Shloka 1◆, Names 1–5: Risen 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 what they offered up in the end was themselves. In the passage of the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa that Bhāskararāya quotes on this name, they had already given the flesh of their bodies as oblations and were about to give the rest when a blaze appeared, bright as millions of suns and cool as millions of moons, with a Śrīcakra at its heart; from the centre of the wheel the goddess rose, shining like the morning sun. 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.

Bhāskararāya, whose eighteenth-century commentary is the one every later reading of this hymn argues with, gives that story only as his second explanation. His first is about the words. Cit is pure Brahman, and it is called a fire-altar because it dispels the darkness of avidyā, ignorance. For the image he quotes a stanza about the fire of consciousness that burns within, uninterruptedly and without fuel, dispelling the darkness of illusion, and then Kṣemarāja's commentary on the Pratyabhijñāhṛdaya, a digest of Kashmiri Śaiva doctrine that Sastry's translation calls the Śakti Sūtras: consciousness is fire because it is its nature to consume the universe. Only after that does he allow that the kuṇḍa may also be an ordinary altar, and even there he reaches first for the Bhagavad Gītā's fire of knowledge, which reduces all actions to ash, before he turns to the purāṇas. In his order of reading, the fire burns ignorance before it burns anything else.

The last word of the name gets the boldest treatment. Sambhūtā, he says, does not mean that she was born from that fire. She abides in it as its quality of consciousness, and consciousness and the one who possesses it are one and the same. A fire does not give birth to its own heat. He then reads the next name as the answer to the objection he has just raised. To anyone who doubts that an eternal goddess can be born, devakāryasamudyatā replies that she manifests for the gods' purpose, and he cites the Devī Māhātmya's formula for it: though eternal, she is said to be born whenever she appears to accomplish what the gods need. The two names of the second line are a question and its answer. The fire never needed lighting. It became visible, once, because there was work to be done.

The stanza he quotes in passing here he gives in full much later, at rahastarpaṇatarpitā, satisfied by secret libation (382), where it is a mantra of the inner sacrifice: I offer the universe, from earth up to Śiva, into the fire of consciousness that burns without fuel and ever increases, dispelling the darkness of illusion. Beside it he sets a second, in which the worshipper pours the ghee of merit and demerit, and the movements of the senses, into the same fire. This is the strand of the name that devotional writers now put in terms of vāsanās and karma: the impressions and the residue of past action are offered into the fire, and what is left when they have burned is not a remainder but the goddess, consciousness with nothing in its way. The vocabulary is modern; the rite is not. And the fire returns at the other end of the story. When the Kāmeśvara weapon burns Bhaṇḍāsura and his city to nothing (82), Bhāskararāya reads that weapon's fire, too, as the fire of consciousness, and Bhaṇḍāsura as the condition of being a separate individual, the source of the appearance of duality. On that reading the goddess who rises from a fire of awareness in the fourth name is the same fire that, in the eighty-second, consumes the ignorance she came to end.

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.

A kuṇḍa is a place where things are offered, so the name also carries its own method. The inner sacrifice that Bhāskararāya quotes later in the hymn gives the shape of it: whatever arises while you sit with the verse — a thought, a mood, the memory of something done or left undone — is not an interruption but the next oblation. Do not push it away, and do not follow it; let it go into the fire. The fire in that mantra burns without fuel, so nothing fed to it can put it out and nothing is needed to keep it going. What is left when the offering has burned is what the name says was there from the beginning.

Modern Śrīvidyā teaching often adds a third reading, and it is worth knowing where its pieces come from. On this reading the kuṇḍa is the kula-kuṇḍa, the hollow at the base of the spine where kuṇḍalinī lies coiled and asleep, and sambhūtā names her waking and rising out of it. Bhāskararāya does not say this about the fourth name. But nearly every element of it is in texts he quotes elsewhere. At mūlādhāraikanilayā (99) he describes the four-petalled root lotus with a point at its centre called the kula-kuṇḍa, in which kuṇḍalinī sleeps with her face covered, and the hymn later calls her kulakuṇḍālayā, dwelling in that hollow (440). At kuṇḍalinī (110) he quotes the Tantrarāja: the shining vital power called kuṇḍalinī resides in the centre of the flames of the fire of the mūlādhāra. At the next name he quotes the Vāmakeśvara Tantra on how she is woken. With the breath held and forced upward, the fire in the svādhiṣṭhāna blazes up, and by the force of that blaze the serpent wakes, breaks through the three knots and the six lotuses, and unites with Śiva in the thousand-petalled lotus. And at parāparā (790) he quotes the Svatantra Tantra: the fire in the mūlādhāra is the foundation of the ordinary, outward homa. In the texts this tradition reads, then, the body already has a fire-pit at its base, and a goddess living in it.

Set those passages beside the fourth name and the connection almost makes itself, and some modern expositions make it explicitly. Udaya Bhaaskar Bulusu's online encyclopedia of Lalitā identifies the cidagnikuṇḍa with the kula-kuṇḍa and takes sambhūtā as her manifestation as kuṇḍalinī, because, it says, she never takes any birth at all — Bhāskararāya's own objection to the word, turned in a new direction. The sound of the words helps the reading along, since kuṇḍa and kuṇḍalinī seem made for each other, though Bhāskararāya derives kuṇḍalinī from kuṇḍala, a coil or ring, not from kuṇḍa, a pit.

What recommends the reading is that it does not replace the other two. It repeats them at another scale. In the story the gods give their bodies to the fire and she rises from it. In Bhāskararāya's reading what is offered is ignorance and its works, and what remains is consciousness. In the yogic reading the offering is the breath, the fire is inside the body, and what rises is the same power climbing toward Śiva. The hymn tells that ascent in full a hundred names from now, from the root centre through the three knots to kuṇḍalinī herself, finer than a lotus fibre (99–111), and nothing in this verse needs to anticipate it in detail.

Two cautions keep the reading honest. The texts do not agree on where the body's fire is: the Vāmakeśvara Tantra puts the fire that wakes her in the svādhiṣṭhāna, the Tantrarāja puts kuṇḍalinī among the flames of the mūlādhāra, and the scheme most modern books follow assigns fire to the maṇipūra at the navel. And none of them equates cidagni, the fire that is consciousness, with a sensation of heat. Whatever is felt to rise, this name says the fire is awareness.