The sugarcane bow and the five arrows

Kāmadeva's five arrows are traditionally flowers, and the list usually given names them: lotus, aśoka, mango-blossom, fresh jasmine and blue water-lily. Here they are not flowers. They are the five tanmātras — śabda, sparśa, rūpa, rasa and gandha, sound, touch, form, taste and smell — which is a term borrowed straight out of Sāṃkhya. In that system the tanmātras are the subtle, uncompounded precursors from which the five gross elements are produced; they stand between the sense of individuality and the material world. Making them her arrows is therefore a much larger claim than making them the five occasions of desire. Her shafts are not what tempts you; they are what the world you are tempted by is built out of.

This kind of substitution is characteristic. Śrīvidyā inherited an iconography from erotic poetry and a vocabulary from classical philosophy, and it reads the one through the other with complete confidence. The sugarcane bow gets the same treatment. Sugarcane is Kāma's bow because it is sweet; it becomes the mind because the mind is what has to be bent before an arrow can go anywhere. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad had used a different vehicle for the same anatomy — a chariot, with the senses as horses and the mind as the reins — and the parallel is close enough that the substitution here reads as deliberate rather than merely clever.

The third name changes register completely, and it is the longest word so far: sixteen syllables, filling the entire second line by itself. Nija means her own, not derived or borrowed; aruṇa-prabhā is the reddish light of dawn; pūra is a flood or a rising tide; majjat is a present participle, drowning or being submerged, still happening; brahmāṇḍa-maṇḍala is the whole circle of world-eggs. The name is one long image with the verb in the middle of it, and the tense matters: the worlds are not going to be flooded and were not flooded once, they are being flooded now.

Brahmāṇḍa is also, of course, the name of the purāṇa this stotra comes from. The Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa is one of the eighteen great purāṇas, and it is the text within which the whole Lalitā material — the narrative, this hymn, the ritual instructions — is transmitted; the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa is traditionally attached to it as well. The coincidence of the word is worth registering. The book is named for the cosmic egg, and here the egg is described floating in her light like something dropped into water.

One further point about the red. It has now appeared in every verse: sindūra and aruṇa in the meditation verses, a thousand rising suns in the last one, and now a flood of it. In Śrīvidyā this colour belongs to kāmakalā, the point at which pure consciousness first inclines toward manifestation, and it is the reason the goddess of this tradition is red where Sarasvatī is white. A verse that has just finished describing the mind as a bow and the senses as arrows ends by saying that the light in which all of this is happening is her own body — which is the whole argument of the tradition in a single compound.

Two sandhis are hidden in this verse and both are visible in the Devanagari once you know to look. Manorūpa plus ikṣu gives manorūpekṣu: a final a and an initial i have fused into a single e, written with the small stroke े over रू and प. Nija plus aruṇa gives nijāruṇa, two a sounds merged into one long ā. Neither juncture can be heard, so the reader has to reconstruct it from the sense. Practising these two words slowly — मनोरूपेक्षु and निजारुण — teaches more about vowel sandhi than a table of rules, because here you can see exactly what has gone missing.

The clusters to isolate: kṣu in ikṣu, which is k followed by the retroflex ṣ and never an English "x"; ñca in pañca, where the ñ is a palatal nasal made at the same place as the c that follows it, so the tongue never has to move; and, hardest of all, majjad-brahmāṇḍa, where a doubled j runs into an unaspirated d and then straight into br. Break it as maj-jad-brah-māṇ-ḍa and rebuild it at speed.

The second half of the verse is a single sixteen-syllable name occupying both quarters, which means there is no natural pause after the eighth syllable. Reciters generally take a light breath after nijāruṇaprabhāpūra and then run the rest through. Doing that also happens to divide the compound at its correct joint, between the flood and the thing being flooded.

Retroflexes come thick here: the ṇ of -aruṇa-, the ṇḍ of brahmāṇḍa and the ṇḍ of maṇḍalā, all three in one line, with the ṭ-series never far away. Curl the tongue-tip back and leave it back through -māṇḍamaṇḍalā rather than resetting between the two ṇḍ pairs. In koḍaṇḍā, likewise, the ḍ and the ṇ are both retroflex and the two together should sound like a single gesture.

Watch the vowel lengths in the first name. Manorūpa has a long ū; ikṣu has a short i and a short u; kodaṇḍā has a long o and a long final ā. Learners tend to lengthen the u of ikṣu because of the long vowel in front of it, and the metre will tell you at once when you have.

For contemplation, this verse gives you an unusually concrete instruction. Take the four objects in order — mind, senses, desire, anger — and notice that in each case the thing that seems to be happening to you is being described as something she is holding. Then let the last name dissolve the arrangement: whatever is being aimed, and whatever is being hit, is inside the same red light.