Without a cause, without a master

Niṣkāraṇā is the point at which the hymn takes the argument from effects back to its end and refuses to go further. Sanskrit philosophy is unusually fond of the regress: everything has a cause, and the question is whether the series stops. The Śvetāśvatara's answer is the one this name assumes — that there is no lord over him in the world, no ruler, not even a sign by which he might be recognised; that he is the cause, and the master of the masters of the sense-faculties; that nobody begot him and nobody is set above him. Two of the names in this verse are in that single stanza. Nirīśvarā takes the first half of it and niṣkāraṇā the second.

Nirīśvarā deserves its shock. The word nirīśvara is the standard label in Indian doxography for a system that does without a god: classical Sāṃkhya is called nirīśvara-sāṃkhya precisely in contrast to the theistic kind. Applied to Lalitā the word means something different — no one holds authority over her — but the tradition has always felt the edge on it, and the edge is sharpened by where the name sits. Twenty-four names ago she was Śambhu's own, Śarva's wife, Śaṅkara's. Forty-seven names from now she will be sarveśvarī, sovereign of all. Here, between the two, she has no lord at all. A hymn that spends its first hundred names on her husband's arms and its later names on her sovereignty puts in the middle of the sequence a name that says the chain of authority simply ends.

Nirupādhi brings in the central working term of Advaita. An upādhi is a limiting adjunct: Monier-Williams gives it as a substitute, a disguise, something that has the mere name or appearance of another thing. The standard illustrations are the red flower that makes a colourless crystal look red and the pot that seems to enclose a piece of space. In each case something unlimited is made to look limited by an accident of proximity, and the whole apparatus of individual selfhood is analysed that way. To call her nirupādhiḥ is to say that every predicate in this hymn, including the ones being recited at that moment, is a flower held up beside a crystal. The stotra returns to the word much later, at name seven hundred and eight, where she is called wholly released from all limiting adjuncts.

Niṣkalaṅkā looks like a repetition of niṣkalā from the previous verse and is not related to it at all. Kalaṅka is a stain or a blot, and its most familiar use is for the dark mark on the moon; kalā, a part or a digit, is a different word that merely sounds similar. Placed two verses apart the two names make a small trap for the reader and a small joke for the listener.

The second line begins a pattern that will run for four verses. From here to name one hundred and eighty-one the hymn works in couples: a name saying she is free of some affliction, immediately followed by a name saying she destroys it. Nīrāgā and rāgamathanī, nirmadā and madanāśinī, and then in the next verses the same shape applied to delusion, possessiveness, sin, anger, greed, doubt, worldly existence, division and death. What the pairing asserts is that her freedom is not a private condition. She is not merely clean; she is corrosive.

Rāga returning here is the most pointed thing in the verse. At the eighth name of this hymn, in its second verse, the noose in her hand was declared to be the very form of rāga — not a symbol of desire but desire itself, held as her own equipment. A hundred and fifty names later she is free of rāga and grinds it away. The tradition does not treat this as a contradiction and does not try to explain it away. The position, stated as plainly as it can be, is that the force which binds and the force which releases are one power differently directed, and that the rope is being held at the other end. A reader who has kept the second verse in mind will hear this pair as its completion rather than its retraction.

Mada is the last word here and it is a wonderfully physical one. Monier-Williams gives it as intoxication, rapture, rut — including specifically the rut of an elephant and the fluid that runs from its temples — and then, by an entirely natural extension, as pride. The name says that this heat never rises in her. There is also an accident of spelling worth registering without making too much of it: the letters of madanāśinī contain madana, which is Kāma, the god of desire whom Śiva burnt to ash, from whose ashes Bhaṇḍāsura was made, and whom she afterwards restored to life. The name means destroyer of intoxication. The language leaves the other reading lying about, in a hymn that has been circling Kāma since its second verse.

The prefix takes three different shapes in the first four names of this verse and the change is the main thing to hear. Niṣkāraṇā and niṣkalaṅkā have the retroflex ṣ before k. Nirupādhiḥ has r before a vowel. And then nīrāgā, at the head of the second line, has no consonant from the prefix at all: before an r the s of nis simply disappears and the i is lengthened in compensation, giving nī-rā-gā with a long first syllable. Two names later nirmadā restores the r. The four forms are within eight seconds of each other and a reciter who hears them as four different words has misunderstood the verse.

The retroflex ṇ of niṣkāraṇā belongs to kāraṇa and is not produced by the prefix; the same ṇ appears in every derivative of that root. Niṣkalaṅkā has the guttural nasal ṅ before k, made at the back of the mouth in the same place as the k, so nothing moves between them: niṣ-ka-laṅ-kā, with the ṅk cluster as one gesture.

The join between the third and fourth names is written into the script and worth pausing on. Nirupādhiḥ ends in a visarga; the next name begins with the voiced n of nirīśvarā; so the visarga becomes r and the two names are printed as one word, निरुपाधिर्निरीश्वरा. This is the same rule that produced bhadramūrtir bhakta- five verses ago and will produce mahālakṣmīr and mahābuddhir later in this batch. When the verse is chanted, the r is heard and the word boundary is not — which is exactly why the name is nirupādhiḥ and not nirupādhir when it is offered on its own.

Nirīśvarā packs three long vowels and the cluster śv into four syllables: ni-rīś-va-rā. The ś is the palatal sibilant and the v is made with the lower lip against the upper teeth. Both are commonly lost. Say the whole word slowly and make sure the ī of the second syllable is genuinely long, because a short i turns the name into nothing at all.

Mathanī has an aspirated dental th — tongue-tip at the teeth, released with a puff — and it is never the th of English thing, a sound Sanskrit does not have. The root is manth, to churn, the same verb used of the churning of the ocean and of Śiva as the churner of the three cities. Hearing the th properly is the difference between crushing passion and merely mentioning it.

The two pairs in the second line are built on echoes and the echoes should be audible. Nīrāgā rāgamathanī puts rāga at the end of one name and the start of the next; nirmadā madanāśinī does the same with mada. Chant each pair as a single arc with the shared word at the join, and the second line stops being four names and becomes two statements.

Metrically the first line is four names of four syllables and the second is three plus five, twice. Breathe after nirīśvarā, at the halfway point, which is also where the verse changes its argument.

For what to hold: this is the verse in the batch that most rewards being read against the beginning of the hymn. Keep the second verse in mind — the noose in her hand that was said to be desire's own form — and then chant nīrāgā rāgamathanī. The tradition's counsel at this point is not to treat the two as stages, as though she had once been attached and had got over it, but as one description from two sides.