Category: Vilāpa-kusumāñjali

Love stories about us

In a poignant scene in Verse 89 of Śrī Vilāpa Kusumāñjali, Rādhā leads her maidservant Tulasi mañjarī to a secret cave in Govardhana Hill to teach her songs about divine love. Whose love? Her own.

Rādhā, the embodiment of divine love, knows and feels every emotion available to our mundane hearts, and more. But she is very shy about teaching songs about these emotions.

The mundane mind can understand this. After all, they are songs about Rādhā’s most intimate and confidential pastimes with her divine lover Mohan. The songs are an intimate history of their divine love affair.

The songs, which Rādhā only shares with her dear maidservants, can be used to revive her dear Mohan in case he should faint in the throes of passion. By singing to him the story of his own love, he is brought back to consciousness.

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I am yours

What does it mean to belong to God?

In one of the final verses (Verse 96) of his passionate and moving Vilāpa Kusumāñjali (Bouquet of Lamentations) Raghunātha Dāsa cries out in ecstasy:

I am Yours, I am Yours! I cannot live without You! O Goddess! 

The ardent cry is directed at Rādhā, the lover of Kṛṣna, and therefore the source of the highest love in the world, the love for God. In the Bhakti tradition of Vaishnavism, the goal of life is service to this divine love, embodied through loving service in everyday life. 

Of all the disciples of the diving loving pair Rādhā-Kṛṣna, Raghunātha Dāsa is known as the deepest and the most passionate. He wants so ardently to serve divine love that his very being merges with the loving energy of Rādhā, the Goddess of love. 

In Bhakti, the path to transcendence is through devotional service, serving others in a way that recognises and honours the divine love in every soul. To love means to love from the heart, from the soul, not from the mind and the ego.

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Swimming in Rādhā Kuṇḍa

Verse 69

Because the kuṇḍa is endowed with Priyājī’s qualities of dearness it bestows a love equal to Radha’s on one who bathes there even once. 

Śri Ananta dāsā Bābājī

We are natural born lovers. Our deepest and most authentic qualities are realised through the expression of that love. This happens on many levels, in many forms, and towards many different kinds of people.

In the last sentence of his commentary to the final verse of Bhagavad-gītā Śrīla Prabhupad declares that the ‘normal condition’ of every living entity is in the ‘pleasure-giving potency’ of Kṛṣṇa, the divinely loving energy of Rādhā. He means that to love God is our highest aspiration and our most natural state. And yet we all find ourselves so far from that state, so far from being ourselves.

What can it mean to love God?  It does not mean turning our back to our imperfect existence in order to seek God somewhere far away in the desert or high on a mountain top. It must mean to love what is purest in us and what is purest in others. 

To love God does not mean to look elsewhere, but to look in ourselves. To love God does not require us to search for something perfectly loveable beyond us because what we are is somehow not loveable. On the contrary, to love God is to love the divine within us. 

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The power of divine love

Verse 42

In his commentary to Verse 42 of Vilāpa-kusumāñjali, Ananda Das Babaji describes the different classifications of love. There are four levels of intensity of that love, spanning from the love of ordinary devotees, to the love of the great sages, to the love of the Vrajavāsīs, to the love of Rādhārāni, which is the greatest love of all. 

Kṛṣna, he goes on, ‘is controlled by His devotees according to the amount of love they have for Him, and Śrī Rādhikā has the greatest love for Him (parama mahān), therefore She controls Him to the utmost’. 

Ananta das babaji thus gives us an important lesson about the difference between divine love (prema) and mundane love (kama) 

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