The meditation verses

These verses are not part of the thousand names and were not composed by whoever composed the stotra. They belong to the ritual apparatus that grew up around it, and the recension this site follows preserves that apparatus intact. Before the dhyāna comes the nyāsa, which declares the credentials of what is about to be recited: the seers of this great mantra are the Vāgdevatās headed by Vaśinī, the metre is anuṣṭubh, the deity is Śrī Lalitā Parameśvarī. Then the syllables aiṃ, klīṃ and sauḥ are placed on the fingers and on six points of the body. Then these four dhyāna verses. Then a five-fold offering in which each element of the world is given to her by its seed-syllable — laṃ for earth as scent, haṃ for space as flower, yaṃ for air as incense, raṃ for fire as lamp, vaṃ for the nectar-principle as food. Only after all of that does the manuscript say, plainly: "and then let him do the recitation." The dhyāna is the hinge. Everything before it prepares a body; everything after it is speech.

The three seed-syllables of that nyāsa are worth pausing over, because they are the three segments of the fifteen-syllabled mantra of this tradition. The nyāsa names them as such: the vāgbhava segment is called the bīja, the middle segment the śakti, the third segment the kīlaka or pin. So the reciter is being told, in code, that the sahasranāma is an unfolding of the pañcadaśākṣarī — that the thousand names are that mantra written out at length. This is the single most important background fact about the text, and it is stated before the first name is spoken.

The four verses themselves come from different places and do not agree with one another. Editions differ over how many to print and in what order; some manuals give one, some three, some five. The first, in the long śārdūlavikrīḍita metre, is close to the standard visualisation of Tripurasundarī found in tantric worship manuals, where she is soft, seated, and holds a cup rather than a weapon. The second is by far the most quoted, and is often chanted alone. The third is the only one that names her as Śrīvidyā outright. The fourth announces its own occasion in its last words: japa-vidhau smarāmi, "at the time of japa I call to mind."

Three of the four insist on red. Sindūra, aruṇa, the japā blossom, kuṅkuma, an aruṇa garland, aruṇa ornaments, aruṇa cloth. This is not decoration. In Śrīvidyā red is the colour of icchā, of desire understood as the first stirring by which anything at all comes to be, and of rajas taken as creative urgency rather than as agitation. The stotra's own third verse will make the point at cosmic scale: her red radiance rises like a flood until the world-eggs float submerged in it. Set this against Sarasvatī's white and Kālī's black and you have located this goddess precisely.

The last thing the dhyāna does is the most radical. Having built an image with great care, the second verse dissolves the arrangement in three words: aham ity eva vibhāvaye — I contemplate her as simply "I". The verb vibhāvaye is not "I worship" or "I see"; it is "I bring into being by imagining". The tradition is telling you, before the stotra begins, that the thousand names are not a description of somebody else. Every name you are about to say is in the third person and none of them is.

Each of the four verses is in a different metre, and knowing which one you are in tells you where to breathe. The first is śārdūlavikrīḍita, nineteen syllables to the line with the break after the twelfth: sindūrāruṇavigrahāṃ trinayanāṃ | māṇikyamaulisphurat. The second alternates eleven-syllable and twelve-syllable lines in the aupacchandasika pattern, which is why it feels lighter and quicker than the others. The third is sragdharā, twenty-one syllables in three even groups of seven: dhyāyet padmāsanasthāṃ | vikasitavadanāṃ | padmapatrāyatākṣīṃ. The fourth is pṛthvī, seventeen syllables with the pause after the eighth — which in this verse falls inside a word, sakuṅkumavilepa|nāmalikacumbikastūrikāṃ, so hear the pause without opening a gap in the sound.

The single most useful drill in the whole set is in the first line. Sindūrāruṇa has a retroflex ṇ: the tongue-tip curls back and strikes the hard palate. Trinayanāṃ, immediately after, has three dental n sounds: the tongue-tip goes forward to the back of the upper teeth. The two are only a few syllables apart and most English speakers flatten both into one sound. Run the line slowly until you can hear the difference, and the rest of the stotra becomes much easier, because this contrast recurs on almost every page — karuṇā, caraṇa, aruṇa and bāṇa all take ṇ, while nāyaka, vadana and bhavānī keep n.

The three sibilants are the other trap, and the first verse gives you all of them within a few words: śekharāṃ has the palatal ś, vakṣoruhām has the retroflex ṣ inside the kṣ cluster, and saumyāṃ, smitamukhīm and sphurat have the plain dental s. Note also that sphurat is s plus an aspirated ph, not an English f; let the p and the breath be heard separately.

Grammatically these verses are one sentence each, and hearing that keeps you from stopping in the wrong place. The long chain of words ending in -āṃ and -īṃ are all accusatives, and they are all governed by a single verb that arrives late: dhyāyet in the first and third verses, vibhāvaye in the second, smarāmi in the fourth. Nothing is complete until that verb lands. Carry the whole chain of epithets forward on one arc of attention and release it only at parāmambikām, bhavānīm, sampatpradātrīm and ambikām respectively.

One small delight to listen for in the fourth verse: japākusuma, the hibiscus flower, and japavidhau, the rite of recitation. Long ā in the flower, short a in the rite. The poet has put the two side by side deliberately, so that the flower you are visualising and the act you are performing sound like the same word. Keep the vowel lengths clean and the pun stays audible.

In practice most reciters use one of these before beginning and not all four. If you are learning, the second verse is the one to memorise first: it is short, it names the four weapons that the stotra's next two verses will explain, and it ends with the line that tells you what kind of attention the whole recitation asks for.