8

Picture the heart standing at a parting of ways, and before it the whole shining throng of things the world has agreed to call great. There are the heaped merits of fruitive works, the offerings and sacrifices that promise their rewards. There are the cool, clear heights of empirical knowledge that name the nameless and dissolve the world into a featureless absolute. There are the dusty roads of pilgrimage that touch a thousand holy stones, and the favor of the demigods who hold the keys to heaven. Vṛndāni sarva-mahatām, the tradition names them: the whole gathering of great things, great endeavors, even great persons. They glitter, and they are not small. The world has called them great for ages and will go on calling them great. And over all of it the singer lifts his voice and says, O mind, apahāya dūrāt, set them aside, and set them not at arm's length but far off, far away. They are stumbling blocks on the path of pure devotion. Their very nearness is the obstacle, for on the road that leads to the sweetness of Vraja, even the bright and beautiful detours are stones that trip the foot.

Why such fierce leaving? Because there is somewhere to go, and the leaving is only the first breath of a love that has already chosen its home. Anusara, the word says: follow, go after, trail behind with longing. And the manner of the going is praṇayena, with love, that tender intimacy that does not approach a king's gate to petition for a gift but slips toward the beloved's door because it cannot stay away. The mind is not sent on an errand. It is sent the way a lover is sent, drawn by a fragrance it half remembers, toward Vṛndāvana, the forest where Śyāma stands and lifts the bamboo to His lips.

Listen, O heart, to what that flute is saying. In the very center of the grove the dark enchanting One plays, and the song that pours out is the same word He once spoke aloud: sarva-dharmān parityajya mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja, give up all forms of religion, every other shelter and laborious means, and take refuge in Me alone. But the flute does not command from a throne. It coaxes. It pulls. Only the heart already washed clean by spiritual practice can hear the call for what it is, and the heart that hears it cannot do otherwise than rise and run, absorbed in the mood of Vraja, eager to meet its Beloved. This is why the dry attainments must be thrown far away. The flute cannot be heard over the clatter of bargaining. The impersonal brahman, vast and featureless; the localized paramātmā within; the Lord seated in awe and rule and worshipped at a careful, reverential distance: each is real in its own measure, yet each casts the listener a long way off from this song. They lead the ear away. Only pure, spontaneous love leads it back into the grove.

And this love is no flickering thing. Here the tradition speaks of transcendental greed, the very life-force of rāga-bhakti. When a devotee grows greedy for the pure loving mood of Kṛṣṇa's eternally perfect companions in Vraja, he steps onto the field of rāgānugā. Do not mistake it for the world's greed. When a worldly man becomes greedy he turns nearly mad, forgetting his body and all that touches it in the hunt for the thing he means to own. That is mundane greed, and even it is not real greed if it comes one moment and is gone the next. The greed that turns the heart to Vraja is greed inverted into a ceaseless hunger to serve. Viśvanātha Cakravartī fixes it in his Rāga-vartma-candrikā: atiśayena pravṛttiḥ syāt yathā kāmārthinaṁ kāmopāyeṣu, the rāgānugā devotee is as absorbed in his longing for devotion as a lusty man is absorbed in the means of his desire. Without such strong eagerness the sweetness of rāga-bhajana cannot even be understood. The devotee asks, day and night, the one question: when will I get the service of my Beloved? And the singer thinks to himself a tender, unbearable thought: how could I ever become so fortunate as to be the very broom that sweeps the yard of the kuñja? Not the queen of the bower, only its broom, only its dust. So he cries out within: O mind, throw all the other great efforts, the worship of demigods, the fruitive works, the gathering of empirical knowledge, the making of endless pilgrimages, far away. Why should I go anywhere but Rādhārāṇī's own abode Vraja? Why should I wander to innumerable holy places when the one treasure waits here?

