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Picture the courtyard of a Vraja dawn. The brass lamps are lit, the river-water has been carried up, the conch sits ready in its niche, the sandal-paste lies ground fine in its little dish. And here come the devotees to mark themselves for the day's service. One presses cool clay to his brow and draws the slender twin lines of the Hari Mandira, the temple of the Lord upon the forehead: that which beautifies the brow from the nose up to the hairline in a vertical stroke, with a blank passage left open between, so the Padma Purāṇa names it, the very dwelling-place of Hari worn upon the face. Another laces the dark Tulasī-beads around her throat, Tulasī who is Viṣṇu-priyā, the beloved of Hari, worn close against the pulse. Another stamps the conch and the disc, the emblems of Madhusūdana, into the roots of his arms, so that the body itself becomes a worshipped thing. This is no costume, O heart. This is the body learning to serve. Picture it fully, for the tradition begins exactly here, with the dearness of these marks, before it dares to speak of the rare soul who has gone past them.

For there is a question pressing behind this verse, left over from the one before. There the great souls fixed at Rādhā's feet were praised though they might show no attachment to vaidhi-bhakti, to the regulated path. Does that mean, then, that the pure follower of rāga, of spontaneous love, simply throws away tilaka and Tulasī as beneath him? The answer is given right here, and it is given with two hands at once.

Know first the shape of this path. The worship of the Gauḍīyas is named rāga-mārga attended by regulative principles. The Rāga-Vartma-Candrikā lays it bare: the orders of scripture inaugurate vidhi-bhakti, but sacred greed, that sudden inner thirst, inaugurates rāgānugā bhakti. At the very hour that greed awakens there is no need of scriptural injunction or proof at all, for where injunction must be cited, greed is not yet present. This is true. The fire can be lit without permission. But hear what follows: once the fire is born, the injunctions must still be kept. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu, that all the limbs of vaidhi-bhakti, hearing and chanting and the rest, are also the supporting limbs of rāgānugā bhakti; this is what the wise and learned say. And Jīva Gosvāmī bends close over that line to add the measure: accept those items of vaidhi-bhakti that are favorable to the spontaneous path, each soul taking up what suits its own feeling.

How then to tell the favorable from the rest? Viśvanātha Cakravartī, to make it plain for the sādhaka, sorts the limbs of devotion into five baskets. There are the items filled with the desired feeling itself, svābhīṣṭa-bhāvamaya: dāsya, sakhya, dwelling in Vraja, which are at once the practice and the very goal. There are the items related to that feeling, svābhīṣṭa-bhāva-sambandhī: taking shelter of the Guru, serving the Guru, japa, meditation, the ninefold devotion offered according to one's own bhāva, the Ekādaśī fast, the Kārtika vows, the eating of prasāda, the wearing of the Lord's offered garlands, some of these the material cause of prema, some the instrumental. There are the items favorable to the feeling, svābhīṣṭa-bhāvānukūla: and here they are, exactly the marks of this verse, the wearing of the Tulasī-mālā at the neck, the tilaka on the brow, the holy names upon the body, the serving of Tulasī, the circling of a holy place, the offering of obeisances. There are the items merely not contrary, svābhīṣṭa-bhāvāviruddha: reverence shown to cows, to the Banyan and Dhātrī trees, to brāhmaṇas, while service to the Vaiṣṇavas runs through every basket at once. And there are the items contrary to the feeling, svābhīṣṭa-bhāva-viruddha, to be set down by the rāgānuga seeker: worshipping oneself as the Supreme, the breathing-exercises and ritual hand-gestures, the meditation on Kṛṣṇa in Dvārakā or among His Queens. So the verdict is clear as the dawn water: the beads and the tilaka and the Name upon the body are favorable, and the favorable is never to be thrown away. Those who cast them off, calling them mere vaidhi-bhakti, are not wise; they are the very great fools spoken of here, and for them the ripening of prema lies far, far away.

O wind of this verse, do not let it be misread. The tradition is fierce in its tenderness toward these signs. To wear the Tulasī-strand is the eternal duty of the Vaiṣṇava, for she is Viṣṇu-priyā, the Lord's own beloved laid against the throat. The Skanda Purāṇa even reads her name out of its syllables: of mā and lā, mā means wealth and lā means giving, so the Lord says, "O Māle, you are blessed because you donate the wealth of love-of-God into the hands of the sādhakas, and so you are called mālā." And the Garuḍa Purāṇa turns its face dark against the one who scorns her: those selfish and sinful souls who will not wear the Tulasī-mālā are scorched in the fire of Hari's wrath and never return from hell; what to speak of the Vaiṣṇava, any man who casts her off, even for a single moment, becomes an enemy of Viṣṇu. Therefore, just as every brāhmaṇa wears his sacred thread whether or not his conduct be spotless, so every soul who longs for the love of Viṣṇu wears the beads at the throat.

