Lotus forest, kadamba grove, sea of nectar — and then her eyes

The two versions of where she lives do not agree, and it is worth being clear about that rather than harmonising them. The previous verse put her on the middle summit of Meru; this one puts her on an island in a sea of nectar. Both are old and both are current, and practitioners hold them simultaneously without embarrassment. The island version has its own literature: the Devī Bhāgavata Purāṇa devotes a long passage to Maṇidvīpa, the island of jewels, and the Saundaryalaharī's eighth verse places her on an island in the sea of nectar. What is common to the two accounts is not the topography but the structure — a centre, approached across a distance, surrounded by increasingly precious enclosures.

Aṭavī, in the first name, is not the polite word for a garden. It means a forest or wilderness, a place one roams in and can be lost in, and pairing it with lotuses produces a strange image: flowers growing as thick and as tall as trees, so that a lotus bed becomes a landscape one enters. Commentators who read Śrīpura as a description of the subtle body rather than of a place take the great lotus forest as the thousand-petalled lotus at the crown of the head, and once that reading is admitted the rest of the geography follows it inward. The two readings are not alternatives to decide between; the external and internal versions of the map are meant to be laid over each other.

The kadamba is a real tree, common across the Indian plains, with dense spherical orange flower-heads that open at the first rains and carry a heavy scent. In poetry its flowering signals the monsoon's arrival, and it belongs to Kṛṣṇa's landscape in Vaiṣṇava literature as much as to the goddess's in Śākta. For this hymn it has a geography attached: Madurai is called Kadambavana in its own temple tradition, and Mīnākṣī who presides there is addressed as the dweller in the kadamba grove. The Saundaryalaharī plants kadamba around the house of wish-granting stone, using the tree's other Sanskrit name, nīpa. So the name has a double reference, to a grove in the mythical city and to an actual temple town in Tamil country, and readers of this hymn in the South have generally heard both.

Sudhā is the drink that makes the gods deathless, the same substance as amṛta, and the ocean of it recalls the most-told episode in Purāṇic literature. Gods and demons, having agreed to cooperate, used Mount Mandara as a churning-stick and the serpent Vāsuki as the rope, and turned the ocean until it yielded its treasures: Dhanvantari with the pot of nectar, the goddess Śrī, the wish-granting cow, the moon, the horse and elephant of the gods — and, before any of them, the poison Hālāhala, which Śiva swallowed and held in his throat, turning it blue. The story establishes what a sea of nectar is: not a decorative pool but the source of deathlessness, obtained only by prolonged and dangerous labour. In the internalised reading the nectar is the flow that descends from the crown when the ascending energy reaches it, and several later names in this hymn use the same vocabulary.

Then the verse turns. Kāmākṣī is a proper name before it is a description — the goddess of Kāñcīpuram, one of three great seats of goddess worship whose presiding deities are all named for their eyes: Kāmākṣī at Kāñcī, Mīnākṣī at Madurai, Viśālākṣī at Vārāṇasī. Since the kadamba name has just gestured at Madurai, the hymn is naming two of the three in adjacent breaths. At Kāñcī the local tradition offers a playful analysis, taking kā as Sarasvatī and ā as Lakṣmī, so that the two great goddesses are her two eyes; the straightforward reading is the one the grammar gives, that desire is in her eyes. Either way the register changes from architecture to face, and the tradition's long preoccupation with her sidelong glance, the kaṭākṣa that a petitioner actually hopes for, begins here.

Kāmadāyinī completes the turn. Kāma is one of the four recognised aims of human life, alongside dharma, wealth and liberation, and orthodox Indian ethics treats it not as illegitimate but as one good among others that must be kept in place. Śrīvidyā goes further than most schools in refusing to choose: it promises bhukti and mukti together, enjoyment and release, and treats the demand that a practitioner give up the first to obtain the second as a failure of nerve. A name saying plainly that she gives people what they want, placed immediately after a name about her eyes, is that position stated in the hymn's own idiom.

The verse divides into two unequal halves for the reciter: three long names of eight syllables each, filling three quarter-lines exactly, then a fourth quarter shared between kāmākṣī and kāmadāyinī. The change of pace is the point and should not be smoothed away. Come off the long names cleanly and let the two short ones stand separately; run together they sound like one word, and beginners regularly produce kāmākṣīkāmadāyinī with no join audible.

Mahāpadmāṭavīsaṃsthā contains three things worth isolating. The cluster dm in padma is dental d followed by labial m, both fully pronounced, with no vowel between. The ṭ of aṭavī is retroflex, made with the tongue tip curled back, and must not become the dental t that an English speaker's t naturally is. And saṃsthā carries an anusvāra before a sibilant, which here is not a consonant but a nasalisation of the preceding vowel: a nasalised sa flowing straight into sthā, not sam followed by a fresh syllable.

The cluster sth returns twice here, in saṃsthā and in sudhāsāgaramadhyasthā, having appeared three times in the verse before. Dental s, then aspirated dental th, one puff of breath.

Kadambavanavāsinī is the easiest name in the verse. The mb of kadamba is a labial nasal into a labial stop, exactly as in English "amber", and the rest is open syllables. Use it to recover breath control after the first name.

Sudhāsāgaramadhyasthā has two aspirated dentals, the dh of sudhā and the dh of madhya, and they must be distinguished from the unaspirated d of kadamba just behind them. Aspirated dh is voiced with a following breath — not d plus a separate h, and not the th of English "the". The cluster dhy in madhya is that aspirated dental releasing into the palatal glide.

Kāmākṣī turns on kṣ, the most distinctive conjunct in Sanskrit: guttural k followed by the retroflex sibilant ṣ, one unit, the tongue moving from soft palate to curled-back position within it. The common error is to substitute the sound in English "action", which palatalises the sibilant.

For the recitation done as archanā, this verse alternates its endings. The two names in -sthā are feminine ā-stems and take -āyai: mahāpadmāṭavīsaṃsthāyai namaḥ, sudhāsāgaramadhyasthāyai namaḥ. The other three are ī-stems and take -yai: kadambavanavāsinyai namaḥ, kāmākṣyai namaḥ, kāmadāyinyai namaḥ. The safe method is to identify the stem before reaching for the ending rather than to memorise the five forms.

What the verse asks is a change of attention halfway through. The first three names continue the work of the preceding verse, building a place; the last two stop building and look at somebody. A reciter who chants all five in the same manner has missed what the verse does. It is customary to let the two kāma names carry a different weight — quieter, and addressed rather than described — since after all the ramparts and oceans the hymn has arrived at the only two facts a petitioner needs, which are that she is looking and that she gives.