Chapter Seven: Literature of the Rasika Tradition

The work closes this scene with the great festival of the Divine Couple’s union:

Heart joined with heart, face with face, lotus hand with lotus hand, the beloved’s breast against her lover’s chest—ah, they attained the primal joy born of the great festival.¹

In the final portion, the sage repeatedly warns that this secret account of the rāsa must never be narrated to dry intellectualists, hard-hearted people, those who argue perversely through profound delusion and refute rasa, slanderers, or the spiritually impoverished who bring the stench of worldly sensual desire into accounts of sacred rasa.

4. Śrī Bṛhad Brahma Saṃhitā

This major saṃhitā, complete in ten chapters, is a principal source for sweet Vaishnava practice. It prescribes paired worship both of Radha-Krishna and Sita-Rama. The first five chapters present the general discipline of Vaishnava practice. The sixth gives the desire-seed and desire-pin of Radha-Krishna worship and then a Tantric procedure for worshipping the Divine Couple.

Immediately afterward, chapter seven explains the purpose of Rama’s descent and the glory of the six-syllable Rama mantra. It contains many verses upon Śrī Rāmaḥ śaraṇaṃ mama—“Sri Rama is my refuge”—and a magnificent meditation upon Rama.² The remaining chapters explain Vaishnava conduct, Ekadashi, application of the upright sectarian mark, and related observances.

5. Śrī Agastya Saṃhitā

The Agastya Saṃhitā survives in a folio-format edition of thirty-three chapters and 131 pages, printed by Jain Press, Lucknow, in 1898. Sri Vaishnavas revere it as highly authoritative. It is a dialogue between Agastya and Sutikshna.

The beginning establishes the duties of social and spiritual orders. It then lists different Rama mantras for attaining different fruits, together with their ritual placements, applications, pins, seeds, and related elements. Up through chapter twenty-one it explains knowledge of Brahman.³