Open-source software vs open-source religion

It struck me today that there is a duality between the way in which open-source programmers work and the way in which philosophy and theology was done in classical India. (This might seem like a strange duality to bring up, but I do it because people frequently make misleading analogies between computer programming and Sanskrit grammar and other Indian disciplines. Also, because it’s my blog, so there!)

The point of open-source programming is that everyone can edit the source code. You fork a Github repository, make your changes, push them, and perhaps they might get accepted into the main code repository itself. Of course, it’s important that you (broadly) use the same sort of compiler/interpreter that the project is intended to work with, otherwise your code may not quite work the same way on others’ machines. 

In short, for open-source software, the rule is:

change the source, keep the interpreter ( / compiler / whathaveyou).

The structure of classical Indian thought is the precise opposite of this. Most of the oldest philosophical texts were written in laconic, even ambiguous, sūtras. Later philosophers then came to write commentaries on these texts, while their disciples wrote super-commentaries on the commentaries, while their disciples wrote super-super-commentaries on the super-commentaries on the commentaries on the sūtras, and so on.

(Lest you think I am joking, here are just two examples:

1. The foundational text of the Nyāya tradition is the Nyāya-sūtra of Gautama. This gathered the following tower of commentaries:
• Vātsyāyana’s Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya
• Uddyotakara’s Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya-vārttika
• Vācaspati Miśra’s Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya-vārttika-tātparya-ṭīkā
• Udayana’s Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya-vārttika-tātparya-ṭīkā-pariśuddhi
2. The foundational text of all Vedāntic schools is the Brahma-sūtra or Vedānta-sūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, sometimes also called Vyāsa. If we look just at one branch of commentaries on this foundational text, the Advaita branch, we get the following picture:
• Śaṅkara’s Advaita Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya
• Vācaspati Miśra’s Bhāmatī
• Amalānanda’s Vedānta-kalpa-taru
• Appayya Dīkṣita’s Vedānta-kalpa-taru-parimala
• Lakṣmīnṛsiṃha’s Ābhoga
• Akhaṇḍānanda’s Ṛju-prakāśikā
• Padmapada’s Pañcapādikā
• Prakāśātman’s Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa
• Citsukha’s Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa-tātparya-dīpikā
• Nṛsiṃhāśrama’s Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa-prakāśikā
• Nṛsiṃhāśrama’s Vedānta-ratnakośa)

The thing to keep in mind is that each of these commentators took the exact wording of his predecessors extremely seriously. And yet we obtain these complex forking interpretations of these texts, often at loggerheads with each other. The purpose of a commentary was ostensibly to elucidate the meaning of the base-text it commented on—but more often than not, it was to show that the base-text could be read to yield the conclusion you knew it had to yield.

In short, for classical Indian intellectuals, the rule is:

keep the source, change the interpreter.

On imagination, meditation, and bringing-into-being

In this fascinating interview, Tanya Luhrmann addresses the tremendous importance of imagination in religious traditions such as American evangelism. The idea that religion is “belief”, the affirmation of the truth-value of some proposition, is a particularly Western, Protestant, understanding of religion, and is profoundly different from the religious experiences of people from, say, the dharmic traditions. (Or for that matter, from the experiences of Orthodox Christians.) Luhrmann says about kataphatic prayer:

It makes what is imagined in the mind more real. In kataphatic prayer you are saying that certain of your mental images are significant, and you are making these images more sensorially rich, you are allowing yourself to imagine them more vividly. The demand of religion is to teach you that the world as you know it is not the world as it is—and to teach you the capacity to see the world as it is, as something good. So you’ve got to make what is imagined real, and you’ve got to make it good.

The obvious response of the outsider to something like this is to describe it as clearly false, or “merely” imagined. And in a certain sense, the outsider is right: it is the believer who has imagined a particular religious experience into being, for which there is most likely no objective correlate. But Luhrmann argues that this attitude misses the heart of the experience as the insider experiences it: as something real, indeed as something more than real—because they create a new reality for the insider. It makes the insider more likely to feel loved, and thus to become more loving. Luhrmann thinks that something like this may even help reverse the erosion of social ties that people complain about today.

