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Picture the one this song adores. Outwardly he is nothing remarkable. He may rise before dawn and perform the daily Vedic offerings the śruti enjoins, the fire fed, the mantras given their measure, the sandhyā-vandana and the japa done in their order; or he may not. He may receive a garland someone lays around his neck, a smear of sandal on the brow, sweet food and the small ordinary luxuries that pass through any life; or he may quietly let them all go. Watch him from the road and you cannot tell which day is which. Ritual done, ritual undone, garland accepted, garland declined. The tradition says plainly: it does not matter. It is neither gain to him nor loss. For the place where he actually lives is nowhere on that road. Remember how the song just before this one showed the rāgānugā-sādhaka who never lets go of his neckbeads and tilaka because they are the very ornaments of the vidhi-mārga, and the siddha who, swept up in ecstasy, sometimes lets even those slip and is not thereby impeded. Now Prabodhānanda turns to us with a warning wrapped in adoration: do not misjudge these hidden ones. Their confidential behaviour is not what it looks like.

Where does such a soul live, then, if not on the road of duty and pleasure? He has crossed over. Gūḍha-āścarya-rasāḥ: the hidden, astonishing flavours, so secret they astonish even the one who tastes them. His mind has become bhāva-rahasya-pāraga, gone all the way to the far bank of the mystery of love. Think of a river you cannot wade. Most stand on this near shore and argue about the water, measure it, perform their disciplines beside it. But this soul has already swum to the other side, and on that far bank stands the bower of Śrī Rādhikā and Her Prāṇeśvara, and the whole world of rule and reward has shrunk to a faint murmur behind him. He belongs to Śrī-Rādhikā-preyas, to Rādhā's own Beloved, Her priyatama Śrī Hari, and through that belonging he belongs to Her. That is his whole address.

See first how high above appetite he has been carried. The one who has won true faith through the scriptures is no longer even interested in liberation, the great goal that the jñānīs strain toward, let alone the enjoyments of the heavenly planets that the fruitive workers covet. And here the tradition is exacting: so long as the desire for bhukti or for mukti still lurks in the heart, prema will not be born, not though a man labour at his sādhana for a lifetime. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu, that as long as the witch-like cravings for sense-pleasure and for liberation sit in the heart, how could the bliss of devotion ever rise there; and the tradition records the same in the Caitanya Caritāmṛta, that if the wish for enjoyment or release stays in the mind, even practice will not bring forth love. Śrī Jīva Gosvāmī, glossing this, says the tenderest thing: yes, the devotee does attain liberation, naturally, on the strength of his bhakti, yet the desire for it never once awakens in him; release is only a concomitant, a by-product that follows him without his ever turning to look at it. So Līlāśuka sang it sweetly: O Lord, let our devotion to You only grow steady, and we may by chance behold Your divine adolescent form, and then liberation herself will stand before us with folded palms to serve, and dharma, artha and kāma will wait quietly upon us. So the four human aims dwindle to nothing for the one who has tasted the sacred flavours of pure devotion.

And here is the secret hidden inside this freedom: it is the very nature of this love to hide itself. Gūḍhāścarya-rasa, the secret astonishing flavour, conceals the one who holds it. So these devotees humbly count themselves unqualified, and to keep their own glory veiled they will sometimes follow the varṇāśrama duties of the Vedas just like ordinary karmīs, and sometimes drop them altogether, and either way no one should find a single fault in them. Jīva Gosvāmī gives the loveliest image for this: prīti, love of God, though she is a feeling, he likens to a beautiful and juicy ladylove of the Lord, a rūpa-rasavatī ramaṇī who naturally enchants the mind and grows more enchanting still when adorned. And one of her ornaments, he says, is the Candrahāra-necklace that makes the devotee conceal his own greatness; the more he hides his exalted state, the more prīti's sweetness swells. Beyond all confidential Vraja-bhakti stands the service of Śrī Rādhā, and the hearts of these hidden ones are fastened nowhere but on Her lotus-feet.

So the rite and the renunciation no longer hold him from either side. The man who clings to his offerings is bound by them; the man who proudly throws them away is bound by the throwing. But the one whose heart is sunk in Her rasa is bound by neither. If the Vedic karma comes, let it come; sometimes it comes as pure service, the way Mahārāja Yudhiṣṭhira performed the great Rājasūya sacrifice, looking for all the world like an ordinary karmī, yet doing it only to keep his beloved Kṛṣṇa, surrounded by His Dvārakā associates, long in his palace, and to gather opulence like Dvārakā's own so that he might serve Him and make Him glad. That kind of karma is no bondage at all; it is the highest fruit of devotion. The activities of such souls are most difficult to comprehend.

