The axe laid to the forest of becoming

The eleven names before this one climbed the six cakras and ended with kuṇḍalinī herself, finer than a lotus fibre. From bhavānī onward the governing consideration is no longer subject but sound. Names in bha- run from here to bhayāpahā; the sibilants take over at śāmbhavī and hold until śāntimatī; the long negative series in ni- begins at nirādhārā and does not release for fifty-six names; then come the names in dur-, then those in sarva-, and then a block of nearly thirty beginning mahā-. Nothing of the sort happens in the first hundred names, which follow her body from crown to foot and then the war with Bhaṇḍāsura in narrative order. Having finished describing her, the Vāgdevatās begin sorting her, and they sort by ear. This is worth knowing before starting the next fifteen verses, because it explains why names that have nothing to do with each other stand side by side, and why a name about her waist can appear in the middle of a page of metaphysics.

Bhava is Vedic. In the Śatarudrīya, the litany of Rudra's names in the Yajurveda, Bhava and Śarva stand together in the same breath of salutation, and both will be used here within twelve names of each other. Later systematisers gathered eight such names into the aṣṭamūrti scheme, the eight forms in which Śiva is said to stand as the elements, the luminaries and the sacrificer. What matters for this verse is only that Bhava is the name of Rudra taken as the source of coming-to-be — bhava from the root bhū, to become — so that Bhavānī is the feminine of becoming itself, and the name that immediately follows can play on the same root without changing the subject.

The suffix is worth a moment because Pāṇini legislates for it by name. Sūtra 4.1.49 lists the words that take the augment ānuk before the feminine ending: indra, varuṇa, bhava, śarva, rudra, mṛḍa, hima, araṇya, yava, yavana, mātula, ācārya. That is why we have indrāṇī, rudrāṇī, mṛḍānī, and here bhavānī and śarvāṇī. The grammar is not decoration: three of the twelve stems on Pāṇini's list turn up as names of this goddess's husband in these two verses.

Bhāvanā is the technical term of the pair. It is the causative of the same root — a making-to-be, the mind's power of bringing a thing into presence rather than merely thinking about it. In this tradition it has a text of its own. The Bhāvana Upaniṣad, a short Śākta upaniṣad attached to the Atharvaveda and the subject of a commentary by Bhāskararāya, teaches the internal worship in which the Śrīcakra is identified point by point with the practitioner's own body and faculties, so that the entire ritual can be performed without a diagram, a lamp or an offering. To call her bhāvanāgamyā is to say that this is the road that arrives, and that the external apparatus, however elaborate, is a means to it and not a substitute for it.

The forest is a standing image. Saṃsāra grows like scrub — dense, self-seeding, impossible to see out of — and Indian religious literature has been cutting it down for a very long time; the Bhagavad Gītā's aśvattha, rooted upward and impossible to trace to its beginning, is felled with the firm axe of non-attachment. What is peculiar to this name is the size of the tool. Kuṭhārikā is a diminutive: not the great war-axe of Paraśurāma but a hatchet, a woman's small axe, and grammatically feminine. The Śrīvidyā tradition has its own connection with the axe-bearer, since one of its principal ritual manuals is the Paraśurāma Kalpasūtra, but this name is not reaching for grandeur. A whole forest, and one small blade.

Bhadra and saubhāgya close the verse and they are not the same idea. Bhadra is the plain old Vedic word for what is good and auspicious, the word in the prayer that we may hear what is bhadra with our ears. Saubhāgya is narrower and much more loaded: it is the good fortune specifically of the married woman, and in this tradition it is the name of the school itself. Bhāskararāya called his commentary on this stotra the Saubhāgyabhāskara; the vidyā is called saubhāgyavidyā; the goddess is Saubhāgyasundarī. So the last name of the verse says, quietly, that what she gives her devotees is her own tradition's name for grace.

The first two names are a vowel-length drill of the purest kind, and getting them wrong is the commonest mistake in this verse. Bhavānī is short-long-long: bha-vā-nī. Bhāvanā is long-short-long: bhā-va-nā. The lengths are exchanged between one word and the next, and the metre will not forgive it. Say them slowly as a pair, three or four times, until the ear can hear which syllable is carrying weight.

There are seven aspirated bh sounds in these thirty-two syllables and every one of them must be heard as b followed by a breath, not as an English v and not as a bare b. Bhavānī, bhāvanā, bhava, bhadra, bhadra, bhakta, saubhāgya. Say bha with the lips closed, then released with a puff. A verse this heavily alliterated is exactly where the aspiration tends to be dropped, because the mouth starts taking shortcuts.

The nasal contrast is the second drill. Bhavānī and bhāvanā take the dental n, tongue-tip forward against the upper teeth. Bhavāraṇya takes the retroflex ṇ, tongue-tip curled back to the hard palate, and it comes wrapped in a conjunct: ṇya, retroflex nasal followed by y. The r earlier in the word is what has pulled that n backwards, and the same thing will happen to śarvāṇī two verses from now, while bhavānī keeps its dental n because there is no r in bhava. One rule, two names, an audible difference.

Kuṭhārikā holds the other hard sound: ṭh is the retroflex t with aspiration, tongue-tip curled back and released with breath. It is not the th of English think, which does not exist in Sanskrit at all. Take the word as ku-ṭhā-ri-kā and let the ā ring.

One piece of written sandhi to see. The second line reads bhadramūrtir bhakta-, but the name is bhadramūrtiḥ, ending in a visarga. Before the voiced bh of the next word the visarga has become r, and the Devanagari joins them into मूर्तिर्भक्त. The same thing will happen at mahālakṣmīr and mahābuddhir later in this batch, so it is worth registering now: when a name ending in -iḥ is followed by a voiced sound, the visarga you would expect at a pause turns into an r inside the line.

The rest is straightforward. Saubhāgya has the diphthong au, then bh, then the conjunct gy — three separate difficulties in one word, and the usual failure is to swallow the g. Bhadra and priyā give you dr and pr, both with a fully trilled or tapped r.

Metrically this is a plain anuṣṭubh, eight syllables to the quarter, and the names fall into it neatly: three plus five in the first quarter, then a single eight-syllable name, then four plus four, then another eight. Breathe after kuṭhārikā, at the halfway point.

For what to hold while chanting: the three senses of bhava in the first line are not a pun for its own sake. Read as a sequence they say that the god of becoming, the discipline that makes a thing present, and the thicket one is lost in are all approached through the same door. And the closing name is the one to rest on if the verse is used alone. It says that the fortune in question is given, not achieved, which is the note the whole of the next verse will develop.