A number of Luhrmann's ideas squarely fit in with late medieval South Indian Hindu thought as is described in More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India by David D. Shulman.

Shulman focuses on the importance given in medieval South India to the force of imagination: to the fact that human being are at their core imaginative creatures, who shape reality by imagining it together. 

• Sometimes this imagination is internal to the person: Shulman tells the story of an impoverished devotee of Śiva who constructs in his mind a temple so beautiful that Śiva prefers to dwell there instead of in the vast granite temple that a king has built for him (said to be the Kailāsanātha temple of Kanchipuram). 
• At other times, this imagination is intersubjective: Shulman describes in great detail a performance from the Kūḍiyāṭṭam dance-drama tradition of Kerala, in which a solitary skilled dancer transforms an empty, prop-less stage into a story-universe through the combination of his gestures and through the shared imaginations of the entire audience. 

Worship is imagined in the same way—by imagining our iṣṭa-devatās in our minds and by that very act bringing them into being. The word used for bringing-into-being is bhāvanā, a word borrowed from Mīmāṃsā ritual hermeneutics that refers to the power of a sacrifice to bring into being its fruit.[*]

Shulman points out that the philosophical and theological systems in which these systems developed in South India were staunch defenders of ontological realism, but of course not of physicalist, materialist reductionism. (Paradoxically, it was Advaita Vedānta that was fairly skeptical of the positive power of imagination.) He writes, comparing 16th-century India and Europe:

In Europe, the ancient dichotomy of mind and matter hardened into a fully desubjectified theory, or evolving set of theories, about the status of objects within an external, natural world. In India, the dichotomy is itself questionable, and the metaphysics of inner and outer took another course. Broadly speaking, in one conceptual system the imagination became increasingly associated with pathology, while in the other it tended to be understood as therapeutic. (p. 278)

Suspension of disbelief is the wrong way to think about what's going on here (at least in the Indian context; it may well hold for Luhrmann's evangelicals). We don’t lie to ourselves about something being there when it isn’t; we construct it with our mental acts—and by doing so, we make it real.

And towards the end of the book, Shulman also touches very briefly upon Ibn ‘Arabī, in whose vast work khayāl, “imagination”, is profoundly related to the structure of the universe and to the relationship between man and God.


[*] This explains the use of words like bhāvayāmi in much devotional Carnatic music. The singer-devotee is trying to actualize the deity in the minds of all those present at the performance. 

Grammar and God

One of the most famous verses in Sanskrit is the opening verse of Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa:

vāg-arthāv iva sampṛktau vāg-artha-pratipattaye |

jagataḥ pitarau vande pārvatīparameśvarau ||

Here, Śiva and Pārvatī are seen to be inextricably intertwined like a word and its meaning.

Another verse I came across today expresses a similar relation, but between different pairs of upamānas and upameyas:

rāsa-vilāsa-vilolaṃ smarata murārer mano-haraṃ rūpam |

prakṛtiṣu yat pratyayavat praty-ekaṃ gopikāsu sammilitam ||

May you remember that enchanting form of Mura’s Conqueror,
        dancing around playfully in the Rāsa-līlā,
        united individually with all of the milkmaids,
                like a suffix with flexional bases.

As may be imagined, this is the opening verse of a grammatical text: the Prakriyā-sarvasva of Mēlpattūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri, who is most famous for his composition of the Nārāyaṇīyam addressed to Kṛṣṇa. As to why Kṛṣṇa should be seen as a suffix (which, in English at least, sounds like it’s subordinate somehow to the word to which it’s added), it’s because the Pāṇinian tradition of grammar sees the suffix’s meaning as dominating the word’s meaning. Moreover, a suffix can be added to far more words than a word can take suffixes, and so it has greater “freedom of union” in that sense. Finally, and conveniently, the word for suffix, pratyaya, takes masculine gender, while the word for flexional base, prakṛti, takes the feminine gender.

