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He concludes that this may be a reflection of the traditional form of lyrical presentation in which the author, as minstrel or bard, performed for a listening audience.

In the literary history of Bengal, songs or "pads" have played a major role .[77] The pad is a one-strophied lyrical song of no fixed length but rarely exceeding a dozen lines. It is a form which flowered in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and its popularity has been likened to that of the sonnet in Elizabethan England.[78] The pad was composed as a song. It received its main inspiration from the story of Krishna and Radha which was taken as an allegory of the merging of the human soul in the Divine. The landscape of these lyrics is most commonly that of a classical pastoral-the forest, its lotus-filled pond and winding paths comprising the standard images of the setting for the many episodes associated with Krishna and Radha. The "Pad-karttas," or song-makers, overcame this limitation of subject-matter, Ghosh explains, by informing conventional details:

with a poetic beauty, a passionate intensity, and a spiritual meaning all their own ... The cowherds, the milkmaids, the cattle, the peacocks, and the rest of the conventional machinery of the ancient pastoral idyll are here, but the passionate intensity of the Pad-karttas has made them alive and real.[79]

This, then, is the lyric tradition Sri Chinmoy has inherited. Once we are made aware of the atmosphere and theme of the pads, it is possible to discover threads of them inlaid in the tapestry of many of Sri Chinmoy's songs of ecstasy and delight. One of the more obvious pad-influenced songs is the following:

There goes my Beloved, my sweet Lord,
    the anklets ringing on His Feet.
I hear the music of His Flute
    vibrating through the horizons.
If ever my cowherd boy should cast a glance
    behind Him, still He only goes forward.
Let my eyes follow the track my
    Beloved treads.
In the twilight hour of the day, with a sweet
    and serene smile,
Leading the herds of varied light,
My cowherd boy goes.[80]