Chapter Eight: Literature of the Rasika Tradition in Hindi

Cherish the clear words of the Veda, understood and beloved.
Take as certain the endless virtues declared by the saints.
Free of pride and display, reflect upon immediate and beautiful service.
With good understanding, regard sorrow and happiness alike; the mind no longer creates stars within darkness.
Yugalananyasharan says: remove difficult and contentious argument.

Rama’s Name is exceedingly dear to me.
That natural, conscious sound is a treasury of rasa and the faithful bearer of love.
It is touchstone, wish-fulfilling gem, celestial tree, and countless wish-fulfilling cows forever.
Install it within, abandon everything else, and never separate from it by any means, day or night.
Reliance upon anything else is a storehouse of fault, sorrow, poverty, and burning in every direction.
Tasting and tasting the nectar of one’s own Name, let the heart rejoice again and again, morning and evening.
Yugalananyasharan says: receiving the True Guru’s gracious glance, one becomes illumined.

Worship the incomparable Name of the Couple.
This alone is the seed of the secret of rasa; the excellent saints and Vedas possess no higher form.
With love, intimacy, and complete trust, meditate upon their essential form.
Joined to the exhilaration of rasika company, abandon the heat and fatigue of worldly becoming.
Stainless, natural experience shines, and ugly karmic formations perish.
Grasp the virtues of kind and well-conducted holy people, obtaining wise and truthful form.
Yugalananyasharan says: excellent remembrance is the beautiful sovereign of nectar.

My beloved’s incomparable, colour-filled Name tastes sweet to me.
Love grows nowhere else; every moment it steals my heart.
Even in dreams, desire for the four fruits is cast away with the world’s burden of pleasure and prosperity.
Understanding that the Name alone is both discipline and attainment, I shall hold it firmly in mind, speech, and action.
Without effort I shall naturally cross the ocean of innumerable doctrines.
Yugalananyasharan says: it fills one with constant happiness and a most wondrous transcendent feeling.

First, receive from the guru the beautiful Name, the ocean of happiness and embodied form.
Set the tongue to repeating it and let special joy increase within the heart.
Through the Name, abandon the exhausting current of varṇāśrama duties and ritual action.
Grasp forever the discipline and rasa of love, becoming absorbed in the natural true form.
Remain forever silent toward the world, forgetting every debate and grief.
Let the unbroken current of the Name continually fill restraint, self-mastery, and affection with nectar.
Yugalananyasharan says: this reveals the true substance and its divine play.