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?
Of all the millions of gopis who grace the forests of Vraja and all the countless sakhīs who honour Rādhā with their friendship, the most intimate young girls are the nitya–sakhīs and prāṇa-sakhīs: Rādhā’s eternal friends and soul-friends: the mañjarīs.
The mañjarīs resemble us in many ways, or rather we resemble them. That is why they hold a special place in our hearts and minds. We understand them because we are made like them, made of the same soul, made of the same dust. The mañjarīs are the most refined and perfected form of what all of us actually are in our deepest hearts: servants of prema, servants of the love God.
Like all of us, the mañjarīs live for prema, they live to let divine love flourish. Like all living entities they live for the love of God. The greatest, most intense, most personal and most present way of loving divinely is to serve the Divine Lover, Rādhā, in the quest to fulfil her desire to unite with her beloved, Mohan.
It is often said that Rādhā is prema—divine love—itself. Through the miracle of Caitanya Mahāprabhu, what we call ‘Rādhā’ is actually Kṛṣṇa in the mood and form of Rādhā. Rādhā appears as the divine lover, as God the lover, relishing the divine beloved, Mohan, as God the beloved.
This divine love, prema, is born out out of the miraculous experience of yearning offered by Caitanya Mahāprabhu. By appearing as two beings in one, two beings that yearn for each other, Mahāprabhu made us understand that the divine is nothing other than this eternal yearing. The mañjarīs are the guardians of this yearning, the servants of prema. the servants of the lover of Mohan, namely Rādhā.
Pure in her emotion and sure in her task, the mañjarī’s very being is to serve Rādhā, to be constantly and perfectly identified with nurturing Rādhā’s one desire, love for Mohan, by nurturing her desire, comforting her in her vulnerabilities, organising playful love games, and overcoming the obstacles to her love.
The mañjarīs are eternally perfect beings, always fresh and eager, eyes always wide open, acutely aware of the desires and sensations of Rādhā and Mohan, sensitive to their most intimate emotional needs of Rādhā, in tune with the ebb and flow of her passions, alert to the criss-crossing sentiments that sometimes favour, sometimes hinder her from expressing her wants. The mañjarīs feel what she feels, even when she does not know the best way to express it. They sense her sensations, always in tune with the thoughts and feelings that attract her to Mohan, yet prevent her from expressing to him the endless love that exists in her heart for only that purpose. The mañjarīs are always attentive to her wants and needs, even when she herself is not aware.
The mood of the mañjarī is therefore a divine mystery. She is so intimately connected with her mistress that their wishes are inseparable. She desires ardently, but not for herself. She is intensely present for Rādhā, to the point of disappearing into her, she wants ardently the wants of another, and she will do anything in order to be nothing.
This is why mañjarī-bhāva, the spiritual mood of the maidservant is said to be the highest form of experience. Without it, even the endless powers of the Rādhā and Mohan are useless in realising their desire to live out their divine love. In the end, what makes greatness of the divine, is the loving exchange it engenders. That exchange is in the merciful hands of the mañjarīs.
For the mañjarī, love and service are non-different. If Rādhā is our model for love of God, the mañjarī is our model for devotional service, the heart of Bhakti. The moods and pastimes of the mañjarīs express one of our key lessons: that love and service, when lived authentically, are inseparable. The highest form of relation is service to the other.
Service to any and all is love for Rādhā.
A mañjarī is a friend of Rādhā, a fellow milkmaid, an equal. But it is a friendship of perfect intimacy, the friendship of one whose heart has aligned with Rādhā, who wants what she wants, who feels the needs she has, who understands the desires she feels. With this extraordinary intimacy comes the wish that Rādhā will receive what she wants, find satisfaction for her needs, and realise her desires.
Thus the loving friendship is inseparable from a mood of service, of giving, of providing, of fulfilling, of sharing all things of the heart and of the soul. The mood of the mañjarīs expresses a generosity that does not peak before it rises to compete selflessness, to a place where the soul is giving itself and where the gift it gives is the gift of pure love.