The autumn moon, and then the turn to nothing

Śaṅkara is the name of Śiva as the one who makes things well, from śam and the root kṛ, and it is also of course the name of the philosopher whom tradition credits with the Saundaryalaharī and with the reconciliation of Advaita Vedānta and goddess worship on which Śrīvidyā depends. Whether Śaṅkarācārya wrote that poem is doubtful and has been doubted for a long time, but the association is old and it is part of why this stotra can move, as it is about to, from erotic simile to unqualified negation without any sense of changing subject. Śrīkarī, immediately after, is the counterweight: the maker of śrī, of splendour and prosperity and Lakṣmī's own quality, which is the word the first three names of the whole stotra were built on.

Sādhvī is the only plainly moral epithet in this stretch and the only name in the line that begins with a dental s rather than a palatal ś. It means straight, true, good — from the root sādh, to succeed or to bring to completion — and in ordinary usage it is what one calls a virtuous woman. Placed among names for the wife of Śaṅkara and the maker of fortune, it insists that the goddess is also simply good in the domestic and social sense, which a tradition with the reputation Śrīvidyā has needs to say from time to time and does say, repeatedly, in its most public texts.

The two physical names are worth pausing over because they arrive out of order. The head-to-foot description of her body finished long ago, around the fiftieth name, and the hymn has since covered the mantra, the cakras and the ascent of kuṇḍalinī. Now, in the middle of an alphabetical run, her face and her waist reappear, and another such intrusion is coming at nīlacikurā seven verses from now. This is not carelessness. The alliterative principle governing this stretch throws up whatever names begin with the right sound, and the composers evidently preferred to keep the body present rather than to let the hymn become an argument. The comparison itself is the oldest in the language: śarat is autumn, the season after the monsoon has washed the sky, when the moon is at its clearest, and śaraccandra is the standard against which faces are measured from the Rāmāyaṇa onward. Śātodarī, thin-bellied, belongs to the same conventional repertoire.

Then the turn. Nirādhārā means without a support, and ādhāra is not a vague word in this hymn: at name ninety-nine she was mūlādhāraikanilayā, she whose one dwelling is the root support, the lowest of the cakras. The tradition reads the present name as saying that she is the ground and therefore stands on nothing, which is the answer the Chāndogya Upaniṣad gives when the question is put directly and the pupil is told that the infinite rests in its own greatness, or perhaps not even in that. Much later in the stotra, at name six hundred and fifty-nine, she is called sarvādhārā, the support of everything. The negation here and the affirmation there are the same statement made twice, and the whole architecture of the next thirteen verses works that way.

Nirañjanā is the heavier of the two. Añjana is what you smear on — collyrium for the eyes, ointment, pigment — and by extension any taint or colouring. Nirañjana is one of the most widely used words in Indian religious vocabulary for the unstained absolute; the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad uses it of the knower who has shaken off both merit and demerit, and the Śvetāśvatara puts it in a list of five epithets of which four will turn up as names in the next six verses of this stotra. The haṭha yoga texts use nirañjana as one of the synonyms for the state of samādhi. When the sahasranāma reaches for the word it is not coining anything; it is stepping into a vocabulary that the upaniṣads, the Vedāntins, the Śaivas and the yogins had all been using for centuries, and it is announcing, at the end of a verse about a moonlike face and a slender waist, that everything said so far is going to be taken back.

The first line contains all three Sanskrit sibilants in the space of ten syllables and it is the best drill in this batch. Śāṅkarī and śrīkarī open with the palatal ś, tongue-body against the hard palate. Sādhvī opens with the dental s, tongue-tip forward at the teeth. Then śaraccandra returns to the palatal. Three names, ś ś s ś, and if the difference is not being made the line collapses into an undifferentiated hiss.

Śāṅkarī has the guttural nasal ṅ before k, made right at the back where the k is made; the tongue never leaves that position between the two sounds. Śrīkarī opens with śr, palatal sibilant into r, which is the same cluster as the śrī that opens the whole stotra. Sādhvī puts a voiced aspirated dh in front of v: sā-dhvī, two syllables, and the aspiration must be heard.

Śaraccandranibhānanā holds the verse's best sandhi. The first element is śarat, autumn, ending in a dental t. Before the palatal c of candra that t has itself become a palatal and doubled, so śarat plus candra gives śaraccandra, written with c and c joined. This is a rule you will meet everywhere once you have seen it: a final t assimilates to a following palatal. Say it as śa-rac-can-dra, letting the doubled consonant have its full length, and the metre will come out right. The rest of the name is three dental nasals in a row across nibhānanā — ni-bhā-na-nā — with an aspirated bh in the middle.

Śātodarī has a dental t, not a retroflex one, which surprises people who expect a retroflex after the long ā. Śāntimatī has the dental cluster nt. Neither is difficult, but both are places where a reciter drifting on autopilot will start curling the tongue back out of habit, because the retroflexes are coming.

The last two names are where the verse changes character and the mouth should register it. Nirādhārā is four open syllables with an aspirated dh in the middle and nothing to trip on. Nirañjanā has ñj, the palatal nasal followed by the palatal j, and it is one of the sounds English speakers habitually replace with the n of ninja, which is close but made further forward. Put the tongue-body where it goes for y, keep it there, and let the j come off the same surface.

Metrically the first quarter is unusually crowded — three names in eight syllables, three plus three plus two — and then a single eight-syllable name fills the second. The second line is four names of four syllables each. Breathe after śaraccandranibhānanā.

For what to hold: this is the verse where the hymn turns, and it is worth chanting the two halves with different weight. The first six names are praise of a kind anyone can follow. The last two withdraw the ground from under them. The traditional counsel for the long negative series that follows is not to treat it as philosophy being recited but as a series of removals actually being performed, one name at a time, and this verse is where the first two are taken away.