This dissertation is a comparison of the Spanish sixteenth-century text and commentary of the Cántico espiritual by Juan de la Cruz with the Sanskrit text Rāsa Līlā (The dance of divine love), a poetical work derived from the Indian oral tradition between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, along with Srīdhara Svāmi's commentary. The central argument of this dissertation is that it is possible to read the Cántico espiritual and Rāsa Līlā along each other, even when they are not historically or otherwise related, and that this comparison illumines aspects of the texts that are not so obvious outside the comparative frame. Through a strong interdisciplinary dialogue, I reexamine traditional assumptions about contextual circumstances for Spanish Early Modern mystical literature. The notions of absence and presence of the divine introduce the dissertation in order to remind the reader that it is in the transitional space between one and the other where both texts indwell, and the impulse that moves from absent to presence and from presence to absence is precisely the desire to attain the divine vision.