Chapter Four: The Perfected Body and Entry into Līlā

The foremost service is to keep Sri Radhika perpetually satisfied through such acts as preparing betel, massaging her feet, offering her milk, and arranging her secret journeys to meet Krishna.

Service also includes becoming a participant in Sri Radha-Krishna’s delightful amorous play and entertaining them with song and instrumental music. In order to intensify Radhika’s amorous adornment, Sri Krishna sometimes sports briefly with a richly endowed heroine whose fortune, pride, confidence, and other qualities rest upon the disposition of a co-wife. This singular good fortune belongs only to Chandravali.

What is the perfected body?

This perfected body is neither an inert body made of bone, flesh, and blood nor the subtle or causal body described by Sankhya. It is an eternally pure, exquisitely formed, radiant, supremely beautiful embodiment of rasa: spiritual, saturated with divine bliss, and composed of being, consciousness, and bliss.

Within Vaishnava practice, this embodiment of the nectar of being, consciousness, and bliss is called a mañjarī. The mañjarīs are appointed to Sri Radha-Madhava’s service with the permission of the sakhīs, and there they experience supreme bliss. Their bodies remain eternally pure, eternally beautiful, eternally sweet, eternally endowed with ever-new loveliness, and eternally radiant. Place and time exert no influence over them.

When practice on this path reaches maturity, the perfected body manifests spontaneously. The body made of the five material elements falls away, but these beautiful women of Vraja—embodiments of the nectar of being, consciousness, and bliss—manifest in the realm of divine love and remain eternally engaged in serving the Divine Couple.

In this discipline and in Sri Radha-Madhava’s abode of love, the names, complexions, garments, ages, directions, and services of Sri Vrindavaneshvara and Sri Vrindavaneshvari, their eight principal sakhīs, and the eight principal mañjarīs are traditionally given as follows. Ages are listed as years, months, and days.