Grammar and enclitic pronouns

natvā sarasvatīṃ devīṃ śuddhāṃ guṇyāṃ karomy aham |
pāṇinīya-praveśāya laghu-siddhānta-kaumudīm ||

Having bowed down to Goddess Sarasvatī,
        pure and virtuous,
I compose the Laghusiddāntakaumudī as an introduction to the Pāṇinian system.

With this invocation to Sarasvatī, Goddess of Knowledge, does Varadarāja begin his Laghusiddhāntakaumudī, the “Brief Moonlight of [Grammatical] Principles”. Varadarāja’s work is an annotated, abridged version of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s Siddhāntakaumudī, which rearranges the whole of Pāṇini’s Aṣṭâdhyāyī into a format that is pedagogically usable by the student. The English translation of the invocation to Sarasvatī does not capture an interesting ambiguity in the original: the adjectives “pure and virtuous” could [and therefore did!] describe the Laghusiddhāntakaumudī itself.

Much can be said about this work, but for now I wish to note just one pair of verses from its haL-anta-puṃliṅga-prakaraṇa, the chapter on (the declension of) consonant-final masculine nouns:

śrîśas tvâvatu mâpîha dattāt te me ’pi śarma saḥ |
svāmī te me ’pi sa hariḥ pātu vām api nau vibhuḥ ||
sukhaṃ vāṃ nau dadātv īśaḥ patir vām api nau hariḥ |
so ’vyād vo naḥ śivaṃ vo no dadyāt sevyo ’tra vaḥ sa naḥ ||

May the Lord of Śrī protect you and me;
        may He give delight to you and me.
That Hari is the master of you and of me;
        may He, All-Pervading, guard you two and us two.

May the Lord grant happiness to you two and to us two;
        for Hari husbands you two and us two.
May He defend y’all and us;
        may He bestow auspiciousness to y’all and to us;
        He is to be served by y’all and us here.

Why would this verse show up in a grammar text? Because the underlined forms are the enclitic forms of the first- and second-person pronouns! This verse contains examples of the enclitic pronouns for the second, fourth, and sixth cases, in the singular, dual, and plural, in that order. These optional forms are permitted by a small set of Pāṇinian sūtras:

• yuṣmad-asmadoḥ ṣaṣṭhī-caturthī-dvitīyāsthayor vāṃ-nāvau [Pā 8.1.20]
• bahuvacanasya vas-nasau [Pā 8.1.21]
• te-mayāv ekavacanasya [Pā 8.1.22]
• tvā-mau dvitīyāyāḥ [Pā 8.1.23]

Pā 8.1.20 permits the use of vām and nau in place of the regular second- and first-person pronouns, respectively, in the sixth, fourth, and second cases. (As stated, this is a general rule, utsarga, that applies to all these pronominal forms regardless of number.)

Pā 8.1.21 then carves out an exception (apavāda) to this rule, saying that in the plural, the forms vas and nas, respectively, should be used. [These are indeed cognate with Spanish vosotros and nosotros and French vous and nous.]

Pā 8.1.22 carves out another apavāda, saying that te and me should be used in the singular. (Thus, taking these two exceptions together, we automatically restrict vām and nau to the dual.) But this rule, while being an apavāda to Pā 8.1.20, is in itself an utsarga.

Pā 8.1.23 is the apavāda to Pā 8.1.22 in turn, saying that tvā and mā should be used in place of te and me for the second-case forms of the singular pronouns. 

This is an extremely brief look at one of the ways in which the Pāṇinian system works, by creating utsargas and apavādas. One of the side-effects of this is that no Pāṇinian rule can be understood in isolation from all other rules, for everything interacts with everything else. 

To know the whole, know the parts; to know the parts, know the whole.

