Ten things taken away

The scale of what has just begun is worth stating plainly. From nirādhārā at the end of the last verse to niratyayā seven verses from now, fifty-six consecutive names run without a break in the pattern. Forty-four of them begin with the syllable ni. Eleven of the remaining twelve are the paired destroyer-names that answer a negative name in the same line — rāgamathanī after nīrāgā, pāpanāśinī after niṣpāpā, and so on. Exactly one name in the whole stretch stands entirely outside the scheme, and it is śāntā, in this verse. Nothing else in the thousand names is built like this.

The prefix doing the work is a single word wearing several faces. It is nis, and its final s behaves according to what follows: r before a vowel or a voiced consonant, ṣ before k, ś before c, plain s before t, a bare visarga before s, and nothing at all before r, where the loss is compensated by lengthening the i. Over the course of these seven verses the reciter will meet every one of those forms — nirlepā and nirguṇā here, niścintā later, niḥsaṃśayā, nīrāgā, nistulā. It is the same prefix throughout. The Devanagari changes shape; the meaning does not.

The vocabulary is not the hymn's own invention, and it is not vague. Almost every word in this verse and the next six has a settled home in the upaniṣads or in the philosophical schools. The clearest single witness is a verse near the end of the Śvetāśvatara that strings together five such epithets: partless, actionless, at peace, blameless, unstained. Every one of those five turns up as a name of Lalitā within seven verses of the present one — nirañjanā at a hundred and thirty-three, niṣkalā and śāntā here, niravadyā in the next verse, niṣkriyā five verses later. The Vāgdevatās are not paraphrasing Vedānta; they are taking its exact words and putting them in the feminine.

Nirguṇā is the load-bearing one. A guṇa is literally a strand of a rope, and in Sāṃkhya the three strands — sattva, rajas and tamas, clarity, motion and inertia — are what all of nature is twisted out of. To be nirguṇa is therefore not to be modest or unadorned but to be outside the material order altogether, and in Vedānta the word marks the highest of the standard distinctions: brahman with qualities, which can be worshipped, and brahman without them, which cannot. The Śvetāśvatara had already applied the word to a single god hidden in all beings, witness and knower, alone and without qualities. That a hymn of a thousand attributes should include the attribute of having none is a contradiction the tradition has never tried to hide. It is worth noting that the stotra makes no attempt to soften it either: seventy-seven names later she will be called mahāsattvā, of great sattva, and the two names stand in the same hymn without apology.

Niṣkalā is the other technical name here, and kalā is a rich word. It is a part, and specifically a sixteenth part; it is a digit of the moon; it is an art or a skill. In the Śaiva Āgamas the distinction between niṣkala and sakala is architectural before it is metaphysical: Śiva is worshipped as niṣkala in the plain liṅga with no features, as sakala in an image with face and limbs, and in an intermediate form in the liṅga that has a face carved on it. The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad had already used the word of brahman in the golden sheath, spotless and partless. And in this particular tradition the count of sixteen matters: there is a sixteen-syllabled form of the vidyā beyond the fifteen-syllabled one, and sixteen Nityā goddesses are worshipped in the Śrīcakra. A goddess whose school counts kalās so carefully is called, here, the one who has none.

The last name repays a look in the dictionary. Upaplava is any public calamity, an invasion, an inundation; Monier-Williams also gives it as a portent or natural phenomenon such as an eclipse, and as a name of Rāhu, the demon who swallows the moon. In a verse that has just called her partless — without kalās, without digits — the closing name can be heard as saying that this is the moon nothing ever eats. Whether the composers meant that cannot be known. That the language put it within reach is a fact about the language.

Ten names go past in ten seconds and the commonest failure here is not pronunciation but counting. Learn the shape first. The first quarter is three plus three plus two: nirlepā, nirmalā, nityā. The second quarter is two four-syllable names with a long ā in the second syllable, nirākārā and nirākulā, which is the only place in the verse where the rhythm opens out. The third quarter repeats the rhythm of the first exactly — nirguṇā, niṣkalā, śāntā — and the fourth is three plus five, niṣkāmā and nirupaplavā. Once the two short names ending the first and third quarters are fixed in the ear, the verse stops sliding.

The prefix is the pronunciation lesson. Say nir- with a full r before the voiced consonants of nirlepā, nirmalā, nirguṇā and before the vowel of nirākārā, nirākulā and nirupaplavā. Say niṣ-, with the retroflex sibilant, before the k of niṣkalā and niṣkāmā — the tongue-tip curls back for the ṣ and is already in position for nothing, since the k is made at the back, so the two must be given separately: niṣ, then kā. Learners regularly turn this into a plain s or into a sh made too far forward.

The retroflex ṇ of nirguṇā is not caused by the r. Guṇa has a retroflex ṇ of its own wherever it appears, and the same is true of the ṇ in kāraṇa in the next verse. Knowing which retroflexes are inherited and which are produced by a preceding r is the difference between remembering the sounds and understanding them.

Three clusters to isolate. Nirlepā has r running straight into l, two liquids with no vowel between them, and English speakers tend to insert one. Nityā is two syllables, nit-yā, with the t closing the first — not ni-ti-yā. Nirupaplavā ends in pl, and the whole word is five syllables of which only the last is long: ni-ru-pa-pla-vā. It is the lightest thing in the verse and should sound like it.

One long vowel to guard. Niṣkāmā has a long ā in the middle, because the word behind it is kāma; niṣkalā has a short a, because the word behind it is kalā. The two names are separated by only one other name and they are otherwise identical in shape. Getting the length wrong turns partless into desireless and back.

The verse is a plain anuṣṭubh and the breath goes after nirākulā. In the nāmāvalī form, where each name is turned into the dative for offering, this verse yields ten separate salutations — nirlepāyai namaḥ, nirmalāyai namaḥ, and so on — and it is worth performing once that way, slowly, because the archanā form makes it impossible to slur ten names into one gesture.

For what to hold while chanting: the tradition does not treat this stretch as doctrine being rehearsed. It treats it as a sequence of removals actually being carried out, and the instruction is to let each name take away what it names rather than to think about what it means. Ten names, ten things set down. The two that are stated positively, nityā and śāntā, are where the breath rests, and they are worth hearing as rests rather than as further claims.