Light off the toenails, and the lotus sent away

Dīdhiti is brightness, splendour, a ray; Monier-Williams also gives it, further down the entry, as religious reflection, devotion, inspiration. Toenails are a serious subject in this literature and not only because they catch the light. In the standard order of temple worship the devotee's head goes to the level of the deity's feet, so the toenails are literally the part of the image at eye height for somebody lying on the floor. When Śaṅkara says that the nails on her toes are moons bright enough to close the lotus-hands of the women of heaven, he is describing what is directly in front of the face of a person who has just prostrated.

Namajjana is namat, bowing, plus jana, people: the bowing folk. And what is covered in them is their tamoguṇa. The three guṇas of Sāṃkhya were already in play in the third verse of this hymn, where the five arrows turned out to be the tanmātras; sattva, rajas and tamas are the three strands of which everything material is woven, and tamas is the one that darkens and weighs down — inertia, obstruction, dullness of mind. Śrīvidyā has an interest in tamas that is not purely hostile, since the same word covers the darkness in which things rest, but the plain sense here is the ordinary one.

What the name claims is precise and unusually modest. Sañchanna means wholly covered, concealed. It does not say that the tamas is annihilated. It says that where her nail-light falls, the dullness is not visible. A stronger claim was available and the Vāgdevatās declined it, and the tradition reads the choice the way it reads several such names: what happens to a devotee first is not a change in what he is made of but a change in what is showing.

Śaṅkara gives her two feet a run of six verses in a row, from the eighty-fourth to the eighty-ninth, and one of them turns on exactly this point. Her feet, he says, seem to be laughing at the trees of heaven — laughing with their toenails, which are moons that make the lotus-hands of the celestial women close up. And what is the joke? The wish-granting trees hand out fruit with their sprout-fingertips, and only to those who are already in heaven; her feet give good fortune to the destitute, without pause and on the spot. The contrast is between a clientele that is already provided for and one that is not. It is the best short statement anywhere in this literature of what the tradition thinks a goddess's feet are for.

The lotus of the second name is the most exhausted comparison in the language. Padmapāda, caraṇakamala, pādāmbuja: the foot-lotus is so entrenched that it has stopped being a figure at all, and this hymn will itself use it in the very next verse, śrīpadāmbujā, having just thrown it out here. Saroruha, the word used here, means only risen out of a pool. Parākṛta means set aside, rejected, driven off, and it is a good deal more dismissive than defeated.

Śaṅkara argues the case rather than asserting it, and the three points he makes are the only place in either poem where a stock comparison is refuted with evidence. A lotus is a thing snow can kill; her feet are expert precisely at living on the snow mountain. A lotus shuts and sleeps at night; her feet are bright in the last watch of the night. A lotus is at best a vessel for Lakṣmī to stand in; her feet pour prosperity over the people who keep the observance. And then the shrug: what is remarkable, mother, in your two feet defeating a lotus? Three properties, three failures, and no more said.

One word in the second name deserves its own note. Jāla, in Monier-Williams, is first a net for catching birds or fish; then a hairnet; then a net in the figurative sense, a snare; and only by extension any dense collection or web. Prabhājāla is a mesh of light and the modern rendering is right, but the first sense of the word is a thing you catch something in. A hymn that opened its description of her hands with a noose has arrived at her feet and found another one.

Finally, a connection worth carrying. The toenails whose brightness this verse describes are the same ten nails that Śaṅkara, four verses earlier in his own poem, identified as the ten arrow-heads at the tips of the quivers that are her shanks, sharpened on the whetstone of the gods' crowns. If you take his account, the light coming off her nails is the shine of a weapon that has been polished by being bowed to.

Two sixteen-syllable names, and both caesurae fall at a joint: nakhadīdhitisañchanna, then namajjanatamoguṇā; padadvayaprabhājāla, then parākṛtasaroruhā.

Dīdhiti is easy to flatten and the metre will not allow it. Two long ī and then a short i: dī-dhi-ti, with an aspirated dh in the middle. Say it three times on its own before putting it into the line.

Sañchanna is a small demonstration of how Sanskrit spells assimilation, and it is worth more than the two seconds it takes. The prefix is sam. Before the palatal ch it becomes the palatal nasal ñ, so sam plus channa is written सञ्छन्न. The same prefix appears elsewhere in this stretch of the hymn as saṃ-, sam-, san- and saṅ-, and the five shapes are simply the five nasals, each chosen to match whatever follows. Once you see that, a whole class of apparently irregular spellings becomes predictable. Then give the doubled n of -channa its full length, because the metre counts on it.

Namajjana has the doubled palatal j, which is now the fifth appearance of that cluster in nineteen verses — ujjvalā twice, majjat twice, and here. Na-maj-ja-na.

Tamoguṇā hides one of the most productive sandhis in the language. Tamas plus guṇa gives tamoguṇa, because a final -as before a voiced sound becomes -o. Manas plus rūpa gave manorūpa in the third verse by exactly the same rule, and it accounts for an enormous number of the -o- compounds you will meet. Undo it and the s-stem underneath becomes findable. The ṇ of guṇa is retroflex and belongs to the stem; nothing triggers it.

The second line is the smoothest sixteen syllables in this whole range: pa-da-dva-ya-pra-bhā-jā-la-pa-rā-kṛ-ta-sa-ro-ru-hā. Only the dv of padadvaya and the syllabic ṛ of parākṛta ask for anything at all, and the rest is open. Use the line to check vowel length rather than agility, since there are five long vowels in it and eleven short, and the alternation is audible if you are doing it right.

One feature of the verse is worth noticing precisely because nothing calls attention to it: there is no palatal ś and no retroflex ṣ anywhere in it. Every sibilant here is the plain dental s, in sañchanna and saroruha. After the six retroflexes of the previous verse this is a clean stretch of road, and hearing the difference between one verse and the next is a better ear-training exercise than any drill.

For the archanā, nakhadīdhitisañchannanamajjanatamoguṇāyai namaḥ and padadvayaprabhājālaparākṛtasaroruhāyai namaḥ.

On what to hold: the first name is the place in the head-to-foot description at which the reciter is put into the picture. Everything from the hair down has been about her. This one is about the people bowing at her feet, and the person saying it is one of them. The instruction is not complicated and does not need to be dressed up: notice that the light is described as falling on you, and that what it does is cover something over rather than take it away.