Yugala-Śataka

The opening pada places them in the eye before placing them in any scene. Dark and fair. He against her, she against him. Not a god and his consort, but a single shape that has chosen to appear in two bodies so that love would have somewhere to happen. The poet does not say one is the lord and the other the servant. He says they lean toward each other and the leaning is the lord.

The padas that follow take that single image and turn it slowly, the way a lamp is turned in the hand. In one pada the dark one is the cloud and the fair one is the lightning that the cloud carries. In another pada she is the ground that the rain wants to fall on and he is the rain that wants the ground. In another pada they are the two banks of a river, and the river is the love that flows between them. In another pada they are the two halves of a single conch, and the sound that the conch makes is their meeting.

Through these early songs the poet refuses to choose. He will not say which of them is primary. He will not say which of them is the ground and which the figure. The Nimbārka theological position is being lived in the verse before it is being argued. Each pada says, in its own image, the same thing. They are not one alone. They are not two apart. They are the kind of together that the word together was made to point at.

By pada fifteen the reader who has been following the poet has already been changed. The habit of seeing one before the other has been gently undone. When the rāsa-maṇḍala arrives in the next stretch of padas, it arrives to a reader who is already prepared to see it as the dance of a single yoked breath, not the dance of a man surrounded by women.

The poet does not begin the rāsa padas by describing a particular night. He begins by saying that the dance is always going on. Somewhere, in the inner Vrindavan that the outer Vrindavan only points to, the maṇḍala is forming. The gopīs are arriving. The flute has already begun. The poet's claim is small and total. This dance does not stop. Whatever else stops, this does not.

Inside the maṇḍala the structure is the same as the structure of the opening padas. The two at the center are not a man and his harem. They are the yugala. The gopīs around them are not other women in competition for the same lover. They are reflections of the central pair, the way many candles lit from one candle are not separate fires but one fire wearing many bodies. Each gopī is dancing with her own form of the dark one, but every dark one is the same dark one, and every fair partner is the same fair one wearing many faces.

The pada that holds the still center of the dance is the pada in which the poet stops describing motion altogether. He says, simply, that the two of them have stopped. The circle is moving around them. The flute is sounding. The gopīs are turning. And in the middle the two at the center are not turning. They are looking at each other. Everything else is the dance. The looking is the rāsa.

Then the motion resumes. The poet returns to descriptions of footfall and ankle-bell, of hand caught in hand, of the night that is so long because the moon has been asked to wait. But the still pada is the door at the heart of this stretch. After it the reader understands that the rāsa-līlā is not, finally, a dance. It is the visible form of the looking that the two at the center are doing. Take away the dance and the looking remains. The looking is the eternal thing.

The poet's first kuñja-pada is an arrival pada. The fair one has come through the path between the trees. The dark one has been waiting. The pada does not narrate a conversation. It narrates the way the air in the kuñja changes when she enters. The leaves that had been still begin to move. The flowers that had been closed begin to open. The poet says it is not the breeze that moves them. It is her.

The middle kuñja-padas are full of small gestures that say everything. He places a flower in her hair. She straightens the garland around his neck. He laughs at something. She does not say the thing that would make the laughter end. The poet's hand stays light. He does not press into the gestures or explain them. He lets the small gestures stand as small gestures, and the smallness is the depth.

The most often quoted of the kuñja-padas is the one in which the poet steps back. He says that the kuñja has a door, and the door has a curtain of jasmine, and the curtain is closed. He himself, the poet, is sitting outside the curtain. He cannot see what is happening inside. He can hear, faintly, the sound of bracelets, and the sound of a flute being set down, and a small laugh. He says he is content. He does not want to lift the curtain. He wants to be the one who sits outside it.

The closing kuñja-padas return to the morning. The sakhīs arrive with garlands. The night has ended. The two have come out of the kuñja and the kuñja has resumed being a place in the forest. But the poet says, in the last of these padas, that the kuñja is now different. It has become a place that has held them. The trees that surround it have learned the inside of the night they will never see. From now on the trees are the trees that know.

