Teeth like sprouts of pure knowledge

Śuddhavidyā, pure knowledge, is a technical term. In the Śaiva systems it names one of the tattvas, a level of reality; in Śrīvidyā it is above all a name for the fifteen-syllabled mantra of this tradition, the vidyā itself. Comparing teeth to its sprouts is therefore not a simile drawn from the garden but a doctrinal statement in the shape of one. The mantra is planted, and what comes up out of the soil, visible when she smiles, is a row of white shoots. It is also a claim about origins: the sound that the mantra is made of is formed at the teeth as much as anywhere.

The word for tooth here is dvija, and the dictionary gives it three meanings that are all live in Sanskrit: a tooth, because it grows twice; a bird, because it is born first as an egg; and a man of the first three classes, twice-born through initiation. The rows in her mouth are therefore rows of the twice-born, and the pun is not accidental in a text that will shortly be describing her assembly of attendants. Sanskrit lets a poet say something like this without doing anything but choosing the ordinary word.

The betel roll of the second name is a specific ritual object. A vīṭikā is betel leaf wrapped around areca nut and lime with spices, here perfumed with camphor, and offering tāmbūla is one of the standard services in formal worship, given after food. It is offered to this goddess in Śrīvidyā practice, and the hymn returns to it: at name five hundred and fifty-nine she is tāmbūlapūritamukhī, her mouth full of betel. The opening invocation printed before this stotra uses the same phrase. So the detail travels — from the devotee's tray, into the goddess's mouth, and back out as a fragrance that fills the directions.

Camphor is worth a moment. Monier-Williams records that both mṛgāṅka and śaśāṅka — deer-marked and hare-marked, the two everyday Sanskrit names for the moon — are also names for camphor, because of its whiteness and its coolness. The moon that was on her forehead in the fifth verse and hanging from her ear in the eighth is therefore in her mouth here, in a different state of matter. Whether the Vāgdevatās intended that is unknowable; that the vocabulary makes it available is a fact about the language they were writing in.

One word does more than it appears to. Samākarṣin means drawing together, attracting — and Monier-Williams, unusually, gives "diffusing fragrance" as one of its senses outright, so the compound is idiomatic rather than strained. The scent does not spread. It pulls. Digantara, the last element, means a quarter of the sky, another region, and simply space. The final image of these ten verses is of the horizons being drawn inward toward a mouth.

The line divides into two sixteen-syllable names as usual, and both of them end with a sandhi that has swallowed a vowel. Dvaya plus ujjvalā gives dvayojjvalā, a and u merging into o; that same ujjvalā appeared at the end of the second verse, so the ear should recognise it. Vidyā plus aṅkura gives vidyāṅkura, and aṅkura plus ākāra gives aṅkurākāra: two separate mergers into a long ā, both invisible, one after the other. If the first name feels like an undifferentiated wall of syllables, it is because three word-boundaries in it have been erased. Rebuild it as śuddha - vidyā - aṅkura - ākāra - dvija - paṅkti - dvaya - ujjvalā and it becomes a sentence.

The doubled j of ujjvalā followed by v is the hardest cluster in the verse and the same one that ended the second verse; take it as -yoj-jva-lā. Paṅkti puts a guttural nasal, a k and a t together with one vowel among them: paṅk-ti. And dvija and dvaya both begin with dv, a dental followed by the labiodental v, which English speakers tend to reduce to a d or a plain v — both consonants must be heard.

In the second name, karpūra has the sequence rp with a long ū after it, vīṭikā has a retroflex ṭ between two long vowels, and samākarṣi has the retroflex ṣ. Keep the ṣ of -karṣi distinct from the s of sam- at the start of the same word: one word, two sibilants, two places of articulation.

One more instance of an ending you have now met several times: samākarṣin has lost its n inside the compound, exactly as paribhāvin and nyakkārin did in the previous verse.

This verse is also a natural place to stop and take stock of the breath. The head-to-foot description will continue for another twenty-five names — speech, smile, chin, throat — but the ten verses covered here form a unit: the manifestation, the weapons, the flood of light, and then the face from the hair down to the mouth. Reciting the ten together takes only a few minutes, and doing so is a good way to feel the shape of the opening before going further.

For contemplation, the last name gives an unusually simple instruction. Attend to a fragrance, and notice that it is described as pulling rather than spreading. Then notice that the thousand names you are reciting came out of the same mouth.