The court assembles in praise, and the army moves out

Bhaṇḍāsura is the antagonist of the Lalitopākhyāna, the long narrative of Lalitā transmitted in the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, and this hymn sits inside that narrative. The story of his origin begins with the episode already invoked when her consort was named lord of desire. Śiva, disturbed in meditation, opened his third eye and burnt Kāma, the god of desire, to ash. The ash did not disperse. One of Śiva's attendants gathered it and shaped a figure from it; Śiva's glance fell on the figure and it came to life. The accounts explain the name from an exclamation of dismay uttered at the sight of the creature, though they differ over who uttered it, and the word bhaṇḍa in ordinary Sanskrit means a knave or a buffoon. The being performed austerities, obtained from Śiva the boon of taking half the strength of any adversary who faced him, built himself a capital called Śūnyaka — the empty city — and ruled.

What his rule did to the world is the part of the story that matters most for reading this hymn. Being made from the ashes of desire, Bhaṇḍa presided over a world from which desire had been withdrawn: nothing was begotten, nothing was wanted, and life went on without vitality. The tradition's point is exact and uncomfortable. The demon is not desire; the demon is what desire becomes when it is incinerated rather than governed. And the goddess who must destroy him has just been named, in the verse immediately preceding this one, as the one whose eyes hold desire and who gives people what they want. When the campaign ends, one of its results will be the restoration of Kāma to his body at the request of his widow.

Unable to endure the situation, the gods performed a great sacrifice, and from the sacrificial pit Lalitā arose — which is why the fourth name of this hymn calls her the one born from the fire-pit of consciousness. She was married to Kāmeśvara, established at Śrīpura, and went to war. Her forces are the śaktis, and śaktisenā is a phrase that works two ways, since śakti means both a power and, in ordinary usage, a spear. An army of powers is also an army of blades. The commanders are named later in the hymn: Mantriṇī, also called Śyāmalā, who is her minister, and Daṇḍanāthā, also called Vārāhī, who is her commander-in-chief, each with her own war-chariot, and Lalitā herself riding the chariot named for the Śrīcakra. The subsequent verses will bring in the fifteen Nityā goddesses, the young goddess Bālā who kills Bhaṇḍa's sons, and the production of Gaṇeśa to break an obstructing device the enemy deploys. The war is not incidental to the diagram: the goddesses who fight it are the same goddesses who inhabit the enclosures of the Śrīcakra, so that a practitioner performing the worship is moving through an order of battle.

The first name repays a slower reading than its length invites. Devarṣi may be taken as a dvandva, gods and sages, or as the technical term devarṣi, a divine sage, which is one of the recognised grades of seer alongside the royal sage and the brahmin sage — Nārada is the standard example. Gaṇa is a troop or company and saṅghāta is a compact mass, so the two together pile crowd on crowd; the compound is doing with vocabulary what a crowd scene does with paint. Stūyamāna is a present passive participle from the root stu, to praise, the same root that gives stotra, the word for the genre this text belongs to. What they are praising is her ātmavaibhava, her own magnificence — vaibhava being an abstract noun formed from vibhu, the all-pervading or mighty, and ātma- here carrying its common sense of "own" rather than its philosophical sense of self. The distinction is worth holding onto. They are not celebrating what she has done for them, which at this point in the story is nothing; they are acknowledging what she is.

One textual note. The nāmāvalī, the form of the text used for offering each name with the word of homage, transmits this name a syllable short, ending in -vaibhāyai rather than the -vaibhavāyai that the stotra's -vaibhavā requires. The shortened form is not a Sanskrit word, and it is best treated as a transmission error rather than a variant reading, but a reciter using a printed nāmāvalī may well find it there.

Two names of sixteen syllables each, one to a line, with no internal landmarks to steer by. Compounds of this length are learned by finding the joints, drilling the pieces, and then joining them without a pause. The joints of the first are devarṣi, gaṇa, saṅghāta, stūyamāna, ātma, vaibhavā — gods-and-sages, troops, massed, being-praised, own, magnificence. Those of the second are bhaṇḍāsura, vadha, udyukta, śakti, senā, samanvitā — Bhaṇḍa, killing, roused-for, powers, army, accompanied-by. Six pieces each, none difficult alone.

Two of those joints involve vowel sandhi worth understanding rather than memorising. In the first name, stūyamāna ends in short a and ātma begins in long ā, and the two merge into one long ā: stūyamānātma. In the second, vadha ends in short a and udyukta begins in short u, and a plus u gives o: vadhodyukta.

The opening of the first name conceals a third sandhi. The elements are deva and ṛṣi, and ṛṣi begins with the vocalic ṛ; a preceding a combines with ṛ to give ar, which is why the word is devarṣi. The resulting cluster rṣi needs the tongue back for both sounds — the r a light tap, the ṣ with the tip curled to the roof of the mouth. It is not the rsh of English "harsh".

Saṅghāta gives the guttural nasal before an aspirated g. The ṅ is made at the soft palate, as in "sing", and the gh is a voiced stop with breath after it, not g plus a separate h. Immediately after comes stū, dental s into unaspirated dental t, so the mouth travels from the back of the palate to the teeth across two syllables; this is where reciters stumble. Then ātma, where tm is dental t straight into labial m.

The second name is dominated by clustered stops. Ṇḍ in bhaṇḍa is retroflex nasal into retroflex ḍ, tongue curled for both, and dy in udyukta is dental d into the palatal glide. Kt appears twice, in udyukta and śakti, both times guttural k released cleanly into dental t; the commonest error is to swallow the k. Nv is dental n into v.

The caesura falls after the sixteenth syllable, exactly the end of the first name, so the metrical break and the sense break coincide. Breathe there and nowhere else, which means each name must be carried on one breath.

For archanā both names take -āyai: devarṣigaṇasaṅghātastūyamānātmavaibhavāyai namaḥ, bhaṇḍāsuravadhodyuktaśaktisenāsamanvitāyai namaḥ. Printed nāmāvalīs differ over the first, some giving the shortened form that drops a syllable; follow the text your teacher uses, and treat the short form as defective rather than optional.

What the verse asks is a change of bearing. Until now the hymn has been contemplative and the natural way to chant it has been even and unhurried. From here it becomes a war narrative and the names lengthen accordingly, and the temptation is to accelerate into the story. The tradition's practice runs the other way: these are the longest names in the stotra, delivered at full weight, because the campaign they open is not a digression from the worship but the reason it exists.