Born from the fire of awareness

The stotra sits inside a story, and the story is worth knowing because the first verse depends on it. In the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa there is a long section called the Lalitopākhyāna, the account of Lalitā, told by Hayagrīva — Viṣṇu in his horse-headed form, the patron of learning — to the sage Agastya. The pūrvapīṭhikā preserved with this text opens with Agastya's complaint. You have told me everything, he says: her manifestation, her coronation, the killing of Bhaṇḍāsura, the description of Śrīpura, the greatness of the fifteen-syllabled mantra, the six placements, the inner and the outer worship, the rules of japa and of the fire offering, the secret identity of the Śrīcakra with the mantra and with the goddess herself. You have even given me the thousand names of Mantriṇī and of Daṇḍinī, her two commanders. You have not given me hers. Was it forgetfulness, or did you look past it on purpose? Hayagrīva answers that he withheld it because it is rahasya, a secret, and that he will give it now because Agastya has asked a second time and asked in devotion.

The text then makes an unusual claim about its own authorship. It says the stotra was not written by any human seer. Lalitā summoned the goddesses of speech — the Vāgdevatās headed by Vaśinī — and commanded them: you who know the secret of my cakra, who are devoted to my names, whom I have appointed to bestow eloquence on my devotees, compose a hymn marked with my thousand names, so that when my devotees praise me with it I am pleased at once. The Vāgdevatās did as they were told and later recited it before her in full assembly. This is why the nyāsa that precedes the recitation names them, and not a human ṛṣi, as the seers of the mantra. Eight of them are worshipped in the eighth enclosure of the Śrīcakra, and the stotra will name them later in its own course.

The repeated śrī- of the first three names is not filler required by the metre. Śrī means light, beauty, prosperity, and it is also the name of Lakṣmī; but in this tradition it is above all the badge of the school itself — śrīvidyā, śrīcakra, śrīpura, śrīguru, śrīmātā. Beginning three names in a row with it announces the lineage in the first breath. It is also an auspicious opening in the ordinary literary sense: a Sanskrit work is expected to begin with a word of good omen, and this one begins with three.

Cidagnikuṇḍasambhūtā is the name that carries the mythology. Bhaṇḍāsura had made the three worlds intolerable, and the gods, having exhausted every other course, performed a great sacrifice. In the fullest tellings the offering they finally made was themselves: they entered the fire. Out of that fire she rose. The name insists that the fire was not the ordinary sort. Cit is consciousness; the kuṇḍa is the pit dug for the sacred fire; she is what came up out of a fire-pit made of awareness. The Devī Māhātmya had told a structurally identical story some centuries earlier, in which the gods' massed brilliance condenses into a woman who fills the three worlds — but there the material is tejas, radiance, and here it is consciousness itself, which is a sharper and more philosophical claim.

Devakāryasamudyatā completes the thought. Samudyatā is a participle built on sam + ud + √yam, literally "risen up and braced for", the word you would use of somebody who has stood up and is already moving toward the task. She did not appear and then decide what to do. She came up out of the fire already committed. As for the errand itself, Bhaṇḍāsura will occupy the stotra again around its eightieth name, and by name 82 the text will say flatly that his city of Śūnyaka was burnt to nothing along with him by the Kāmeśvara weapon. What is worth noticing here is where he came from. When Śiva burnt Kāma to ash with the fire of his third eye, someone gathered the ash and shaped a figure from it — Citrakarman, one of Śiva's attendants, in the most common telling, though the accounts vary and some name a different gaṇa. Śiva's glance brought the figure to life and granted it the boon that any enemy who faced it would forfeit half his strength. An exclamation of astonishment — bhaṇḍa! — gave it its name, attributed to Brahmā in some recensions and to the assembled attendants in others. The demon that the goddess of desire was raised to destroy was himself made out of the ashes of desire.

The lion-throne of the third name is not a metaphor either. In the Lalitopākhyāna her enthronement is a distinct event, the paṭṭābhiṣeka that Agastya lists among the things he has already been taught, and the frame narrative uses the same epithet of her without explanation: siṃhāsaneśvarī always shows favour to the one who worships her. The verse is putting a coronation and a birth into the same four lines, in that order — sovereignty first, and only then the account of how she came to be.

This is an anuṣṭubh, the ordinary thirty-two syllable verse of Sanskrit narrative and hymn, and the nyāsa that precedes the stotra names anuṣṭubh as its metre. Four groups of eight; the natural breath is after the sixteenth syllable, at the end of siṃhāsaneśvarī. Within that, the first verse of the stotra is built on a small crescendo that is worth hearing. Śrīmātā is three syllables, śrīmahārājñī is five, and together they exactly fill the first quarter. Śrīmatsiṃhāsaneśvarī is eight and fills the second by itself. Then each half of the second line is a single eight-syllable name. Three names, then two, and each one longer than the last until they cannot grow any further.

The hardest sound here is ज्ञ in mahārājñī. Reciters trained in the north will say something close to "gy" and reciters trained in the south something close to "jñ"; the value the grammarians describe is j followed by the palatal nasal ñ, both made at the same place as the y in "yes". Say rāj-ñī with the tongue-body flat against the hard palate for both consonants. You will hear the other pronunciation on most recordings and there is nothing wrong with it, but this is what the letter is.

Three other points of care. In śrīmat-siṃhāsaneśvarī, a dental t runs straight into a dental s; release the t audibly rather than letting it collapse into the sibilant. In cidagni, the d is the giveaway of a sandhi: the word is cit, consciousness, and its final unvoiced t has been voiced by the vowel that follows, so what you are actually saying is cit + agni. Knowing that keeps the meaning of the name in view while you chant it. And kuṇḍa gives you the retroflex pair ṇḍ — tongue-tip curled back for both consonants, no forward movement between them.

The long vowels carry the line: śrī, -mātā, -rājñī, -eśvarī, -bhūtā, -dyatā. Every one of the five names ends in a long ā, because every one is a feminine nominative singular agreeing with an unspoken "she is". That is the grammatical shape of nearly the entire stotra: a thousand adjectives in search of a subject who never needs to be named.

For the recitation done as archanā rather than as stotra, each name is turned into the dative and given an offering — śrī mātre namaḥ, śrī mahārājñyai namaḥ, and so on down the list. It is worth practising the first verse both ways once, because hearing śrīmātā become śrī mātre teaches more about the fourth case than a paradigm chart will.

As for what to hold in mind: the order of the five names is itself the instruction. She is mother before she is empress, and she is on the throne before you are told where she came from. If the verse is to be used as a contemplation on its own — and it often is, being complete in itself — the thing to rest on is the fourth name. Everything that follows in the next thousand names comes out of a fire that is made of nothing but awareness.