Chapter Eight: Literature of the Rasika Tradition in Hindi

Within that bower one prepares a beautiful throne and spreads it with divine jewelled cloth.
There one meditates upon the heart-stealing form of Sri Siyavar, naturally filled with happiness.
From nails to crown, every fresh limb is an ocean of rasa; the discerning mind should contemplate it as conscious and divine.
Whatever lovely ornament adorns each limb, behold it again and again and let the mind be repeatedly enchanted.
Sri Sitapati is a treasury of supremely divine and auspicious qualities, a sun of embodied radiance.
Fix the mind upon him forever in this way; at times, overcome by love, he reveals himself.

Devotional yoga is an aid by which stainless knowledge and its state are obtained.
One gains the principal liberation of isolation, and the threefold dispositions of craving fall away.
Although knowledge is an excellent discipline, it is difficult for the individual soul to grasp.
Without mastery of the senses, O wise one, knowledge is hard to attain; life is short, so devotion is the authoritative way.

Keep the cry “Alas!” forever within the heart and let streams of tears flow from the eyes.
Abandon food, drink, honour, and the rest; day and night remain attached to meeting the Lord.

The relationships are husband and wife, master and attendant, father and son;
bearer of attributes and attribute, embodied soul and body, and the beautiful relation of that which is bound to its support.
They are also possessor and possession, governor and governed, protector and protected;
support and supported, pervader and pervaded, standing face to face.
Behold enjoyed and enjoyer in one rasa, the powerful and powerless;
the perfectly full and the one lacking fullness, the knower and the unknowing.
One is free of every desire, the other swollen with countless desires.
The supremely discerning know the firm relation between self and Supreme in this way.

Although all these relationships are incomparable, husband and wife form the embodiment of happiness.
Within this relation, love shines most fully and the beloved’s rasa appears without covering.

Forgetting every desire for heaven and liberation, one takes the sole vow of meeting the Beloved.
Understanding the body to be formed of twenty-four principles, the loving devotee abandons identification with it.
Through longing to meet Sri Sita-Rama, the movements of Maya’s qualities are destroyed without effort.
The life-breath exits through the gate of the suṣumṇā, pierces the brow, and proceeds to the abode of Rama, destroyer of Khara.
The journey occurs through the suṣumṇā alone, the traveller wholly indifferent to the splendours of Brahma’s realm and the other directions.
Skilled upon the path beginning with light, the soul pierces the exceedingly subtle solar sphere.
The covering of Prakriti is crossed, and then the colour-filled river Viraja is seen.
Greatly blessed, the soul bathes in that river and completely abandons the subtle body.
The causal body and its latent desires are destroyed; purified, the soul becomes a treasury of manifold happiness.