A campaka bud, and a jewel that shames the stars

Nāsādaṇḍa is a plant word. Daṇḍa is a stalk, a stem, a staff — the same word that gives the sugarcane bow of the third verse its shape — so the nose is being seen as something that grows straight up. Śaṅkara makes exactly the same move with a different plant, calling it nāsāvaṃśa, the bamboo of the nose, and adding a joke the sahasranāma does not risk: a bamboo is what a flag is flown from, so her nose is the flagstaff of the Himālaya's royal house. The two texts are working the same figure — straightness, slenderness, a segmented stem — from the same tradition of description.

Campaka has already been named in this stotra, in the fourth verse, among the flowers in her hair. Repeating it here is not carelessness. The campaka's yellow is a specific and rather pale gold, and using it twice ties the top of the head to the middle of the face. Nava, fresh or new, is doing work too: an opened campaka darkens as it ages, so the comparison is to the flower at its palest, on the first day.

The nose ornament is a South Indian detail. Temple images of the goddess in the far south are given a nose stud, often set with diamonds, and in living practice the ornament is one of the things a devotee may vow to give. Śaṅkara, describing the same feature, says she wears pearls, and offers an explanation of where they come from: her breath, being cool, condenses pearls inside the nostril, and the ornament outside is one of the surplus. That is a conceit rather than a doctrine, but it depends on the same observation the commentators build on — that this is the part of the face through which breath moves. Some read the two nostrils as the channels iḍā and piṅgalā, which is a commentarial overlay and not something the verse itself says.

One word here has more range than it looks. Tārā, in the compound tārākānti, is a star — the light this jewel defeats is starlight. But tārā is also the standard word for the pupil of the eye, and it is the name of one of the great goddesses of the tantric tradition. The plain sense in this verse is starlight; the other meanings sit close by, and a reader who has been through the meditation verses will already have met the moon there under the title tārānāyaka, lord of the stars. Something the moon rules over is here being outshone by a nose stud, which is the kind of quiet escalation the hymn goes in for.

Two words in this verse should be looked at together, because they are the same word twice: nāsādaṇḍa and nāsābharaṇa. The first begins with a dental n; the second begins with the same dental n and then ends in a retroflex ṇ. That final ṇ is not arbitrary. Ābharaṇa is built on the root bhṛ with the prefix ā, and the r inside the root pulls the following n back into the retroflex position — the rule the grammarians call ṇatva, which will account for the retroflex nasal in an enormous number of the names in this stotra. Once you have heard the difference between the n of nāsā and the ṇ of ābharaṇa inside a single word, that rule stops being abstract.

The compound-final ābha, appearing here in puṣpābha, is worth collecting. It means "having the look of" and it has now turned up four times in six verses: sahasrābhā in the second, kalaṅkābha in the fifth, mīnābha in the sixth, puṣpābha here. It is one of the handful of endings that do most of the work in this hymn, along with -maṇḍitā, -śobhitā, -virājitā and -bhāsurā, all of which mean roughly "made splendid by". Recognising them turns a long compound into a short one plus a familiar tail.

The two lines end with two different kinds of adjective and it is audible. Virājitā is a past participle: made brilliant, having been made resplendent. Bhāsurā is a primary adjective formed with the suffix -ura: simply shining, no agent implied. The first line therefore says something was done to her nose, and the second says her ornament shines of itself.

For the consonants: puṣpa has ṣ then p, retroflex sibilant into labial stop, and the ṣ must not soften into an s. Tirask-ārin gives you the rs sequence across a syllable boundary. And keep the long ā of nāsā long in both names — it is the same vowel twice in a row, and a common place to let the second one shorten.

On what to hold: this is the smallest thing the hymn has stopped for so far, and there will be smaller. The discipline the head-to-foot description asks for is the willingness to spend a whole verse on a nose without deciding that the poem must really be about something else.