Stavamrita Lahari

Stavamrta-lahari, waves of the nectar of prayer, is a collection of twenty-eight Sanskrit astakas, eight-verse hymns, composed by Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakura, a major seventeenth and eighteenth-century Gaudiya Vaishnava commentator and acarya whose Sanskrit works remain foundational to the tradition's scholarship. Nineteen of those twenty-eight hymns are gathered here. Two distinct threads run through the collection: astakas glorifying the guru-parampara — Srila Narottama Dasa Thakura, Srila Lokanatha Gosvami, and Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Himself, addressed as Saci-nandana, Saci's son — and astakas addressed directly to the historic Deities installed by the Six Gosvamis and worshipped in Vrindavana's own temples: Govindadeva, Gopinathadeva, Madana-Gopaladeva, and Gokulananda among them, together with hymns to sacred sites such as Nandisvara and Radha-kunda. Read together, the collection moves between two objects of devotion this whole padavali tradition returns to constantly: the teachers through whom devotional practice is received, and the Deities in whom that practice culminates.