Chapter Eight: Literature of the Rasika Tradition in Hindi

The lovely chin flashes, and clever eyes desire it, while the mind looks on.
It reduces restless desire to powder and removes the heart’s darkness and pride.

What is a rosebud beside it? What is a hard throat, how cruel?
Where else is such a tender lotus-chin, filled every instant with ever-new light?

Upon each quick chin rests an excellent beauty-spot, lovely upon fair and dark.
The forms of lover and beloved seem to have taken graceful repose there.

The yellow beauty-spot upon the graceful dark Beloved is a treasury of the Couple’s rasa.
Yugalananya says: adorned in affection, may I remain beholding it for an age.

The beauty-spots within the heart-stealing forms of the youthful Couple are treasures of consciousness.
Fix attachment upon them every moment, and cause the loving heart to remain attached.

Before Sri Sitavar’s moon-face, lotus after lotus speaks only in shame.
Neither Veda nor moon, both marked by limitation, can describe the perfect arrangement of that face.

What is the moon, an abode of stains and helpless before its fragmentary phases?
Yugalananya says: the radiance of their beautiful faces is inaccessible and boundless at every moment.

Sri’s eyes and speech hold waves of severity, poison, joy, grace, enchantment, and fresh vision.
Yugalananya says: behold their covering beauty and let the mind find peace.

Every limb reflects in every other, and all bodies become mirrors.
Even if many ornaments were removed, the limbs themselves would still be recognised as ornament.

Whenever karma brings me to birth, may love for Sita and her Beloved increase.
May I dwell in their excellent abode while remembering the Name with right devotion.

Without Sri Sita-Rama, terrifying fear arises;
without truth, there is no right way at all, and day by day the course turns contrary.

My unfeeling benefactor has become a thief and robbed me in every way.
To whom can I tell the full account of my condition?
Carry this account of mine to my dilbar,
in whose hands I have gladly sold myself and become his maidservant.
I have looked in every direction and searched the people of the world.
Show compassion, gracious Lord; do not remain unfeeling now.
Siyavallabha, grant me true company and an excellent dwelling in the city of Awadh,
or a lovely, wondrous residence near sacred Kamadgiri.