Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 6

I

SWEET MOTHER

(New Series)

The Golden Harvest

The poet-saint Ramprasad says:

“O my man, you do not know how to till!

If you knew! Oh, you have such a piece of land –

This human life of yours!

You could have reaped gold from it.”

Indeed this human body is the precious land from which one could reap a harvest of gold. For this body has the proud privilege of receiving the golden touch of the Divine materially and to hold it and maintain it. This materialisation of the Divine is the supreme alchemy of which the body is capable. There are other forms of union with the Divine, all forms of consciousness, of the mind, of the vital – subtle perceptions, thoughts, emotions, even sensations – all delightful but immaterial: even without the body they can be felt and experienced, they are true and real in their own authenticity. But the body brings in a new element, altogether different a phenomenon. It makes a thing living, real materially. The human body has this strange virtue of Touch – the body contact – which makes what is dead (matter) alive – mrtam kañcana bodhayanti (Rigveda). We know the biblical adage: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating thereof." This capacity of eating is the privilege of the body alone: only the body can supply this proof that makes a thing concretely real. Why did Ramprasad utter these words somewhat rough and uncouth to a civilised

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hearing? - "Oh Mother, I will eat you up, devour you, even as I do a plate of vegetable!" There is delight in devotion, there is joy in surrender, even ecstasy in love, but where is the inexplicable exquisiteness of utter oneness in the physical embrace – as for example, in Radha's experience?

Radha is the personification of the supreme global and integral identification of the Divine with the human, or rather the transfusion of the Divine Person into the substance of the human person. Radha says, every drop of blood, every particle of flesh in her body cries out for every drop of blood, every particle of flesh of Krishna's body. Radha has made, as it were, a fossil transmutation of her body replacing it bit by bit by Krishna's body. She feels she is none other than Krishna, even physically himself. It is an utter unity and identity - not merely in the Vedantic way, up there in Atman, but down here also: it is an infusion or immixture in Nature also. It is a kind of coalescence by fusion as of the sub-atomic particles (– the matrix, by the way, of the supreme incalculable energy). Because of this supreme union and identification, even down to the material body, Radha feels that her body is no longer her own but Krishna's and therefore utterly sacred. She cries out as the Vaishnava poet says: "O sister, when this body dies, do not burn it or throw it into the river, but keep it suspended on a branch of the tamal tree. Tamal has a dark hue, my Krishna is also of dark hue. I love Tamal because I love Krishna."

The earth, the body that has once received the touch of the earth-made body of the Divine never loses the virtue of that contact. That contact remains imbedded in the substance of the mortal human body: it abides there as a secret aroma, as the fragrance of a flower hidden in its pollens. So long as the flower lasts, the perfume' will last – even after, even when it has withered.

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