The highest reality of all

vaṃśī-vibhūṣita-karān nava-nīradâbhāt

pītâmbarād aruṇa-bimba-phalâdharôṣṭhāt |

pūrṇêndu-sundara-mukhād aravinda-netrāt

kṛṣṇāt paraṃ kim api tattvam ahaṃ na jāne ||

This is an oft-recited verse in praise of Kṛṣṇa, but I stumbled across Pandit Jasraj’s version of it for the first time recently. The verse is quite straightforward, but possesses great beauty in its simplicity. Here is an attempt at a translation.

A hand ornamented by a bamboo-flute,
A complexion like a fresh monsoon rain-cloud,
A yellow garment,
A lower lip, red as the red bimba fruit,
A face, beautiful like the full moon,
A pair of eyes, like lotuses

        ——greater than that Kṛṣṇa,
        there’s simply nothing I know.



I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this verse was by the great Mughal-era Advaita scholar Madhusūdana Sarasvatī. Digging a little deeper, I found this verse to be part of his upasaṃhāra (conclusion) to his Gūḍârtha-dīpikā (“Lamp for Hidden Meanings”), a commentary on Śaṅkarācārya’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā. It turns out that Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, in addition to / despite his Advaitic leanings (depending on which way you swing), was a fervent devotee of Kṛṣṇa and held that bhakti to Kṛṣṇa was a path fully equal to, and distinct from, the renunciatory path leading to the Advaitic ideal of kaivalya. 

“A Hymn to Śrī”: The Śrī Stuti of Śrī Vedānta Deśika

It is said that Śrī Vedānta Deśika composed his famous Śrī Stuti when a pious but poor young man came to him for help: he wanted to get married, and needed some money to convince his father-in-law-to-be that he was worth it. No sooner had Śrī Vedānta Deśika finished reciting the Śrī Stuti than a shower of gold coins poured down from the heavens, making the young man rich and making Śrī Vedānta Deśika even more famous than he had been.

What follows is a first draft at translating this most beautiful of hymns praising the Goddess Śrī. All that is good in this comes from the beauty of the original; whatever isn’t, stems from my own deficiencies. May I be forgiven my myriad faults!

|| Śrīḥ ||

The noble Veṅkaṭanātha,

        blessed with śrī,

        saffron-maned lion among poets and philosophers,

        teacher of the Vedānta—

may he be enshrined in my heart forever!

|| 1 || 

Magnificent beyond all measure,

Auspicious even to all things auspicious,

Resting on the chest of Madhu’s conqueror

Ornamenting it by Her lustre,

Felicity personified for all people

        who seek material and spiritual prosperity—

        to you, o Śrī, do I,

                who have no other refuge,

        surrender!

Kṛṣṇa and the “field of vision”

cetaś cañcalatāṃ tyaja priya-sakhi vrīḍe na māṃ pīḍaya
bhrātar muñca dṛśau nimeṣa bhagavan kāma kṣaṇaṃ kṣamyatām |
barhaṃ mūrdhani karṇayoḥ kuvalayaṃ vaṃśaṃ dadhānaḥ kare
so ’yaṃ locana-gocaro bhavati me dāmodaraḥ sundaraḥ ||

Heart, stop fluttering;
Dear friend, stop torturing me!
Brother, let me see, just for a moment;
Cupid, spare me, just for a second:

        A peacock’s feather in His hair,
        water-lilies in His ears,
        bamboo flute in His hands—

He’s all I can see,
        Dāmodara the handsome.

This gorgeous verse, from the Rasamañjarī of Bhānudatta, has also been translated by Sheldon Pollock, although I cannot find my copy of the book right now.  What I love most about this verse—and what I find impossible to translate—is the compound locana-gocara. 

In terms of pure sound: its two halves are almost exactly identical prosodically, differing only in the third and sixth syllables (and that too only because the sixth must bear the added weight of the -sU case ending). Furthermore, the repetition of the -oca- sounds makes it delightfully delicate to recite. (Think “cellar door”.)

