Verse 94
In the West we often understand our world in terms of its history. The typical ingredients are politics, power, money and greed. The typical result is suffering.
From the point of view of the rasika, one who has the wisdom to relish the loving nectar flowing through the Creation, the history of the world is the history of love.
In his commentary to Rādhā Rasa Sudhāndhi, Verse 94, Ananda das Bābājī, describes an episode from the Gaura Līlā that he calls ‘The festival of Srī Rādhā’s mercy’. It is the story of love, jealousy, loyalty and betrayal.
The turns of the story might remind us of Greek tragedy or Shakespearean comedy of errors. But this pastime describe in Verse 94 and its commentary, do not end in sorrow and loss, but in a higher form of feeling.
Rādhā has been waiting all night for her planned tryst with Mohan. She has carefully decorated the arbour in the forest of Vrindavan. When he finally appears at dawn, he has visible signs of lovemaking with an other, in particular, Rādhā’s close friend and maidservant Candrāvali.
Rādhā first pretends to send Mohan back to her rival lover, but then instead chastises him, then refuses to meet with him. When Mohan turns to the maidservant Candrāvali for help, she redoubles the chastisement of the lover she had met in disloyalty to her own mistress. Mohan puts himself at the mercy of Candrāvali, his lover of the night before, begging for her help in making things right with Rādhā.
On another level, though, Mohan takes pleasure from the chastisement of both Rādhā and her maidservant, knowing secretly that her anger is an expression of her love.
And on yet a third level, Candrāvali, who has betrayed her mistress by meeting Mohan, gently reminds Rādhā of Mohan’s beauty and virtues, and finally suggests bringing Mohan before her. In Mohan’s heart, this creates a new wave of rasa, a new experience of pleasure, saturated with love.
Ananda das Bābājī’s retelling brings to life the many extremes of emotion in the subtle līlā involving Candrāvali, Rādhā and Mohan. The intensity of love, the bitterness of jealousy, the resentment of loyalty, and the tenderness of humility come together to cause the creation of the a new wave of rasa in Mohan’s heart, a new level of desire, and an unsurpassed form of love.
As Rādhā lets go of her displeasure at Mohan, she opens the doors to the pleasure-giving energy that she alone embodies. ’Śrīmatī gives up Her pique and from this proceeds and meeting for the divine couple, which is hot and sweet at the same time, like boiling sugarcane juice’. This is her hlādinī-śaktī, her pleasure-giving energy, the power she holds to give bliss, even to God himself. As the new wave of rasa fills Mohan, a new, higher form of love is created in the heart of God, and his pleasure increases.
The Gaura Līlā, the loving pastimes of Rādhā and Mohan, goes on eternally. But in each cycle of trysts, tenderly depicted in the poems and prayers of Śrīlā Prabodhānanda Sarasavtī and others, the evolution of the soul never ends. Prema, love for God, grows with every hour, every minute, every second.
If worldly history makes news when a new war is started, rasika history makes news when a new form of love is created.