From the world-mountain inward to the couch of the five gods

Meru is the mountain at the centre of the world in Purāṇic geography — golden, immense, the axis about which the sun and the planets turn, with the continents arranged around it and the gods living on its slopes. Su- is an intensifying prefix, so Sumeru is Meru at its most Meru. The name here specifies the middle peak, which presupposes that the mountain has more than one summit; the accounts supply several, though they do not agree on how many or on who occupies which, and a reader will find the three-peaked and four-peaked descriptions both in circulation. What the hymn needs is only the centrality. She is not on the mountain but on the point of it, and the point of the world-mountain is the point of the world.

That literal cosmology has a second life as a ritual object. A Śrīcakra can be drawn flat on a copper plate, but it can also be built up in relief, the nine enclosures rising in tiers to the central point, and a diagram made in that raised form is called a Meru or Meru-prastāra. Practitioners who keep one on an altar are keeping a small mountain, and the identification runs in both directions: the mountain is a diagram and the diagram is a mountain. When the name says she stands on the middle summit, it is describing both a place in the cosmos and an object a worshipper may have in the room.

The city is Śrīpura or Śrīnagara, and it is described at length in the Lalitopākhyāna, the long narrative of Lalitā in the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa within which this hymn is transmitted. The description is architectural and obsessive: a series of concentric ramparts, twenty-five in the usual count, each built of a different substance — iron, bronze, copper, lead, brass, silver, gold, and then successively topaz, ruby, diamond, beryl, sapphire, pearl, emerald, coral — with gardens, groves and attendant deities between them, until the innermost enclosures are of gem-stone itself. The lists differ between recensions and it is a mistake to treat any one of them as authoritative; what is constant is the principle, that approach to the centre is graded and takes work. Nagara, city, is also the word behind the tradition's understanding of her title Tripurasundarī, the beauty of the three cities. This school thinks about divinity in urban terms — a governed place with walls, gates, districts and officials — and the nine enclosures of the Śrīcakra, each with its own resident goddesses, are that city drawn on a plate.

The cintāmaṇi is the wish-granting gem, one of a small family of Indian objects that give whatever is desired, alongside the kalpavṛkṣa, the wish-tree, and the kāmadhenu, the cow of plenty. It is not the property of one tradition: Buddhist iconography puts a cintāmaṇi in the hands of Avalokiteśvara, and the image is common to most of the religious literature of the subcontinent. What is striking in this name is the grammar of the compound. The house is not a house containing wish-granting gems; it is a house made of them, so that the material of the walls is the granting of wishes. Anyone inside such a building has, by construction, nothing left to ask for — which is the tradition's way of saying that the innermost sanctum is where desire terminates, and this sits deliberately close to the naming of her consort as the lord of desire two names earlier.

The last name reaches the furniture, and the furniture turns out to be theological. The five Brahmās are Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Rudra, Īśvara and Sadāśiva, and they are not an arbitrary group: in Śaiva doctrine they preside over the five cosmic functions, which are emission, maintenance, withdrawal, concealment and the bestowal of grace. Four of them form the legs of her couch and the fifth is the plank or mattress laid across them. Later in the hymn the same couch will be named again in harsher language, as a bed of five corpses, on the reasoning that the five are inert until she animates them — the standard tantric pun in which śiva without śakti is śava, a body. The Śaiva tradition also uses the term pañcabrahman for the five great mantras associated with the five faces of Sadāśiva, and the two senses are not kept rigorously apart. Either way the name completes the verse's argument. The movement inward has passed from a mountain to a city to a house, and it ends by discovering that the entire administrative machinery of the universe is functioning, at the innermost point, as a piece of furniture.

This verse is unusually kind to a learner in one respect and unusually demanding in another. The kindness is metrical: each of the four names is exactly eight syllables and fills one quarter of the anuṣṭubh, so there is no ambiguity about where a name begins or ends. The demand is in the consonants, as difficult as any in the stotra.

Three of the four names end in a form of the root sthā, to stand. The cluster sth is dental s followed by aspirated dental th, both with the tongue at the upper teeth, the aspiration a single puff after the t and not a separate syllable. Since the verse gives the cluster three times in the same position, take the three endings by themselves before attempting the whole names.

Two names contain the vocalic ṛ, a vowel in Sanskrit and not a consonant cluster: śṛṅga and gṛha. It is made by curling the tongue toward the retroflex position and voicing it as a syllable in its own right, close to the American -er of "butter" but shorter. In śṛṅga it follows the palatal ś, so the tongue travels from hard palate to retroflex position within one syllable; this is awkward and worth isolating. The ṅg that follows is the guttural nasal before g, as in "finger".

Śrīmannagaranāyikā contains a sandhi worth understanding rather than memorising. The elements are śrīmat, possessed of splendour, and nagara, city. A final t before a nasal becomes the corresponding nasal, so śrīmat becomes śrīman, and the result is a doubled n which must be held long: śrī-man-na-ga-ra. Reciters who shorten it lose a syllable's weight and the pāda goes slack.

Pañcabrahmāsanasthitā is the hardest name here. Ñc is the palatal nasal before the palatal c, the tongue flat against the hard palate throughout. Then comes br, straightforward, followed by hm, which is not. In brahmā the h is a voiced breathy sound leading directly into m; English speakers either drop it or insert a vowel, producing "bra-ha-ma". It is two syllables, bra and hmā, and the h belongs to the second.

For the recitation done as archanā the verse is straightforward, since all four names are feminine ā-stems taking the dative in -āyai: sumerumadhyaśṛṅgasthāyai namaḥ, śrīmannagaranāyikāyai namaḥ, cintāmaṇigṛhāntasthāyai namaḥ, pañcabrahmāsanasthitāyai namaḥ. After the irregularities of the preceding verse this uniformity is a good place to consolidate the ending.

What the verse asks is that the attention actually make the journey it describes rather than take the four names as titles. Śrīcakra worship proceeds through the enclosures one at a time, and this verse is that procedure compressed into thirty-two syllables: mountain, city, house, seat. Let each name settle before moving to the next, which the even measure makes easy. The one thing not to do is arrive at the last name and hear it as scenery. Everything the worshipper has been taught to think of as ultimate — the creator, the preserver, the destroyer — has just been placed underneath her, and the verse expects that to register.