Forever pure, forever awake, forever free

Three of the four words in the standard Advaita formula for the nature of the self are here as names, and the fourth was two verses back. Śaṅkara opens his commentary on the Brahmasūtra by asserting that brahman exists, that its nature is eternal, pure, awake and free, that it is all-knowing and endowed with all powers. Nitya, śuddha, buddha, mukta: the phrase is a fixed unit in his prose and in the prose of everyone who came after him. This verse has nityamuktā, nityaśuddhā and nityabuddhā, and nityā itself stood at name one hundred and thirty-six. It is as close to a citation as an anuṣṭubh can come. And the remainder of Śaṅkara's sentence is not idle either: all-knowing and endowed with all powers will arrive as sarvajñā and sarvaśaktimayī in verses fifty-one and fifty-two, at the other end of this batch.

What the formula is doing is denying that liberation is an event. If purity had a date, something impure preceded it; if wakefulness began, there was sleep. The three nitya names refuse the date, and nityamuktā refuses it in the strongest place, since freedom is exactly what devotional and yogic literature normally describes as attained. Placed in a hymn addressed to a goddess who rose out of a fire-pit at a particular moment to kill a particular demon, the name is doing real work. The stotra means both things and does not reconcile them.

Nirvikārā takes a term from the analysis of causation. Vikāra is a modification, what a thing becomes when it changes without becoming another substance, and the classical statement is the Chāndogya's lesson about clay: knowing one lump of clay, everything made of clay is known, because the modification is a matter of speech and of naming, and the clay alone is real. To call her unchanging in that vocabulary is to place her on the side of the clay rather than of the pots.

Niṣprapañcā is the philosophically heaviest name in the verse. Prapañca is the spreading-out, the manifold, the world considered as multiplicity, and the word carries a note of proliferation rather than of mere plurality. The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad's description of the fourth state — not conscious of the inner, not conscious of the outer, unseeable, ungraspable, unmarked, unthinkable — arrives at its climax with the phrase prapañcopaśamam, in which the spreading-out has subsided, followed at once by śāntam, at peace. Both of those are names in this stretch of the hymn. The Māṇḍūkya is the shortest of the classical upaniṣads and the one on which Advaita rests most heavily, and this name is a direct borrowing from its most quoted sentence.

Nirāśrayā looks at first like a repetition of nirādhārā from two verses ago, and commentators on this text spend a good deal of energy on such pairs. The distinction usually drawn is between a physical support underneath and a refuge one resorts to: an ādhāra holds something up, an āśraya is where something takes shelter. She has neither, and the second is the sharper claim, since the whole devotional apparatus of the hymn is built on taking refuge in her. There is nowhere for her to go.

Niravadyā rewards etymology. Avadya is formed from the root vad, to speak, with the negative prefix and the gerundive ending: literally what is not to be said. What is not to be said is what is disgraceful, and so avadya comes to mean fault or blemish. Blamelessness in Sanskrit is a fact about speech before it is a fact about conduct — there is nothing to be said against her, and so nothing to be said.

Nirantarā closes the verse and the word is in ordinary use for anything continuous or incessant. Antara is an interval, a gap, and also the inside of a thing and a difference between two things; all three senses are live. Without gaps, without an inside distinct from an outside, without difference. The tradition reads it as the denial of the three kinds of distinction that Advaita enumerates — the difference of a thing from another of its own kind, from a thing of another kind, and from its own parts — which is exactly the ground the hymn will cover again at nirbhedā four verses from now.

Every one of the eight names in this verse is four syllables long, and no other verse in the hymn is built so squarely. Nit-ya-muk-tā, nir-vi-kā-rā, niṣ-pra-pañ-cā, ni-rā-śra-yā, nit-ya-śud-dhā, nit-ya-bud-dhā, ni-ra-vad-yā, ni-ran-ta-rā. Count them out once and then let the metre carry you; the danger in this verse is not stumbling but drifting, because nothing in the rhythm ever changes.

Niṣprapañcā holds the hardest cluster in the batch: retroflex ṣ, then p, then r, three consonants with no vowel among them, at the start of the second syllable. Break it as niṣ-pra-pañ-cā and rebuild slowly. The ñ later in the same word is the palatal nasal, made at the same place as the c that follows it, so the tongue does not move between them — the sequence ñca requires one gesture, not two.

The two nitya names in the second line differ by a single consonant and are otherwise identical: nityaśuddhā and nityabuddhā. Both contain the doubled voiced aspirate ddh, which means holding the d closed for a full beat and then releasing it with breath — śud-dhā, bud-dhā. Most reciters shorten one or the other; the metre wants both long. Chant the pair as a unit until the only thing that changes is ś against b.

Nitya itself is two syllables, nit-ya, with the t closing the first syllable. Do not let a vowel creep in. The three occurrences of nitya are the spine of the verse and they must all sound the same.

The rest of the clusters are milder and worth naming: rv in nirvikārā, dental r into the labiodental v; śr in nirāśrayā, palatal sibilant into r; dy in niravadyā; nt in nirantarā. Nirāśrayā and niravadyā also give a useful contrast in vowel weight — the first has a long ā in its second syllable and the second has a short a, and the metre will tell you at once if you get them the wrong way round.

There is no sandhi to unpick anywhere in this verse. Every name stands separate, and this is one of the very few places in the stotra where the written line can be read off exactly as it is heard. If the Devanagari of the long compounds has been giving trouble, this is a good verse to read aloud from the script rather than from the transliteration.

The caesura is after nirāśrayā, and there is no reason to breathe anywhere else.

For contemplation, the three nitya names are the instruction. Each of them removes a beginning. It is easy to hear forever free as a compliment paid to somebody else; the tradition's use of the verse is to turn it around, since the point of asserting that freedom was never absent is to raise the question of who exactly is supposed to be acquiring it. This is the verse in the batch most often quoted on its own in Advaitic settings, and it is the one that best repays being chanted slowly enough to hear as eight separate statements rather than as a single wash of negation.