs to behold: my contaminated eyes, mora malina nayana, always want that treasure-form. Alas, alas, when will this longing be fulfilled? That cry, half prayer and half wound, is the truest thing in the whole song. It does not pretend to have arrived. It only burns, and goes on looking.