For the tradition keeps a story to show how dear and how dangerous a single glance away can be. There was a pure-hearted one, Śrī Kṛṣṇa Dāsa Bābājī of the village Raṇabārī, near the town of Chātā in Vraja, whose life is set down in the second volume of Haridāsa Dāsa's Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Jīvana. He had Vraja, and yet a small restlessness moved him to see some other holy places, and he went to Dvārakā, the city where Kṛṣṇa was married to sixteen thousand one hundred and eight queens, the place of crowned and lawful splendor. When he came home to the dust of Vraja, Rādhārāṇī Herself came to him in a dream and told him, gently and terribly, now you belong to the company of Kṛṣṇa's queen Satyabhāmā; go back to Dvārakā. The grief of that undid him. Cut off from the grove and from Her, he burned away in the fire of separation like a stick of dry firewood, and so left the mortal world rather than leave Vraja. By his very undoing he showed all the devotees of the world how unfavorable it is for a lover of Śrī Rādhā to leave Vraja even once. If the rightful majesty of married Dvārakā is a wandering for the heart that has tasted the bowers, how much more the world's hard-won merits and its cool philosophies. Set them far away. There is only one place to go.

And what is the treasure waiting there for the heart that comes? Rādhābhidhānam iha divya-nidhānam asti, the tradition sings: here, here in this very grove, there is enshrined a divine jewel, and Her name is Radha. She is not a doctrine. She is not a reward weighed out for services rendered. She is subhāva-sudhā-rasaughaṁ: a flood, an overflowing ocean, of the loveliest moods, good feeling sweet as immortal nectar, rasa upon rasa brimming past its own banks. To find Her is to find the whole of Vraja's love, for She is its fountainhead, and the rare, impossible love of the cowherd grove that no merit can purchase and no austerity can compel is, by taking shelter of Her, simply given.

And the word the tradition lingers on for Her is tāraṇī, the ferry, the one who carries across. Sat-tāraṇī: She redeems the sincere souls, the sajjana, bearing the honest heart over the wide black river of birth and death, not by judgment, not by tally, but by the sheer outpouring of Her sweetness. Whoever truly turns toward Her, She lifts. And then the tradition, in its boldness, will not stop even there. For sat can also name the Real Itself, the One who is true in all three phases of time, and so it whispers an astonishing thing: that Rādhā redeems even Kṛṣṇa. One may ask, does Kṛṣṇa, who is no conditioned soul, need redeeming at all? And the answer comes: Kṛṣṇa suffers the pain of Cupid's darts, burning under the arrows of love's own desire, and She redeems Him by showering Him with the nectar-stream of Her nearness, cooling that fire. More wondrous still, the sat Kṛṣṇa was so eager to relish the love of Rādhā in Vraja that He descended to this very earth precisely to be relieved of the burning agony of that desire. He became a lover that He might be carried across by the ferry named Rādhā.

And so the very root of the word divya, the tradition reminds us, is div, which means to play. The divine treasure of the grove is divine because it is at play. The jewel hidden in Vṛndāvana is the sweet amorous līlā of Rādhā that makes Kṛṣṇa glad, the sport that has its only home in those bowers, and that is why the singer so eagerly sends his mind there and nowhere else. Not to a featureless absolute, not to a far-off heaven, but here, where the play is happening, where the Beloved is made happy by the nectar of His Prāṇeśvarī, the very Queen of His life-breath.

This is the love that carried the earlier masters home: Bilvamaṅgala and Jayadeva, Caṇḍī Dāsa, the six Gosvāmīs, and a multitude more, brought to Vraja by no engine but spontaneous love. They wandered the groves with arms upraised, weeping the names, crying out, hā hā kāhāṅ vṛndāvana, O where is Vṛndāvana, where is the cowherd-prince Kṛṣṇa with the flute at His mouth, where is that threefold-bending form, where is that flutesong, where is the Lord who enchants even Cupid. Narottama Dāsa Ṭhākura sings their longing: I will bathe in the cool water of the Yamunā, overwhelmed with ecstatic love, and raising my arms wander lane by lane through Vṛndāvana crying Kṛṣṇa's name; I will soothe my burning heart by gazing on Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa's trysting place and roll on that ground in love, calling, where is Rādhā, the Queen of my heart, where are You, O lifter of Govardhana; and above the Mādhavī-vine bower the male and female parrots sit blissfully and sing the rasa of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, and I will sit at the foot of a tree and let their song cool my heart, and oh, when will I pass my days in such happiness. This is the destination toward which the verse turns your face. Not an idea of the grove. The grove itself, and the divine treasure enshrined at its center, waiting.