Reservoir of all Love and Devotion

Today is the most auspicious Radhastami, appearance of Srimati Radharani

bhajāmi rādhām aravinda-netrāṁ

smarāmi rādhāṁ madhura-smitāsyām

vadāmi rādhāṁ karuṇā-bharārdrāṁ

tato mamānyāsti gatir na kāpi  [Stavāvalī]

“I Worship Radha who has lotus eyes, I remember Radha who has a sweet smile, and I speak of Radha who is melted with compassion. There is nothing else for me. She is my life and soul.” A beautiful prayer by Raghunath Das Goswami, a vaishnav acharya.

My mentor explains, “Srimati Radharani is the source of all loving potency in everyone.”

Below is an extract from a book, “The Journey Within” by Radhanath Swami:

“In this connection there is a beautiful story from the holy place of Vrindavan. About five thousand years ago, a jackal was drinking water from a lake. Among animals, jackals are rarely respected. You often hear phrases like “the courage of a lion,” “the strength of a bull,” “the memory of an elephant,” “as graceful as a deer,” or “the voice of a nightingale,” but who wants the qualities of a jackal? Comparing someone to a jackal, that scrawny, wolflike scavenger with the eerie night scream, is considered an insult. Jackals also feed on corpses.

So one day, in Vrindavan, some children saw a she-jackal lapping water from a pond, and laughing, they began to beat her with sticks. The jackal cried in agony, but the children kept beating her. Then some of the children picked up stones and hurled them at her. Trying desperately to escape, the jackal finally found a hole in the ground and huddled inside. Still the children did not relent. They wanted this jackal to suffer. So they screamed harsh words into the hole and then set a fire around its circumference, hoping to smoke the jackal out so they could continue to beat her. The terrified jackal shrieked in pain.

At that time, Radha and her friends were walking some distance away and could hear the jackal’s cries. Feeling compassion, Radha told her friend Lalita, “No one should be suffering like this. Go bring that person to me.” Lalita found the children around the hole with their sticks and sent them home. Then she put out the fire. Reaching into the hole, she pulled out the jackal and brought her, trembling, to Radha. The weeping jackal bowed her head at Radha’s feet. Radha knelt down and petted the jackal on the head and accepted her as her own loving associate. She gave that jackal life’s perfection, pure love for God.

The jackal is like the illusioned soul, and the children are likened to the three types of misery one meets in material existence: miseries caused by one’s own body and mind, by nature, and by other beings. The jackal’s cry was a humble calling out for mercy. When we chant Radha’s holy name (Hare, in the maha-mantra) with the kind of sincerity the she-jackal felt, Radha will give us her heart. No sincere soul will ever be denied Radha’s grace.”