The chariot called King of Wheels

The Lalitopākhyāna does not tell the campaign against Bhaṇḍāsura as a myth. It tells it as a war book, in the manner of the Mahābhārata: named commanders, armies counted in akṣauhiṇīs, a chain of command, several days of fighting with a pause at nightfall, and vehicles assigned strictly by rank. Three chariots leave Śrīpura, and the purāṇa has already placed them in the city before the campaign starts, drawn up in the grounds of the Cintāmaṇi mansion — the Cakrarāja in the lotus grove to the south-west, the Geyacakra to the north-west, the Kiricakra of the next verse to the north-east.

The Cakrarāja is hers, and it is described as enormous and as having nine tiers or steps. The tradition takes those nine tiers to be the nine enclosures of the Śrīcakra, which is a reading the words invite rather than resist: cakrarāja is one of the ordinary names of the Śrīcakra itself. So cakrarāja-ratha says in two words that she goes to war seated inside her own diagram, and that the diagram is not a picture of a place but a vehicle that moves. Each tier of it is occupied. The purāṇa spends chapters stationing deities on the steps, so that when the stotra says sarvāyudha, all the weapons, it is not reaching for a superlative. On this chariot the armament is the personnel: the weapons are goddesses, and the goddesses are the enclosures of the yantra.

The Geyacakra belongs to Mantriṇī and has seven steps, and the purāṇa's roster for it is worth knowing because it shows what kind of army this is. On the first step Mantriṇī herself with Saṅgītayoginī; on the second Rati, Prīti and Manojā with lutes; on the third the five goddesses of Kāma's arrows — Drāviṇī, Śoṣiṇī, Bandhinī, Mohinī and Unmādinī — with five forms of the love-god beneath them; on the fourth the eight mother-powers headed by Brāhmī, and below them Lakṣmī, Sarasvatī, Rati, Prīti, Kīrti, Śānti, Puṣṭi and Tuṣṭi; on the fifth sixteen goddesses headed by Vāmā; on the sixth the eight Bhairavas beginning with Asitāṅga; on the seventh Mātaṅgī, Siddhalakṣmī and the powers of the guardians of the quarters. An army made of music, desire, speech and prosperity is going to war, and the chariot it rides in is called the Wheel of Song.

Mantriṇī is the second figure of the tradition after Lalitā. Her other names are Śyāmalā, Rājaśyāmalā and Mātaṅgī; she is dark, she carries a vīṇā, and she governs speech, music and counsel. Mantriṇī is simply the feminine of mantrin, the king's minister, and in the ritual system of Śrīvidyā she and Daṇḍinī are worshipped as the two officers of state. Agastya, in the frame narrative that opens this text, complains that Hayagrīva has already given him the thousand names of Mantriṇī and of Daṇḍinī and has withheld only Lalitā's — which tells you that both had thousand-name hymns of their own, and that a listener in the eighth or tenth century would have heard geyacakra-rathārūḍha-mantriṇī and pictured a specific goddess with a specific instrument, not an allegory of good advice.

What the sahasranāma does with all this is compression. The purāṇa needs several chapters to load the chariots; the hymn needs thirty-two syllables. This is worth holding on to for the next eight verses, which can read like a catalogue of proper names if you do not know that each one is a compressed chapter. The Vāgdevatās are not summarising the story for someone who has not heard it. They are giving the reciter a set of handles.

The two lines of this verse are metrical twins, and hearing the twinning is most of the work. Each is a single sixteen-syllable name; each has -rathārūḍha- sitting in exactly the same position, as its fifth to twelfth syllables; each ends in a past participle in -ā. Chant it once slowly with that shape in mind and the verse stops being two mouthfuls and becomes a couplet with a refrain in the middle.

The sound to isolate first is ḍh in ārūḍha, the voiced retroflex aspirate. Curl the tongue-tip back, keep the voice on, and let a distinct puff of breath out as the tongue comes away. It occurs twice in this verse and twice more in the next, so it is worth the drill. Then pariṣkṛtā, which packs three difficulties into four syllables: the retroflex ṣ, the cluster ṣk, and the syllabic ṛ. Take it as pa-riṣ-kṛ-tā, keeping the ṛ short — it is one beat and no more.

That word also sets up the single best drill in this stretch of the stotra, and the answer arrives in the very next verse. This verse ends in pariṣkṛtā with a retroflex ṣ; the next ends in puraskṛtā with a plain dental s. The two words are near-identical in shape, they are both built on √kṛ, and they rhyme across the join between the verses. The retroflex in pariṣkṛtā is not arbitrary: an s following the i of pari- is turned retroflex by rule, while the s of puras- is protected by the a in front of it. Say the two words back to back until the difference is audible, because the same rule will govern half the retroflex sibilants you meet from here on.

Mantriṇī is three difficulties in a row as well. The cluster ntr is dental n, dental t, then r, all in one release; the ṇ that follows is retroflex; and the final ī is long. Immediately after it comes parisevitā, which is dental all the way through. So the word pair mantriṇī-parisevitā takes the tongue-tip back and then forward four times in eight syllables. Go slowly.

Two sandhis are hidden in the writing. Sarva plus āyudha has given sarvāyudha, and ratha plus ārūḍha has given rathārūḍha; in both cases two a-sounds have merged into a single long ā written with one mātrā, so the ear gets no warning of where the seam is. Notice also that geya is two syllables, ge-ya, with a pure long e — never the diphthong an English speaker will want to put there.

The metrical caesura falls after the eighth syllable of each line, which in both cases lands inside a word: cakrarājarathā | rūḍha and geyacakrarathā | rūḍha. Hear the division without opening a gap in the sound. Most reciters take the actual breath at the end of the first line and run each name through in one arc.

As for what to hold: this is the point where the stotra stops looking at her and starts following her. The verse has no adjective of beauty in it. It reports equipment and it reports a subordinate keeping station, and the change of register after twenty-five verses of ornament is itself the thing to notice.