And in terms of meaning too, the two halves of the word work beautifully. The first, locana, can mean either the seeing organ, “eye”, or the sense itself, “eyesight”. It is also connected with such meanings as “illumination” and “lighting up”. The second, gocara, is even more fascinating. Etymologically, it is in fact a compound, go-cara, literally meaning “cow-pasture”. Through some considerable semantic drift, it comes to mean “field”, first literally and then metaphorically, encompassing such meanings as “scope”, “range”, sometimes even “topic”. A smart translation for locana-gocara would therefore be something like “range of vision” (taking into account the associations of “range” with cattle rearing).

But in the particular context of this verse, I really wanted something simpler. Kṛṣṇa isn’t just in the nāyikā’s range of vision, He becomes it. He is the pasture in which the cows that are her eyes roam, coming to rest at a few particularly succulent grazing spots—His peacock-feather, His ornaments, His flute. He is, simply put, all she can see.

“The Splendor of the Great Hero”: Śrī Raghuvīra Gadyam aka Śrī Mahāvīra Vaibhavam

Among the most remarkable compositions of Swami Śrīman Nigamānta Mahādeśikar is the Śrī Mahāvīra Vaibhavam, also known as the Raghuvīra Gadyam. In about 90 lines, it summarizes the entire story of the Rāmāyaṇa, paying special attention to the glory and heroism of Rāma. I have attempted to translate the work here while paying close attention to the poetic effects of the original.

|| Śrīḥ  ||

śrīmān veṅkaṭanāthâryaḥ kavi-tārkika-kesarī |
vedāntâcārya-varyo me sannidhattāṃ sadā hṛdi ||

The noble Veṅkaṭanātha,
endowed with śrī,
saffron-maned Lion among poets and philosophers,
supreme teacher of the Vedānta
—may he be established forever in my heart!

jayaty āśrita-saṃtrāsa-dhvānta-vidhvaṃsanôdayaḥ |
prabhāvān sītayā devyā parama-vyoma-bhāskaraḥ ||

He conquers all,
His dawn dispelling the darkness of His devotees’ dread;
Luminous,
Inseparable from the Goddess Sītā, 
The Sun of the Supreme Heaven!

jaya jaya mahāvīra! 
mahādhīra dhaureya! 

Victory, victory to the great hero! 
to the steadfast, resolute, bearer of all burdens!

The birth of poetry in Sanskrit

While translating the first verse of the Rāghavayādavīyam of Veṅkaṭādhvarin, I came across a word that I simply could not decipher on my own: mārāmorāḥ (मारामोराः in Devanāgarī). I had to look up the English commentary of Dr. Saroja Ramanujam to figure it out. She resegmented it as mā-ārāma-urāḥ, and glossed it as a bahuvrīhi (an “exocentric” compound functioning as an adjective) that means “one whose chest is a pleasure garden for Mā”. (There is no way I would have figured that out on my own!) 

But what, or who, is Mā? Dr. Ramanujam simply noted that it was a name for Lakṣmī, but I wanted to find out more and dug deeper. Now, digging too deep is fraught with difficulties. (Just ask the dear departed dwarves of Dwarrowdelf, who delved too deep, disturbing a denizen of the dark depths that then dealt the deathblow to their delightful dominion.) But in this case, what I found was pure mithril.

Prof. Ajay Rao has written a fascinating paper called “Theologising the Inaugural Verse: Śleṣa Reading in Rāmāyaṇa Commentary” for the Journal of Hindu Studies. The underlying argument of the paper (which Prof. Rao elaborates in his dissertation) is that the Rāmāyaṇa was not always perceived as a fully religious text, and that at least early in its history it was seen as a work of literature (kāvya) and not a received tradition (smṛti). Indeed, the Rāmāyaṇa is seen not just as any literary work, but as the first literary work (ādi-kāvya), and its composer, the poet-sage Vālmīki, is regarded as the First Poet (ādi-kavi). Prof. Rao further argues that the “theologization” of the Rāmāyaṇa was accomplished by a series of Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators who interpreted key episodes in the narrative as illustrative of the theological ideas underpinning their philosophical theology. Foremost among these commentators was the sixteenth-century Govindarāja, upon whose Rāmāyaṇa-bhūṣaṇa commentary Prof. Rao relies.

