The herb that brought desire back

It is worth stopping at this point to see how large a detour has just closed. The chain begins with Tārakāsura, who held a boon that only a son of Śiva could kill him. Śiva was in mourning and in meditation and would not marry, so the gods sent Kāma to disturb him; Śiva opened his third eye and burnt him to ash; the ash was gathered and shaped into a figure, which became Bhaṇḍāsura and turned out to be a far worse problem than the one the gods had been trying to solve. The whole Lalitā narrative — her rising from the fire, her city, her army, the four days of battle — is an interpolated emergency inside the plot of the Kumārasambhava, and this verse is where the interpolation is closed and the original story allowed to resume. Kāma is revived, goes back to work on Śiva, this time succeeds, and Skanda is born and kills Tāraka. The purāṇa says so explicitly a few verses after the passage this name is drawn from.

The scene itself is domestic rather than cosmic. The gods bring Rati forward. She is described as a widow with her hair uncombed, which is the standard sign, and their argument to the goddess is not theological — they say that this woman is wretched, and that if the goddess reunites her with her husband she will be blessed. Lalitā looks at her, is moved, and out of the sidelong glance that follows Manmatha is reborn: better-looking than before, with a smiling face, only two arms this time, his bow and arrows made of flowers. He delights his wife with a look, the same way he was made.

The metaphor chosen for her is precise in a way that a general word like saviour would not be. Sañjīvanī is the herb of the Rāmāyaṇa, the one Hanumān goes to the mountain to fetch and brings back with the mountain attached because he cannot tell which plant it is. There is a second resonance: the demons' own preceptor Śukra was famous for possessing the mṛtasañjīvanī, the knowledge that raises the dead, and used it to keep resurrecting his side's casualties. The stotra calls the goddess not the person who administers the remedy but the remedy itself — the herb, not the physician. That is the same grammatical habit that made the noose desire's own form in verse two: she is not described as doing the thing, she is described as being the substance by which the thing is done.

The second name opens the mantra section and needs a word of orientation. The root mantra of this school has fifteen syllables and falls into three groups, called kūṭas — the word means a peak or summit, and by extension a heap or cluster, so the mantra has three summits. The first is the vāgbhava, that which arises as speech; the second the middle or kāmarāja cluster; the third the śakti cluster. Each of the three ends in the same syllable, which the tradition calls the hṛllekhā. The syllables themselves are given at initiation and are not printed here, but the Saundaryalaharī verse quoted below encodes them, letter by letter, in a way that has been decoded in print for a very long time — and that verse is itself the best evidence of how old and how stable the arrangement is.

What this name does with that structure is to map it onto her body. The vāgbhava cluster is her face. It is the cluster of speech, and the face is where speech comes from; and if you have read the frame narrative you will remember that the hymn you are reciting was composed by the goddesses of speech at her command. The next verse will take the middle cluster down to the waist and the third below it. The hymn is about to say that her body is not merely described by the mantra but is the mantra, in the plainest possible sense: three groups of syllables, three regions of a body, no remainder.

Two visarga-final names in three verses, and this is the second: auṣadhiḥ. The word packs four separate difficulties into four syllables — the diphthong au, which is long and must not collapse into a plain o; the retroflex ṣ; the aspirated dh, which is d with an audible puff and not the sound in English "the"; and the closing visarga, that light voiceless breath echoing the preceding i. Say au-ṣa-dhiḥ slowly four times.

Before it comes sañjīvana, with ñj — a palatal nasal followed by a palatal j. Because both are made at the same place the tongue does not move at all between them; the nasal simply stops and the voice comes out through the mouth. And before that, sandagdha: a dental nd, then the gdh you have now met three verses running.

Haranetrāgni is a straightforward vowel merger — netra plus agni, a and a into one long ā — but it is worth reconstructing because it keeps the picture in view. Hara's eye, the eye's fire: three words in five syllables.

The second line contains the two most instructive consonant sandhis in the batch, and both are visible in the writing. Śrīmat plus vāgbhava has become śrīmadvāgbhava, because a final unvoiced t before the voiced v is itself voiced to d — the same change you met in cidagni in the very first verse. And vāgbhava is itself vāc plus bhava: the palatal c of vāc, speech, becomes a guttural g before the voiced aspirate bh. So the word for the speech-cluster has had its own first consonant altered by the second half of the compound, and the writing preserves the evidence. When you chant śrīmadvāgbhava you are saying śrīmat vāc bhava with two joints greased.

Then kūṭaika, which is kūṭa plus eka. A short a followed by e does not merge into e; it strengthens to ai. This is the vṛddhi merger, less common than the ones that give ā and o and e, and it is about to recur three more times in the next two verses — kūṭaikatā, mūlādhāraika, kulāmṛtaika. Learn its signature now: whenever you see an ai in the middle of a compound in this hymn, suspect a following eka or ekatā.

The rest of the second line is retroflex work. Kūṭa has the retroflex ṭ, and mukhapaṅkajā ends on ṅk, the guttural nasal again, made at the point of the k. Between them svarūpa gives you a plain dental s and a rolled r.

A point of rhythm: the caesura in the second line falls after -eka-, at the eighth syllable, which is also where the compound divides between the mantra-cluster and the body-part. For once the metrical joint and the grammatical joint coincide. Breathe there.

On what to hold: this verse is the seam of the whole hymn. The first name looks back at everything that has happened since the goddess rose from the fire; the second looks forward into the mantra, the body, the six centres and the coiled power, which is what the rest of this stretch of the stotra is about. Chanted attentively it should feel like a door.