Ten descents out of her fingernails

The Lalitopākhyāna sets out this part of the battle as a table, weapon against counter-weapon, and it is worth having the table because the stotra reduces the whole of it to one word, daśākṛti, the ten forms. Bhaṇḍa releases the missile that produces the demon who stole the Vedas, and she answers with the fish. He sends the ocean-weapon, and the tortoise comes up to carry the śaktis on its back. He restores Hiraṇyākṣa, and the boar kills him again; Hiraṇyakaśipu, and the man-lion tears him apart; Bali, and the dwarf appears; Sahasrārjuna, and Paraśurāma; Rāvaṇa, and Rāma with his bow; a swarm of demons born as kings, and the fourfold Vāsudeva, Saṅkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna and Aniruddha; the Kali missile, and Kalki.

That list is not the one on the calendars. This text's ten do not include the Buddha, they represent Kṛṣṇa by the four-fold emanation of the Pāñcarātra theology rather than by Kṛṣṇa himself, and they close with a form answering great delusion rather than with a familiar name. The set of ten was still settling when this material was composed, and here it has been arranged not by chronology but by function: each descent is defined by the enemy it exists to cancel. That is worth knowing before deciding what the stotra means by ten forms.

The detail about the fingernails is not an ornament either. Narasiṃha killed Hiraṇyakaśipu with his claws, because the demon's boon had ruled out every weapon; the avatāra of the nails is himself an avatāra about nails. This stotra has also been to her nails before. At name 44 the light coming off her toenails was said to burn away the darkness in those who bow to her — the hymn's foot-to-crown description ended there, and the same body-part now produces armed gods. A reader who has been chanting from the beginning will hear the echo.

The Pāśupata weapon in the second name carries an even heavier freight. In the Mahābhārata it is Śiva's supreme missile, obtained by Arjuna after a wrestling match with the god disguised as a mountain hunter, and it is given with an explicit warning: never to be discharged at an ordinary human being, because if released at a lesser target it would burn the world. That is exactly what she does with it. She uses the weapon that must not be used on lesser beings on the whole of the demon rank and file at once, and the name for the result is nirdagdha — burnt out, consumed, nothing left. It is the same participle the next verse will use for the destruction of the city.

The theological move here is the one the stotra has been making since its second verse, and it is worth naming because this is its largest instance. In verses two and three the bow, the arrows, the noose and the goad — the equipment of the god of desire — turned out to be hers. Here the ten bodies of Viṣṇu come off her hands like sparks and the ultimate weapon of Śiva is one of her arrows. The hymn does not argue for her supremacy. It demonstrates it by inventory.

The verse begins with a cluster most learners have not met yet. Karāṅguli has ṅg, the guttural nasal made at exactly the point where the g that follows it is made, so the tongue never travels between them; it is the same sound as in English "finger", which is a useful accident since aṅguli means finger. Say ka-rāṅ-gu-li with the ṅ closed and the g released.

Then a sandhi that the writing hides. Nakha plus utpanna gives nakhotpanna: a short a and a short u have fused into a single o, and the word-boundary has vanished. Inside the result you get tp, an unaspirated t running straight into a p, and then a doubled nn that has to be held. Na-kho-tpan-na.

The first name ends in a visarga, which is the first thing this verse asks you to do that the last six did not. Daśākṛtiḥ is an i-stem, so its nominative singular is -tiḥ and not -tā, and after nine consecutive names closing on a long ā the change is very audible. The visarga itself is a voiceless breath that carries a faint echo of the vowel before it — most southern reciters will give you a light ihi at the end of daśākṛtiḥ, and that is the traditional realisation, not an error.

Nirdagdha in the second line is the hardest cluster in the verse: a voiced g running directly into the voiced aspirate dh, with no vowel between them and the aspiration audible on the dh alone. Nir-dag-dha. It occurs again in the very next verse in the same position, so the practice carries over.

The second line is also a chain of three sandhi seams inside one word. Mahā plus pāśupata plus astra plus agni yields mahāpāśupatāstrāgni: pata and astra merge their a and ā into one long ā, and astra and agni do the same again a syllable later. Five long ā's in eight syllables, and none of the four original word-boundaries visible. Say it slowly as mahā-pāśupata-astra-agni before you say it as written, and the sense will stay attached to the sound.

One pleasant thing about the sibilants here. This verse has no retroflex ṣ at all, which is unusual for this stretch of the hymn. What it has is the palatal ś twice, in daśa and in pāśupata, against plain dental s in asura and sainika. After ten verses of curling the tongue back this is a rest, and it is worth noticing the relief as information: the poet has given you a line your tongue can lie flat for.

On what to hold while chanting: the image is very physical and should be allowed to be. Ten armed gods come out of the ends of her fingers, at the exact place where a hand stops being a hand. If the ten descents have ever felt like a doctrinal list to be recited, this verse puts them back where the tradition wants them, which is at the edge of a body.