The last knot, the summit, and the rain that comes back down

Ājñā means an order, a command, the word of someone whose authority is not in question. Why the centre between the brows should be called the wheel of command is explained in more than one way. It is the place where the teacher's instruction is received and lodged, so that the disciple who has reached it is under orders; it is also the seat from which the will issues, the point of the body that mind is felt to occupy. The manuals give it two petals and set the syllable oṃ at its centre, and the smallness of that petal count against the ten of the navel and the thousand above is itself part of the description: at this height the vocabulary of proliferation is running out. Antarāla, the word the name uses for where she stands, means the interval or the hollow between two things — not the wheel, but the space inside it.

Rudra is the older name, Vedic and dangerous, of the god who was later Śiva. The tradition connects the word with √rud, to howl or cry out, and the Ṛgveda's Rudra is a figure to be placated rather than approached, the archer whose arrows are disease. The last of the three knots takes his name, and commentators generally treat it as the subtlest and the worst. The knot of Brahmā ties one to the body, the knot of Viṣṇu to the persistence of oneself as somebody; the knot of Rudra ties one to what has been gained by undoing the other two — to visionary experience, to the powers that the manuals promise, to the standing of a person who knows. It is the knot that only exists for the accomplished, and the hymn's placing of it at the seat of command is not accidental. What binds at that height is authority.

Sahasrāra is literally the thousand-spoked, from ara, the spoke of a wheel, and the compound joins that wheel-word to ambuja, the water-born, which is a lotus. A thousand-spoked lotus is a mixed image on purpose: the number is not a count but the standing Sanskrit figure for an amount past counting, the same thousand that gives this hymn its title. It is worth noticing that the tradition does not usually reckon the sahasrāra as the seventh of a series. A few names further on the hymn will call her the one established above the six wheels, and that is the ordinary way of speaking: six centres, and then something that is not a seventh centre but the place where the sequence ends.

Sudhā is the drink of the gods, the same substance as amṛta, the not-dying, won from the churning of the ocean of milk and fought over by gods and antigods. The yogic literature relocates it. In the haṭha manuals a moon at the crown continually drips this nectar, which falls and is burnt up by a sun at the navel, and that waste is what ageing is; the third chapter of the Haṭhapradīpikā describes postures and seals whose entire purpose is to catch the drip before the fire gets it. Against that background the fourth name of this verse is startlingly lavish. It does not speak of a drop conserved but of sāra, a flood or downpour, and the verb abhi-√vṛṣ is the verb used of monsoon rain on a field. Nothing is being hoarded.

The reversal in that last name carries the doctrinal weight of the passage, and it is characteristic of this school. Śrīvidyā did not teach that the body is to be escaped, and the sahasranāma will not leave the practitioner at the top of his own skull. Having climbed, she pours the deathless downward through everything she rose past, so that the six centres that were obstacles on the way up are the ground that gets watered on the way back. The Saundaryalaharī tells the same story and adds the ending: after drenching the world she returns to her own place and goes back to sleep, coiled, at the root.

As in the previous verse, each name fills exactly one quarter of the anuṣṭubh — eight syllables apiece, four quarters, no overlap. Across the two verses that gives eight consecutive names of eight syllables each, an unusually regular stretch, and reciters often find their speed creeping up here because nothing resists it. Resist it deliberately. The second half of this verse is where the sense turns, and taking the last quarter at the pace of the first three throws the turn away.

Ājñā opens with the cluster that divides the subcontinent. Written jña, it is historically the palatal j followed by the palatal nasal ñ, and it is pronounced gya in much of the north, dnya in Maharashtra, and nya in the south. No one of these is the reading that recitation traditions agree on, and you will hear all three on recordings of this hymn. The defensible course is to take whichever your own teacher or lineage uses and be consistent, rather than switching by word.

The third name is built entirely out of vowel fusions and repays taking apart. Its elements are sahasrāra, ambuja and ārūḍhā. Sahasrāra ends in short a and ambuja begins in short a, which combine to long ā; ambuja ends in short a and ārūḍhā begins in long ā, which also gives long ā. So three of the four long ās you hear in sa-ha-srā-rām-bu-jā-rū-ḍhā are seams, not stems, and a reciter who knows where the seams are will not be tempted to shorten them. The name also ends in ḍha, the voiced retroflex aspirate, which is among the hardest sounds in the language for an English speaker: tongue-tip curled back to the roof of the mouth, released with breath and with the voice on throughout.

Sudhāsārābhivarṣiṇī is four long ās in a row across its first four syllables, then a fall into short vowels and retroflexes. The rṣi cluster is a trilled or tapped r, then the retroflex sibilant, and the ṇī that ends the word is retroflex too, taking its retroflexion from the ṣ before it — an instance of the sound change that also produces the ṇ in varṣiṇī's cousins throughout the hymn. Keep the four long vowels genuinely long and the name performs its own meaning; the downpour is in the vowels.

For archanā the endings again divide two and two. The ā-stems take -āyai: ājñācakrāntarālasthāyai namaḥ, sahasrārāmbujārūḍhāyai namaḥ. The ī-stems take -yai on a shortened stem: rudragranthivibhedinyai namaḥ, sudhāsārābhivarṣiṇyai namaḥ.

What the verse asks of the person chanting is mostly a matter of where the attention rests at the end. The natural instinct is to hold the summit, since that is what the vocabulary of ascent trains one to want. The hymn does not hold it; it spends one name there and gives the last to the rain. Recited in that order, day after day, the verse is a standing correction to the idea that the point of any of this is to get out of the body one is sitting in.