The root centre, the navel, and the first two knots

The stretch of the hymn beginning here is usually treated as its yoga section. The verses just before it described her city, her armies and the destruction of Bhaṇḍāsura; from the ninety-ninth name onward the subject is the interior of a human body, set out in the vocabulary of the subtle physiology that the tantric traditions inherited and elaborated. That physiology is not anatomy. The centres it speaks of are not organs, and the tradition does not claim they would be found by dissection; they are stations constructed in meditation, imagined with great precision and then inhabited. Nothing in this verse works if the cakras are taken for glands.

Mūlādhāra is a transparent compound: mūla, root, and ādhāra, that which holds up, from ā-√dhṛ. It is the support at the root, placed at the base of the spine, visualised as a four-petalled lotus enclosing a square, the square being the standing figure for earth. To call her ekanilayā, having it as her single dwelling, is a strong claim, and it sits oddly beside the next verse, which will seat her at the crown of the head. Commentators generally take eka here in the sense of principal rather than exclusive, or else read the name of her resting condition — the coiled, sleeping state in which she is imagined before any practice begins — as against the waking ascent that follows.

Granthi is a knot, from √granth, to tie or string together; the same root gives grantha, a book, because a book was a bundle of palm leaves tied with cord. Three such knots are said to obstruct the central channel, and each carries the name of one of the three great gods. What they obstruct is commonly explained as three orders of attachment: the knot of Brahmā binds one to the body and the business of generation, the knot of Viṣṇu to the maintenance of oneself as a person with a name and a history, the knot of Rudra to the powers and visions that appear once the first two are loosened and which are more dangerous than either. The Upaniṣads had already used the image without the localisation. The Muṇḍaka speaks of a single knot of the heart that is cut when the highest is seen; the tantric contribution was to distribute that one knot along a vertical axis and give its parts owners.

Where the knots sit is a point on which the sources do not agree. Haṭhayoga texts commonly place the knot of Brahmā at the root centre, the knot of Viṣṇu at the heart, and the knot of Rudra between the brows. The sahasranāma keeps the first and the third but attaches the second to the navel wheel, and it names only three of the six centres, passing over svādhiṣṭhāna, anāhata and viśuddhi in silence. Such variation is ordinary. The Saundaryalaharī, in a verse otherwise very close to this one, assigns water to the navel and fire to the centre below it, reversing the usual order of the elements. It is better to notice the disagreement than to smooth it away: these systems were transmitted in lineages that differed, and the differences were not felt as errors.

Maṇipūra is either the city of jewels or the place filled with jewels, depending on how pūra is taken, and it is visualised as a ten-petalled lotus at the navel with fire for its element. The verb underlying uditā is ud-√i, to go up, the ordinary word for the rising of the sun; a sunrise is an udaya. So the name does not say that she arrives at the navel but that she becomes visible there, comes up into view inside it — which suits a centre whose element is fire. And the antar of maṇipūrāntar insists on interiority: not at the navel wheel but within it.

Each of the four names fills exactly one quarter of the anuṣṭubh: eight syllables, four times over, with no name spilling across a boundary and no quarter shared. That makes the verse unusually easy to scan and unusually easy to lose your place in, because two of the four quarters end identically. Brahmagranthivibhedinī and viṣṇugranthivibhedinī differ only in their opening two syllables and are otherwise the same seven-syllable tail. Fix them by their partners rather than by their sound: the knot named for the creator belongs with the root, the knot named for the preserver with the navel. Get the pairing right and the order cannot slip.

The first name hides a join that beginners routinely mispronounce. It is mūlādhāra plus ekanilayā; a final short a followed by an initial e yields ai, so what you say is mū-lā-dhā-rai-ka-ni-la-yā. That ai is a full long vowel held for two counts, not the quick glide of English "eye," and swallowing it costs the quarter a syllable.

This is a retroflex-heavy verse, and the retroflexes are exactly where an English speaker will flatten them. The ṇ of maṇipūra is made with the tongue-tip curled back to the roof of the mouth, not at the teeth. Viṣṇu opens with the retroflex sibilant ṣ followed by that same retroflex nasal, both made in the same position, so the tongue curls once and stays: viṣ-ṇu, with no dental n anywhere in it.

Granthi gives you nthi — dental n, then the aspirated dental th, then i. The th is one sound, t released with breath, and never the th of English "thin." Brahma gives you hma, voiced h followed by m, and the aspiration is carried through the nasal rather than dropped before it; the effect is a breathy m, not a silent one.

For recitation as archanā the endings divide along declensional lines that this verse illustrates cleanly. The two ā-stems take -āyai: mūlādhāraikanilayāyai namaḥ, maṇipūrāntaruditāyai namaḥ. The two ī-stems in -inī take -inyai: brahmagranthivibhedinyai namaḥ, viṣṇugranthivibhedinyai namaḥ. Four names, two patterns, alternating — as good a drill in the feminine dative as the hymn offers.

As for what the verse asks: notice that the reciter is not its subject. Every name is hers, every verb of piercing is hers, and the person chanting is grammatically absent. Whatever ambition the vocabulary of rising energy may excite, the verse assigns the work to her and gives the chanter nothing to do but say so. In the living traditions this material is not taken up alone, and the hymn's own phrasing is the first argument for that restraint.