And even where the senses have not been fully conquered, the sense-objects cannot overwhelm him. The Bhāgavata declares it in the eleventh canto: though My devotee may not control his senses and cannot give up enjoyment, by the boldness of his devotion he is not overcome by the objects of sense. Jīva Gosvāmī, in his Krama-Sandarbha, shows how: the devotee, even while tasting the pleasure he cannot yet relinquish, reproaches himself and prays humbly for the Lord's mercy, and the Lord, drawn helplessly to that humility, swiftly lifts him past the attachment and pours the nectar of His own service into him. Viśvanātha Cakravartī, in his Sārārtha-Darśinī, gives two pictures for it. A heroic warrior, about to win the field, may take an arrow or two, yet he will not accept defeat; he rises and routs the enemy. A sick man may swallow medicine that takes some days to work; the fever may even return that very day, but it is a fever already dying, and soon it is wholly gone. Just so, the devotee may seem hampered by his attachments, but on the great strength of his bhakti he is already victorious over them. If even such a struggling soul is not overwhelmed, what then of the one settled in renunciation? And when this one does accept garlands and sandal-paste, it is never for his own pleasure; he is the Lord's servant, and he takes them as the Lord's merciful remnants, His prasāda. Uddhava himself, the tradition reminds us, taught that even māyā is conquered in just this way, when he spoke of the garlands and fragrances already enjoyed by the Lord.

Hear, then, the warning folded into this wonder. Let no renunciate who has gathered a little learning grow proud and look down upon the householder-devotees. The greater part of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu's own dear associates were householders, and the very dust of their feet is begged for by all the renounced. These householders too were and are forever immersed in the great secrets of the service of Śrī Rādhā's lotus-feet, and they must never be lumped together with fruitive workers, dry knowers, or yogīs. Prabodhānanda echoes the counsel of the Prema-Bhakti-Candrikā: be careful never to be touched, in mind or company, by others; the singing of the names of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa is the highest meditation, so seek no other truth; do not grow attached to those who mix their bhakti with karma or yoga; cling only to the opinion of the people of Vraja, for that is the greatest treasure.

There is a fuller reading still, the tradition adds, that fits the perfected siddha-bhaktas, whose conduct is unfathomable even to sādhakas, let alone to karmīs, jñānīs and yogīs. Even when they do not follow every prescribed rule of hearing, chanting, deity-worship and praise, they must not be slighted in the least, for they are forever afloat in the ocean of dhruvānusmṛti, unbroken meditation, and their ways are not to be read by ordinary eyes. And precisely here a guardrail is set, the very heart of this purport: the sādhaka must not imitate them. Viśvanātha Cakravartī, in his Ānanda-Candrikā gloss on the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi, asks whose footsteps the sādhaka should follow, the siddhas' or his own kind's, and answers neither extreme. Do not imitate the siddhas, for in them moves an independence like Kṛṣṇa's own, the svairaṁ caranti of the Bhāgavata's tenth canto. And do not imitate the ill-behaved among sādhakas either, even the one of whom the Gītā says, "though he behave very badly, if he worships Me with undivided heart." Follow only the sadācārīs, the devotees of pure conduct who keep the injunctions the devotional scriptures lay down. So when you see some siddha mahātma moving beyond the Vedic rule, do not copy him, and do not fault him: that is the whole gist. These siddhas wander free in the bhāva-rājya, the kingdom of love, having passed beyond every rule and prohibition, their hearts drowned in the flavours of Śrī-Śrī Rādhā-Mādhava's feet. They move wherever the waves of bhāva steer them; bhāva has become the helmsman and not they. That is why the words fall in their twinned, indifferent pairs: kurvantu kurvantu mā, let them do or not do; gṛhṇantu muñcantu vā, let them take or let go. And even the ācāryas, though they are nitya-siddha, eternal associates of the Lord already, chose to behave as careful sādhakas, fixed like the pole-star, so that the neophytes might have a steady example to steer by.

So Prabodhānanda gathers it all into his Bengali refrain, and the tradition sings it after him: those rasikas devoted to Rādhā's feet may or may not perform the karma-kāṇḍa of the Vedas, may or may not do their japa and sandhyā-vandana, and still they are the greatest of saints. They may wear the Lord's leftover garlands or renounce them; let the ignorant of this earth reproach them a hundred times. But, O brother, those great souls whose only wealth and only treasure is Rādhā's lotus-feet are the very ones most able to enter the grave, deep secret of the moods of Śrī Hari, Rādhā's priyatama. For Kṛṣṇa feels a greater, more lavish love, a snehādhikya, for Rādhā's own maidservants than for any other; and so, Prabodhānanda declares, whoever takes shelter at Rādhā's feet is the greatest soul of all.

And the tradition leaves us one small, unforgettable picture of how unguessable such a one looks from outside: a saint who one day held a strand of Tulasī-beads to count his japa, with Ṭhākura Mahāśaya's Prārthanā and Prema-Bhakti-Candrikā beside him, and another day wore no beads at all, counting his Names on a knotted string of cloth, his very loincloth untied. Watch him and you would never know. He moves among us, this hidden one, and we never guess. He does or does not light the morning fire, he greets the neighbor, he takes or refuses the garland, and inside, every breath, he is being drawn deeper into the grove where Rādhā laughs and Her Beloved waits. He is in the world and not in its grip. His state never trembles, because the One who holds it is Herself unshakeable. This is what the song adores: not a doctrine, but a face turned so fully toward Rādhā's feet that nothing in three worlds can turn it back.