Kula, and what lies outside it

The Śrīvidyā tradition has argued for centuries about what kind of tradition it is, and this verse is the passage both parties quote.

On one side is the kaula stream, which worships the goddess in the external diagram with a full ritual apparatus, and which historically included practices — the five substances beginning with wine — that mainstream Brahminical opinion regarded as transgressive. On the other is the samaya stream, which holds that the real worship is internal, conducted in the centres of the body, and that the outward rite is at best a concession. The two are not different religions; they share the mantra, the diagram and this hymn. They disagree about what to do on a given evening.

The disagreement has a documented history in the commentaries. Lakṣmīdhara, whose commentary on the Saundaryalaharī is one of the best known, reads that poem throughout as a samaya text and is openly hostile to kaula practice. Bhāskararāya, writing in the eighteenth century and the most influential commentator this stotra has ever had, was himself a kaula and read accordingly. Both of them had this verse in front of them. Bhāskararāya could point to four consecutive names built on kula and to Kaulinī standing in the middle of the line; a samayin can point out that the verse gives the last word to samayācāratatparā, wholly devoted to the samaya observance, and that the goddess is described as tatparā, given over to it, in a way she is not said to be given over to anything kaula. The hymn will not settle it. It was probably not written to.

The word kula is doing several things at once across these names and it is worth separating them. Kulāṅganā is the plainest: aṅganā is simply a woman, and kulāṅganā in ordinary non-technical Sanskrit means a respectable married woman of a good family — the mistress of a household. The tradition has taken an entirely conventional social term and made it a name of God, and the effect is the same as the effect of calling her mother in the very first name of the hymn. Kulāntasthā and kulayoginī use kula in the technical sense of the assembly of powers: she is not observing the kula from outside, she has her station in it, and among its members she is the one whose practice binds them together. Kaulinī is a derivative rather than a compound: kaula with the feminine ending, she who belongs to the Kaula observance.

Akulā is the pivot. Read as a simple negation it says that she is not the kula, that she stands outside the assembly of powers altogether. But akula has a second life. Monier-Williams, working from ordinary classical usage and with no interest whatever in tantra, records akula as a name of Śiva. In the Kashmirian traditions that is the standard technical usage: akula is Śiva, the ground, the unmoving, and kula is Śakti, the unfolding. On that reading akulā is not a denial of anything but a claim of identity — the feminine form of the masculine ground, she who is Śiva. The hymn has placed the word at the exact centre of the verse, between four kula names and two samaya names, which is either a very good accident or a very deliberate piece of construction.

Samaya has a range as wide as kula's, and it overlaps with the saṃketa of the previous verse almost exactly: agreement, compact, convention, established observance, precept. So the two verses have used two different words for the same idea, once as the kula's private compact and once as the samayin's rule of conduct, which suggests that whoever assembled these names was aware of writing a bridge. There is also a piece of external evidence worth having. In the Saundaryalaharī, Samayā appears twice not as a doctrine but as a proper name of the goddess herself, standing beside a masculine partner — in verse 39 as the great Samayā beside the god who presides over the fire of the svādhiṣṭhāna, and in verse 41 as the one who dances the gentle lāsya while her partner dances the tāṇḍava. So samayāntasthā may be saying something more concrete than devotion to a school of practice: she abides within Samayā, that is, within her own name.

Seven names in thirty-two syllables makes this the most broken-up verse in the batch, and the groupings are uneven: four, four, three and five in the first line, then three, five and eight in the second. Nothing else in this stretch of the hymn has that shape. Count it out once — kulāṅganā, kulāntasthā, kaulinī, kulayoginī; akulā, samayāntasthā, samayācāratatparā — and then chant it, and the irregularity becomes the character of the verse rather than an obstacle.

The most useful warning in this whole batch belongs here. Akulā has a short initial a. Lengthen it and you have said ākulā, which is a real Sanskrit word meaning confused, agitated, flurried, overburdened. One misjudged vowel turns beyond the assembly of powers into in a flap. Say a-ku-lā crisply, with the first syllable as light as you can make it.

The verse is built on a drumbeat. Ku-la at the head of four consecutive names, then a-ku-lā, which is the same two syllables with a single short one bolted on the front to reverse the sense. Then sa-ma-ya twice. If you let the alliteration carry, the doctrinal shape of the verse becomes audible without any explanation: four beats of one thing, one beat of its negation, two beats of the other thing.

Three clusters need care. Kulāṅganā has ṅg, the guttural nasal at the point of the g. Kulāntasthā and samayāntasthā both have the sequence n-t-s-th across a syllable boundary, which is four consonants with no vowel among them: say kulān-tasthā, releasing the t before the s begins and putting the aspiration on the th alone. And kaulinī opens with the diphthong au, which is long and must not be shortened toward o — this is the vṛddhi vowel again, here as the marker of a derivative: kula gives kaula the way sundara gives saundarya.

Samayācāratatparā is the only long name in the verse and it has one seam: samaya plus ācāra, two a-sounds fused into a long ā. Four short a's, then a long ā, then tatparā with two more shorts. The rhythm of that word alone is the reason the second line does not feel top-heavy.

One point on the dental n. Every nasal in this verse except the ṅ of kulāṅganā is a plain dental — aṅganā, kulānta, kaulinī, yoginī, samayānta. Not one retroflex ṇ in thirty-two syllables, which after four verses thick with them is worth hearing as a deliberate change of colour.

This verse and the last are the two favourites for archanā, the form of recitation in which each name is turned into the dative and offered with a flower or a grain of rice. Seven short names in one verse means seven offerings in the time the previous verses would have taken for two. It is worth practising this one both ways — kulāṅganā becoming kulāṅganāyai namaḥ, kaulinī becoming kaulinyai namaḥ — since the ā-stem and ī-stem datives behave differently and this verse gives you four of one and three of the other.

On what to hold: the verse describes two ways of doing this and says that she is in both of them, and then says she is in neither. If your own practice tends strongly one way — toward ritual and its objects, or toward the inward work with nothing in the hands — this is the verse that declines to congratulate you.