Chapter Eight: Literature of the Rasika Tradition in Hindi

Sri Sita-Rama-nāma-paratva Padāvalī

By Swami Yugalananyasharan

This is a highly authoritative, experience-confirmed work on the glory and rasa of the Name. It magnificently portrays the intoxication of one who drinks the wine of Rama’s Name. From beginning to end, the entire work is steeped in the rasa of lived experience. It was printed and published by the Lucknow Steam Printing Press in the bright fortnight of Kartik, Vikram Samvat 1969.

The Name bestows discipline, well-being, love, and a flash of gold.
Repeating it with persistence, crying “Alas!”, one tears away the mossy veil of delusion.
Entry into the immutable station comes; within the dense realm and difficult costume of life, love arises and light begins to glitter.
Mind, judgement, movement, and travel fall far away; filled with radiance, the hidden pure form of the true thousand-petalled mystery appears before the eyes.
Yugalananya says: the supremely Beloved is pleased; the Name roots, flowers, removes the thorns of error, and forever fills taste with nectar.

Drinking the sweet and graceful nectar of Rama’s Name, one attains the Husband.
Age after age it becomes graceful, joined to a mass of radiance.
Eternal play shines, covered by its own unique beauty.
Wave after excellent wave arises in incomparable experience.
Yugalananya says: the Couple’s form appears forever beautiful and near.

The heart comes bowing, rained upon within the Name.
Someone has secretly made it drink this cup.
Talk of the matter circulates among both the elect and the common.
How wonderfully it sleeps in the repose of mystical slumber!
No other power can go into that abode.
Its station shines more brightly even than the sun.
Through mercy alone I was drawn helplessly toward the beloved left side.
The painful snares of the perishing world do not remain within that abode.
Even the Couple’s separate self-conception disappears, caught in the net of loving lament.

Rare are the rasikas seen repeating the Name’s rasa.
The Name is the support of their lives; they do not abandon the essence of its happiness even for an instant.
They make its stainless syllables a heart-stealing garland and cast away attachment to special sense objects.
Within one heart they behold the uninscribed, beautifully arrayed Couple as both beyond qualities and endowed with qualities—