Flowering hair, a crown of rubies

This is the opening of what the poets call an aṅga-varṇana, a limb-by-limb description, running from the hair down to the feet. The second half of the Saundaryalaharī is organised the same way and in the same order, and reading the two side by side from here on is the single most useful thing a student of this stotra can do: they cover the same features, often with the same comparisons, and the differences show up sharply. In this stotra the sequence begins at name thirteen and ends at name fifty-one, after which she is seated on Śiva's lap and the poem turns from her body to her city and her powers.

The four flowers are specific plants and it is worth knowing them. Campaka is Michelia champaca, whose deep-yellow flowers have one of the strongest scents in the Indian garden. Aśoka is Saraca asoca, which puts out dense clusters of orange-red blossom close against the trunk; classical poetry holds that it flowers when a beautiful woman touches it with her foot, one of the standing conceits called dohada, the tree's longing. Punnāga is Calophyllum inophyllum, white-petalled with a yellow centre, heavily scented. Saugandhika is simply "the sweet-scented one" — Monier-Williams glosses the word itself as fragrant — and it is generally taken to be a white or blue water-lily. So the compound is not a vague heap of flowers. It is four named species, chosen so that the colours run gold, red, white and white and the fragrances layer.

The tradition does something characteristic with this image. It insists that the flowers are not lending her hair their fragrance but borrowing hers. Śaṅkara's verse on the same subject says outright that the blossoms of Indra's own garden take up residence in her hair in order to acquire the scent that is natural to it. The logic is the same as in the previous verses, where the weapons in her hands turned out to be made of the forces they represent: whatever is beautiful in the description is not being attributed to her, it is being derived from her.

Kuruvinda, the stone of the second name, is a genuinely ambiguous word, and it is a good illustration of why a single dictionary is not enough. Monier-Williams lists it as a kind of barley, as the fragrant grass Cyperus rotundus, as the tree Terminalia catappa, as a flower-bud, as black salt, as cinnabar — and, in the neuter, as a ruby. Ruby is the sense the commentators take here, and the context forces it: what else would be strung in rows on a diadem. Note that the first meditation verse has already crowned her with māṇikya, which is the ordinary word for a ruby. The same stone is being named twice with two different words, once in the ritual frame and once in the stotra, and the effect is cumulative rather than repetitive.

Red, again. Ruby, aśoka, and behind them the sindūra and aruṇa of the meditation verses and the flood of red light in the verse just past. By this point in the text a reader should stop treating the colour as ornament. It is the tradition's signature, and when the stotra later calls her sarvāruṇā, wholly crimson, at name forty-nine, it is only stating what the description has been saying all along.

For the first time the verse consists of exactly two names, each sixteen syllables long, each filling a complete line. Count them and you will find that campakāśokapunnāgasaugandhikalasatkacā and kuruvindamaṇiśreṇīkanatkoṭīramaṇḍitā are both precisely half an anuṣṭubh. From here on this becomes the normal shape of a verse in this stotra, and knowing it helps: when you begin a line you know you will not be allowed to stop until sixteen syllables have gone by.

Three pieces of word-formation are visible in the written text and worth pausing over. Campaka plus aśoka has become campakāśoka, two short a vowels fused into a single long ā and written with one ा — the reader has to supply the seam. Punnāga looks like a simple word but is not: the underlying form is puṃnāga, "elephant among men", and the nasal has assimilated to the n that follows and doubled it, which is why the Devanagari shows पुन्नाग with a conjunct. And saugandhika is su-gandha, "good scent", put through the vowel-strengthening called vṛddhi that turns an initial u into au — the same process that turns sundara into saundarya in the title of Śaṅkara's poem.

The verse also gives you two present participles in the compound-final form ending in -at: lasat, shining, and kanat, glittering. This ending is going to be everywhere in the stotra — udyat in verse two, majjat in verse three, vibhrājat in verse five, calat in verse six — so learn its shape now. Written लसत् and कनत्, with the virāma cancelling the inherent a, they are the stem of a present participle with nothing added.

For the consonants: keep aśoka's palatal ś distinct from saugandhika's dental s, and keep both distinct from the retroflex ṣ, which does not appear in this verse and whose absence is itself a useful thing to notice. Maṇi, śreṇī and maṇḍitā all take the retroflex ṇ; koṭīra takes the retroflex ṭ. In practice the second line is a retroflex exercise: let the tongue-tip stay curled back from -maṇi- through to -maṇḍitā and only come forward for the dentals.

On what to hold: the verse is the beginning of a very long act of looking, and the traditional counsel about such passages is not to rush them in order to reach the doctrine. There is no doctrine coming. The description is the point, and the four flowers are meant to be smelled one at a time.