And so too the tilaka, the little temple on the brow. The Padma Purāṇa has the Lord tell Brahmā that His devotees, at pūjā and at homa, morning and evening with gathered mind, always wear the upright mark that destroys fear, whether out of love for Him, or for their own welfare, or for their protection. And so too the marks of conch and disc. The Smṛti is plain: one must always worship Śrī Hari while bearing His emblems upon the shoulders, for otherwise the worship will not ripen. Some Vaiṣṇavas wear the footprints of Viṣṇu, some the syllables of His Name, pressed as mudrā into the body. Rūpa Gosvāmī himself counts the wearing of the Vaiṣṇava-marks among the sixty-four limbs of devotional practice, and proves its eternality from the Padma Purāṇa: those Vaiṣṇavas who wear strings of Tulasī, of Āmalakī, of lotus-buds at the neck, whose shoulders bear the conch and disc, whose brows are made lovely with the upright line, these swiftly purify the whole world.

Hear this clearly, O seeker, against every clever excuse. There are those who say the tilaka and the beads are only the outward badge of a sect, with nothing to do with the inner path; and there are those a little wiser who allow that a sādhu's dress at least has its use, since a man perched on a chair in hat and coat and trousers slides into a passionate mood, while a man with beads and tilaka and the Name on his body, seated on the floor on a Kuśa-mat, finds a gentler, more virtuous mood awaken in him. But neither of these has touched the truth: that these marks are limbs of Vaiṣṇava practice that must not be set down, because they are a deep cause of the Lord's own satisfaction. The wearing of the marks is itself a way the body kneels and serves. And just as it is an offense to sin upon the strength of the Holy Name, so it is an offense to refuse the marks while telling oneself one has become a rāgānuga and is past them. To drop a limb that should not be dropped is to insult Bhakti-devī herself, and she will not pour her result into hands that have shoved away her own gift; the fruit of all that practice is withheld. This is why the verse turns upon such a one and asks, almost with a raised eyebrow, who is this great fool, who is this supremely unintelligent soul? It is a reprimand, and a true one, for every ordinary sādhaka.

But the verse holds a second reading, and it is the sweeter one, the one that lets the night-flower open. Picture now not the clever shirker but the drowned saint. Picture a mahātma whose bhajana has grown heavy and deep, who has laid his whole mind at the feet of Śrī Rādhā, who floats day and night upon an unbroken ocean of remembrance, the current of his heart running always toward Kṛṣṇa as the Ganga that cannot help but pour downhill. Such a one may rise in the morning and simply forget the beads. He may not draw the tilaka, not from contempt for it, but because he has slipped so far inside the bhāva that the outer hands have stopped reporting for duty. The conch goes unstamped not because the body is rejected but because the body has been forgotten in love. So bereft is he of outward awareness that the marks go unworn, and yet not the faintest harm touches his progress; on the strength of his total worship of Śrīmatī Rādhikā he is still to be counted among the most intelligent of all. Of such a soul the verse cries out in wonder: who are these supremely wise ones? They are the crown-jewels of the earth. The tradition tells, almost shyly, of the siddha Gaurakiśora dāsa Bābājī, whose Tulasī-strand was sometimes at his neck and sometimes not, so wholly had he wandered into the kingdom of love.

Mark this above all, O heart: the very same bare brow is foolishness in the one and glory in the other, and what divides them is not the bead but the bhāva. So the verse plants a double guard, one for the beginner and one for the giant. To the ordinary sādhaka it says: do not dare to skip the beads and the tilaka and the marks, for these are your nourishment and your service, the body's own physical bhajana, and a sādhaka who purposely omits them sets a great obstacle in his own road. But to that same ordinary sādhaka it says with equal force: when you see a true siddha who has lost his beads in the flood of remembrance, do not, do not measure him by your rule, for to disrespect him even silently within the secret chamber of your own mind is to commit vaiṣṇava-aparādha, a gross offense against a devotee. Follow the marked and lawful conduct of the steady saints as you would follow the pole-star; do not imitate the law-transcending freedom of the drowned ones, for that freedom is not yours to copy, it is only theirs to be given. Honor it in them; practice the rule in yourself.

And so Prabodhānanda himself, the tradition holds, sang the verse over again in his own tongue: how can the glory be told of the greatest loving rasika devotees of the three worlds, who have offered their minds to Kṛṣṇa's beloved Rādhā, whom the Vedas and the Śrīmad Bhāgavata alike call most intelligent, even if the conch and disc are not on their shoulders, even if the wondrous Hari-Mandira tilaka is not on their brows, even if the enchanting Tulasī-strings do not hang at their throats? Those who worship the lotus feet of Rādhā are the crown-jewels of the planet earth. O Radhe, let me not be the clever fool who throws away Your gifts; let me also not be the proud judge who weighs Your drowned saints by my small scale. Let me only wear what You have given, and bow to those who have forgotten even that, lost wholly in You.