A body divided into three mantras

This is the second head-to-foot description of the goddess in the stotra, and it is worth putting the two side by side. The first ran from name 13 to name 51 and was made of visible things: four kinds of blossom in her hair, a ruby diadem, the half-moon of her forehead, musk on the brow, and so on down to the toenails whose light dispels darkness. It took thirty-nine names. The second takes three, occupies two verses, and is made entirely of sound. It is the same body twice, once painted and once spelled.

The division points are the throat and the waist, and they are chosen rather than obvious. Kaṇṭhādhaḥ means below the throat, kaṭiparyanta means as far as the hips, so the middle cluster occupies the trunk — the chest, the heart, the breath — while the first cluster had the head and the third has everything from the waist down. In yogic anatomy those two lines matter independently: the throat is a junction, the waist is where the lower centres begin. Here they are being used as the seams of a garment made of syllables.

The fifteen-syllabled mantra falls into three groups of five, six and four, and the tradition calls each a kūṭa, a peak or summit; each ends in the same syllable, the hṛllekhā. The first is the vāgbhava, of speech; the second is the middle cluster, also called the kāmarāja, the sovereignty of desire; the third is the śakti cluster. Beyond that, a great many correspondences have been proposed and are transmitted with varying confidence — the three to the sun, moon and fire; to waking, dream and deep sleep; to will, knowledge and action; to the three great gods. These are the tradition's own reflections rather than statements in the text, and it is worth holding them lightly. What the text itself asserts is narrower and stranger: three groups of syllables, three regions of a body, and an equals sign.

One of the several traditional explanations of her name Tripurasundarī, the beauty of the three cities, takes the three cities to be exactly these three clusters. Others take them as the three worlds, the three states of consciousness, or the three cities Śiva burnt. All of these circulate, and the tradition has never been embarrassed by having four incompatible etymologies for its central name. But the reading that makes the three cities the three kūṭas is the one these two verses support, because they have just built her out of three parts and called each part a mantra.

The underlying operation — take a body, divide it, and equate each part with a member of some other ordered set — is very old in India. The Ṛgvedic hymn of the cosmic person does it, mapping mouth, arms, thighs and feet onto the divisions of society; the Upaniṣads do it with the sheaths; the tantric traditions do it with mantras, and the technical name for the result is the mantra-body. What distinguishes the version here is the direction of the identification. In the older cases the body is the source and the categories are read out of it. Here the mantra is the source, and the body is what the mantra looks like when it is seen rather than heard.

There is a practical consequence, and it is the reason this material is placed just after the nyāsa in every ritual manual. If the three clusters are three regions of her body, then placing those clusters on the corresponding regions of one's own body — which is precisely what the nyāsa preceding this stotra does — is not a symbolic act but a construction. The reciter assembles the goddess's body on his own before saying her names.

This verse contains the single best sandhi demonstration in the entire batch, and it is nearly invisible unless someone points it out. The word adhas, below, occurs twice — once in each line — and it appears in two completely different shapes.

In the first line, kaṇṭha plus adhas gives kaṇṭhādhaḥ, and because the next word begins with the unvoiced k of kaṭi, the final s has become a visarga and stayed there: कण्ठाधःकटि. That is a visarga sitting in the middle of a compound, which learners almost never expect. In the second line, kaṭi plus adhas plus bhāga gives kaṭyadhobhāga: the i of kaṭi has turned into y before the following vowel, exactly as in mantriṇyambā two verses ago, and then the final s of adhas, standing before the voiced bh, has turned the whole syllable into -o. कट्यधोभाग. Same word, two environments, two outcomes, both written out where you can see them. Say kaṇṭhādhaḥ and kaṭyadho one after the other and the rule for visarga before unvoiced and voiced consonants will stay learned.

The visarga in kaṇṭhādhaḥkaṭi also needs its own attention as a sound. Before a k, the traditional realisation is a light aspirate made far back in the throat — some grammarians give it its own name, jihvāmūlīya — and in ordinary recitation you will hear it as a short breath with a faint echo of the preceding a. Do not simply drop it; the syllable count depends on it being there.

Both names end in -ṇī, and both of those retroflex nasals are produced by the rule met in verse thirty: an r earlier in the word pulls a following n back. Svarūpiṇī has it from the r of rūpa, dhāriṇī from the r of dhāra. Two clean examples in two lines.

The vṛddhi merger promised in the last verse duly returns: śaktikūṭa plus ekatā has given śaktikūṭaikatā, a short a and an e strengthening into ai. Then ekatā plus āpanna merges two ā-sounds. Two seams inside one word again.

For clusters, the verse asks for ṇṭh at the very start — retroflex ṇ, retroflex aspirated ṭh, one gesture with a puff of breath at the end of it — then ry in paryanta, then dhy in madhya, then the sv of svarūpiṇī, which is a dental s followed by a v inside the same release and not a vowel between them. Kaṇṭhādhaḥ is worth ten repetitions on its own.

Rhythmically the two lines rhyme, both closing on -iṇī and -iṇī, and both are single sixteen-syllable names with the caesura falling inside a word. In the first line it lands after -paryanta-, which is a real joint in the compound; in the second it lands inside -kaṭyadho-, which is not. Take the breath at the line end.

On what to hold: chanting these two names is the only point in the hymn where you are asked to run your attention down the length of a body in a straight line, from the throat to the waist and then from the waist to the ground, and to hear the sound of it as you go. The nyāsa done before the recitation has already placed the same three groups on your own throat, trunk and hips. If you have done it, this verse is a description of where your hands have been.