The first of the closing padas is a small confession. The poet says he has been singing for a long time now. He has run out of new ways to say what they look like. He has used every image he could find. None of the images is sufficient. He asks the two of them to forgive his attempts. He does not stop. He continues with the imperfect words he has, because the alternative is silence, and silence is also an imperfect word.

The padas that follow are addressed prayers. He asks the fair one to keep him in her gaze. He asks the dark one not to forget the small servant who has been singing about him without his asking. He asks both of them, together, to let his eyes be the eyes that watch them, and to let his mouth be the mouth that names them, for as long as he is alive and after he is no longer alive.

Through these padas the poet slowly turns his contemplation inward. He says that the kuñja he has been describing in the earlier padas is also somewhere inside his own chest. The two who meet in the outer Vrindavan also meet in the inner one. He does not need to travel to find them. He needs only to sit and let his attention rest. When his attention rests, the kuñja appears. When the kuñja appears, the two are already there.

The hundredth pada is a benediction in the form of a description. The poet says, simply, that the dark one is leaning against a tamāla and the fair one is standing beside him. The flute has been set down. The night is long. The poet, far from them and inside them at once, is content. The work ends in the middle of a moment that the poet does not want to end. The hundredth pada is a hand placed on the world to keep it still.

An argument for bhedābheda runs like this. The soul is not identical with the absolute, because the soul has limits the absolute does not have. The soul is also not different from the absolute, because the soul depends on the absolute for its very existence. Therefore the soul is both different and non-different from the absolute, naturally, by its own nature. The Sanskrit treatises of the lineage take this argument carefully through every objection.

The Yugala-Śataka does not run the argument. It places the reader in front of the divine couple and lets the couple do the work. Watching Rādhā and Krishna in the kuñja, the reader sees, without being told, what bhedābheda means. They are two. The fair body and the dark body are unmistakably distinct. They speak to each other, look at each other, walk toward each other. None of this could happen if they were one in a way that erased the twoness. And yet they are one. Their breath has the same rhythm. Their attention is a single attention. Their delight in each other is one delight worn from two sides.

The reader who has watched the couple through a hundred padas no longer needs the philosophical argument. The argument has become an experience. When the reader later opens a Sanskrit treatise of the lineage and encounters the technical phrase svābhāvika-bhedābheda, the phrase no longer feels like a position to be defended. It feels like a description of what the reader has already seen. The poetry has done the philosophical work.

This is what the lineage means when it calls the Yugala-Śataka its vernacular flowering. The flower does not argue for its own existence. It opens. The argument that produced it is held inside the petals as an unspoken structure. A reader who has learned to look at the flower has learned the argument without ever being made to face it.

Inside the Nimbārka sampradāya the padas are sung. They are not silent objects on a page. They are taken up at the temple and at the gathering and in the home, set to traditional melodies, returned to season after season. A devotee may sing the same pada, on the same morning of the year, every year of an entire adult life. The pada does not wear out. It opens further with each return.

The padas are also the basis for kīrtana-teaching. A senior devotee will sit with a younger one and unfold a single pada slowly, tracing the image, naming the philosophical undercurrent without making a lecture of it, returning to the pada and letting it close again. A few padas, taught this way, become a lifetime's contemplative library. The hundred do not all need to be unpacked at once. The lineage assumes they will be returned to.

Beyond the lineage, a contemporary reader who comes to the Yugala-Śataka without formal initiation can still receive what the work most wants to give. The training in the yugala-eye, the gradual undoing of the habit of seeing one before the other, the discovery that the divine can be contemplated as already two-as-one: none of this requires sectarian membership. The padas teach by occurring. A reader who reads them slowly, even in modern English rendering, is being taught.

What the work asks of the reader, finally, is small and complete. Sit. Watch the two. Do not choose between them. Do not place one in the foreground and the other in the background. Let the looking be on both at once. When the looking is on both at once, something is happening that is neither monism nor dualism. The Sanskrit word for it is bhedābheda. The Brajbhāṣā word for it is yugala. The everyday English word for it has not yet been invented. Until it is, the hundred padas hold the place where the word will go.