“Extreme Poetry”: Sanskrit śleṣa

Prof. Yigal Bronner at the University of Chicago has written a remarkable book called Extreme Poetry: the South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration. This describes the staggering intellectual and literary phenomenon in Sanskrit of composing works that can be read in multiple ways to simultaneously produce different narratives. It is a brilliant work that casts light upon a phenomenon that is astonishingly difficult both to read and to ’rite. In perhaps no other language could something like this be realized on such a colossal scale.

Reading Prof. Bronner’s book has inspired me to turn to a 17th century Sanskrit text of the viloma genre called the Rāghavayādavīyam, composed by the Śrīvaiṣṇava litterateur Veṅkaṭādhvarin of Aracāṇippālai. Veṅkaṭādhvarin is also famous for his Viśvaguṇādarśacampū, a “travel” work that describes the condition of the Tamil lands of his time through the eyes of two celestial beings (gandharvas), one idealistic, the other sarcastic and cynical. His Śrī Lakṣmī Sahasram is, as the name suggests, a thousand verses glorifying the Divine Mother Lakṣmī, who is central to the Śrīvaiṣṇava religious tradition. Veṅkaṭādhvarin divided his work into twenty-five chapters, invoking the twenty-five-verse Śrī Stuti composed perhaps 300 years earlier by his revered predecessor, Śrī Vedānta Deśika. [It would be fascinating to look for systematic connections between the two works.]

<UPDATE>
It turns out that Veṅkaṭādhvarin also composed another work, the Ācārya-pañcāśat, fifty verses honoring the great teacher (ācārya) Śrī Vedānta Deśika. 
</UPDATE>

In comparison, the Rāghavayādavīyam is a much shorter work, consisting of thirty verses. It narrates the story of Rāma when read forwards. However, when each verse is read backwards (while the whole work is still read forwards), it narrates the story of Kṛṣṇa! Translating this level of Sanskrit is beyond my capacity, but I would eventually like to give it a shot. 

For now, just the opening benediction, with the help of the English commentary and translation of Dr. Saroja Ramanujam. I have chosen different interpretations for a couple of words where I thought my choices fit the context of the verse better; it is, of course, entirely possible that I am wrong.

May the same power that animated Veṅkaṭādhvarin to compose this work allow me to translate it as best as I can into English!

Verse 1 (anuloma)

vande ’haṃ devaṃ taṃ śrītaṃ rantāraṃ kālaṃ bhāsā yaḥ |

rāmo rāmādhīr āpyāgo līlām ārâ ’’yodhye vāse || 1a ||

I bow down to the Lord, 
the one sporting with Śrī
        splendidly for eternity,

Who, as Rāma, 
        His mind fixed on that beautiful woman (Sītā),
returned from the ocean

and fulfilled His divine play (līlā)
        dwelling in Ayodhyā.

Verse 1 (pratiloma)

sevâdhyeyo rāmā-lālī gopy-ārādhī mā-’’rāmôrāḥ |

yaḥ sâbhâlaṃkāraṃ tāraṃ taṃ śrītaṃ vande ’haṃ devam || 1p ||

Worshipable through loving service,

He charms beautiful women,
        delights, and is delighted by, the milkmaids;

His chest is a pleasure-garden for Mother Lakṣmī—

to Him, 
        splendid,
        His ornaments radiating light,

to the one sporting with Śrī,
I bow down to the Lord.

[Reading a text forward is called anuloma in Sanskrit, which literally means “with / following the hair”. Doing something anuloma means following the natural flow of things. Its opposite is pratiloma, which literally means “against the hair”. The two terms can be felicitously translated into English as “along the grain” and “against the grain”.]

