Category: 108 words for Gurudev

What is a mañjarī?

mañjarī [maidservant, bud, flower]

On the transcendental plane called Goloka Vrindāvan, a mañjarī is a female maidservant of Rādhā. Sheis both a servant of Rādhā but also a friend. She is friend through service and a servant through friendship. She does not serve by obligation or personal gain, but by love. The relation or Rādhā and her mañjarīs is of the most intimate kind, only surpassed by the intimacy of conjugal lovers.  

What is an intimate friend? First, an intimate friend is one who has knowledge of her friend, one who shares experiences, who knows the same feelings, the same desires, one who is curious about the same things, who seeks the same things, who loves the same things, who fears the same things. 

But an intimate friend is something more. An intimate friend shares not only interests and goals, tastes and preferences. She shares a world, a reality. An intimate friend is one who as the same answer to these questions: what is real? what is true? what is beautiful? and most of all, what is love?

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What is sevā? I  

sevā [service, servitude, hommage, devotion]

The word sevā is often translated with the word service. Sevā is indeed service, but in the Bhakti tradition, it is much more. 

In everyday experience, service is a common idea. In its most simple form it refers to a transaction: this for that. I do something for your benefit in exchange for something you do or provide for my benefit. There is an action and there is a reward, either material or immaterial. This action is commonly called a service. 

In material form the benefit we gain from a service might take the form of money or some other object of value, perhaps even another service. The reward can also take an immaterial form as some kind of recognition or honour, perhaps a moral reward, or some other kind of intangible satisfaction. 

Sometimes service refers to action done under material constraints of power. We render service not because we choose, but because we are subject to the power of an other. 

In the Bhakti tradition sevā is the highest form of religious practice. It is the most elevated express of devotion, the purest relation to the divine. 

In stark contrast to service done in the mundane, everyday mood, sevā in religious practice is action done without the expectation of reward, payment or compensation. It is action take without ego, self-less action. It is action as gift, as generosity, as love. 

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