Four arms, and the noose of desire

The four things in her hands are Kāmadeva's. The god of desire carries a bow and flower-arrows in Sanskrit poetry from a very early date, and the noose and the elephant-goad belong to the older Śākta armoury; this goddess holds all four. That combination is the visual signature of Tripurasundarī, and it is also the plot of the story the stotra is embedded in. Kāma was burnt to ash by Śiva; from that ash Bhaṇḍāsura was made; she rose from the fire to destroy Bhaṇḍāsura, and in the Lalitopākhyāna she afterwards restores Kāma to life at Rati's plea. Between the burning and the restoring, the weapons are in her hands. The iconography is the narrative frozen at its midpoint.

The standard reading in the tradition assigns the four objects to the three powers by which the divine is said to act: the noose is icchā, will or desire; the goad is jñāna, knowledge; and the bow with its arrows together are kriyā, action. On that reading the pair named in this verse are the two that come first — she wants, and she knows, and only then does she act. It is a scheme rather than an exegesis, and different teachers push it in different directions, but it is old and it is worth knowing because it explains why the noose is always named before the goad.

The more interesting move in this verse is grammatical. Rāga-svarūpa and krodha-ākāra are not the same kind of statement. Svarūpa is own-form, essential nature: the noose does not represent desire, it is desire. Ākāra is shape or configuration: the goad has the outline of anger. The tradition generally reads the noose as what binds a creature and the goad as what pulls it back, and the difference between the two words fits that. Attachment is what you are made of; anger is a shape imposed from outside, a hook in the flank that turns the animal around. Both are in her hands. Neither is renounced.

That refusal to renounce is the distinguishing mark of this stream of practice. A great deal of Indian religion treats rāga and dveṣa, attraction and aversion, as the two afflictions to be uprooted; the Yoga Sūtra lists them among the kleśas. Here the same two are the goddess's own regalia. Śrīvidyā does not deny that desire binds — the noose is a noose — but it insists that the binding force and the liberating force are one power differently directed, and that the rope is being held at the other end by someone who loves you. Bhāskararāya and the commentators after him spend a good deal of ink on exactly this point.

As for the thousand rising suns: the image is conventional, but the choice of the present participle is not. A risen sun is a fact; a rising sun is an event. She is described in the tense of something perpetually beginning, which matches the aruṇa, dawn-coloured, reddish theme that runs through the dhyāna verses and will return in the next verse as a flood of red light drowning the worlds. Some later reciters connect the thousand suns with the thousand names themselves, one for each ray. That is a pleasant idea and probably a late one; the text does not say it.

The verse contains three of the most awkward consonant clusters in the first ten śloka, and they are all worth slowing down for. Udyad-bhānu has d + y and then a d running into an aspirated bh; keep the aspiration on the bh and do not let it become a b. Pāśāḍhyā has ḍh, the voiced retroflex aspirate, which is one of the rarest and hardest sounds in the language: tongue-tip curled back, voice on, and a distinct puff of breath released as it comes away. And ujjvalā is j + j + v — a doubled palatal followed by a semivowel, and the place where most learners simply give up and say "ujwala". Take it as uj-jva-lā and hold the doubled j long enough to hear it as two.

The two long compound names in the second line are built to be heard as a pair, and the pairing is exact: rāga-svarūpa-pāśa-āḍhyā against krodha-ākāra-aṅkuśa-ujjvalā. Emotion, then the word for form, then the weapon, then a word meaning "rich in" or "blazing with". If you feel the parallel while chanting, the second line stops being a mouthful and becomes a sentence with a shape. Note too that the two words for form are deliberately different — svarūpa and ākāra — and the difference is audible. Do not let them blur.

Vowel length does most of the work of the metre here. Hold the ā in sahasrā-bhā, in cātur-bāhu (the ā of catur is short, the ā of bāhu is long — a common slip), in -āḍhyā, and in -ākāra-. The short a of krodha and of the final -kuśa- must stay short or the line will sag.

One sandhi to see in the written form. Krodha + ākāra gives krodhākāra, and ākāra + aṅkuśa gives ākārāṅkuśa: two long ā vowels swallowing each other twice in the same word. In the Devanagari it shows as a single ा each time, so the eye has to reconstruct what the ear cannot hear. This is the commonest reason a learner mis-parses a long name in this stotra, and it is worth pausing on the word क्रोधाकाराङ्कुशोज्ज्वला until the four pieces separate cleanly.

What to hold while chanting: the verse is asking you to identify what is pulling you and what is turning you back, and then to notice that both cords run to the same hand. The traditional counsel here is not to fight the noose. Watch where it is attached.