These are some notes I wrote to a friend concerning madhukari, the practice of collecting almsfood from houses, and especially from the houses of Vrajavasis — which is the way most bhajananandi-mahatmas of the past would sustain their lives.

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Doing madhukari, dainya awakens in the heart and the svarupa of the dhama begins to unveil. As the dhama is a manifestation of the sandhini-sakti, and is rough on the surface for our perceptions alone, so are the dhama-vasis, whether people, animals or vegetation. Perceiving them with humility and regarding them as worshipable as the dhama itself opens the path to the aprakata-dhama, and the aparadha of disregarding or treating the dhama-vasis with contempt cuts the from our eyes the strands that connect the drisyamana-dhama and the aprakata-dhama. This is why the mahatmas of the past were carefree in collecting madhukari. Madhukari from the Vrajavasis' houses is not collected only for filling the belly, it is collected for attaining prema.

With regards to thoughts of the Vrajavasis not being pure, being in need of purification, and so forth. Of course, to mundane eyes they exhibit a host of habits unfit for a sadhaka, and so forth. Compare this to the dirt floating atop Radha-kunda. The dirt would never stop you from admiring and worshiping the kunda, or from drinking the kunda's water — liquid prema! Read the following from Pandit Baba's vyakhya on the first verse of Manah-siksa, where Sripada advises his mind to develop unprecedented rati for the residents of Vraja:


There are a host of verses along these lines, and even more to the point of disregarding the "rough edges" as Pandit Baba has it, in Prabodhananda's work. Bhangabihari Vidyalankara notes in his Manah-siksa-tika:


The issue of accepting madhukari is only an issue as long as this faith has not awakened. Equipped with faith as described above, the foodstuffs begged from the houses of the Vrajavasis are givers of prema as much as the water of Radha-kunda and the dust on the alleys of Govardhana is — no matter its shape before our eyes. And again without such faith, adverse effects may be had — just as one may get seriously ill from drinking the kunda's water without faith.

One baba advised me, "When taking madhukari, always meditate on its being cooked by Lalita, Visakha and the other sakhis — then there will be prema while eating." I can tell you from experience that the devotional effects of madhukari are far beyond anything I have ever experienced from any other preparations. And again, drinking the kunda's water while meditating on its prema-svarupa, and so forth — bhai, these are very powerful forms of sadhana, as they have you directly linked with divine substance of astonishing powers.

Yes, one can of course think like this with all foods and get a positive effect! There is, however, a subtle difference there. With the foods begged from the houses of the Vrajavasis, the process is a discovery of unperceived qualities, while with other cookings it is more of a superimposition — just like the difference between drinking water from or bathing directly in Radha-kunda, and invoking sacred waters into a bucket or a container.