“Is wealth alone happiness?”

nidhi cāla sukhamā

rāmuni sannidhi-sevā sukhamā

nijamuga palku manasā

dadhi-navanīta-kṣīramulu rucō

dāśarathi-dhyāna-bhajana-sudhā-rasamu rucō

dama-śamamanu-gaṅgā-snānamu sukhamā

kardama-durviṣaya-kūpa-snānamu sukhamā

mamatā-bandhana-yuta-nara-stuti sukhamā

sumati-tyāgarāja nutuni kīrtana sukhamā

I should begin by admitting I don’t actually know Telugu! However, the lyrics of Tyāgarāja use enough Sanskrit that I can usually figure out what’s going on. If I get something wrong, please tell me and I’ll change it.


This beautiful song, said to have been composed by Tyāgarāja in response to royal pressure, contrasts the pleasures of the material world with the pleasures of immersing oneself in the Divine (for Tyāgarāja, the form being Rāma in this case).

What’s the greater joy: wealth alone,

Or proximity and service to Rāma?

Tell me honestly, o Mind!

Godā Stuti, conclusion and English translation

kavi-tārkika-siṃhāya kalyāṇa-guṇa-śāline |
śrīmate veṅkaṭeśāya vedānta-gurave namaḥ ||

Godā Stuti, 29

iti vikasita-bhakter utthitāṃ veṅkaṭeśāt
bahuguṇa-ramaṇīyāṃ vakti Godā-stutiṃ yaḥ |
sa bhavati bahumānyaḥ śrīmato raṅga-bhartuḥ
caraṇa-kamala-sevāṃ śāśvatīm abhyupaiṣan || 29 ||

Godā Stuti, 28

śatamakha-maṇi-nīlā cāru-kalhāra-hastā
stana-bhara-namitāṅgī sāndra-vātsalya-sindhuḥ |
aḷaka-vinihitābhiḥ sragbhir ākṛṣṭa-nāthā
vilasatu hṛdi Godā Viṣṇucittātmajā naḥ || 28 ||

Godā Stuti, 27

jātāparādham api mām anukampya Gode
goptrī yadi tvam asi yuktam idaṃ bhavatyāḥ |
vātsalya-nirbharatayā jananī kumāraṃ
stanyena vardhayati daṣṭa-payodharā ’pi || 27 ||

Godā Stuti, 26

raṅge taṭid-guṇavato ramayaiva Gode
kṛṣṇāmbudasya ghaṭitāṃ kṛpayā suvṛṣṭyā |
daurgatya-durviṣa-vināśa-sudhā-nadīṃ tvāṃ
santaḥ prapadya śamayanty acireṇa tāpān || 26 ||

Godā Stuti, 25

Gode guṇair apanayan praṇatāparādhān
bhrū-kṣepa eva tava bhoga-rasānukūlaḥ |
karmānubandhi-phala-dāna-ratasya bhartuḥ
svātantrya-durvyasana-marma-bhidā nidānam || 25 ||

Godā Stuti, 24

ārdrāparādhini jane ’py abhirakṣaṇārthaṃ
raṅgeśvarasya ramayā vinivedyamāne |
pārśve paratra bhavatī yadi tatra nāsīt
prāyeṇa Devi vadanaṃ parivartitaṃ syāt || 24 ||

Godā Stuti, 23

arcyaṃ samarcya niyamair nigama-prasūnaiḥ
nāthaṃ tvayā kamalayā ca sameyivāṃsam |
mātaś ciraṃ niraviśan nijam ādhirājyaṃ
mānyā manu-prabhṛtayo ’pi mahīkṣitas te || 23 ||

Godā Stuti, 22

dūrvā-daḷa-pratimayā tava deha-kāntyā
go-rocanā rucirayā ca rucendirāyāḥ |
āsīd anujjhita-śikhā-vaḷa-kaṇṭha-śobhaṃ
māṅgalyadaṃ praṇamatāṃ Madhu-vairi-gātram || 22 ||