Without I, without mine

Ahaṃkāra needs its Sāṃkhya setting or the name will be read as a moral compliment. In that system the world unfolds from an unconscious ground through a series of principles, and the third of them is ahaṃkāra, defined in a single word: abhimāna, the act of taking something as one's own. From it two lines of evolution branch, the eleven faculties on one side and the five subtle elements on the other, so that everything a person is equipped with and everything a person perceives are alike products of the I-maker. It is a piece of machinery, not a character flaw. The upaniṣads had already told a story about how it arose. In the oldest of them, the self alone was there in the beginning, in the shape of a person; it looked around, saw nothing but itself, and said I am — and from that the word I came to exist. Nirahaṅkārā denies the whole apparatus at its root.

Nirmamā and mamatāhantrī take the other half. Mama is the genitive of the first person pronoun, simply mine; mamatā is that word made into an abstract noun, mineness. Sanskrit does this readily and the result is a word for the state of regarding things as belonging to one. The Bhagavad Gītā pairs the two terms in exactly the way this verse does, more than once: the man who has given up all desires and moves without longing, without mine and without I, comes to peace. Śānti is where the Gītā's sentence lands, and śāntā was a name in this hymn six names before nirahaṅkārā. The stotra is assembling its Gītā verse out of parts.

Niścintā opens the verse and it is the lightest of the eight in weight and the heaviest in ordinary usefulness. Cintā is anxious thought, the mind revolving something it cannot settle. It is worth noticing that the same word stands inside cintāmaṇi, the wish-granting stone, which is what her palace is built of in the standard visualisation — the gem that yields whatever is thought of. In one word thought is the disease and in the other it is the currency of the granted wish. The hymn has already put her inside the cintāmaṇi house by implication; here it says there is no cintā in her.

The three destroyer-names deserve a word about what they are for. It is of no practical use to a reciter that the goddess personally has no delusion, no possessiveness and no sin; a hymn made only of such statements would be a description of somebody enviable and nothing more. Every one of these pairs therefore turns outward on its second half. The doctrinal claim being made by the pairing, rather than by either name alone, is that she can remove these things from a devotee precisely because they are not in her — the tradition's standing objection to seeking help from any power that is itself entangled. This is why the negative names and the destroyer-names are always in that order and never the reverse.

Pāpanāśinī is also a promise the text makes about itself. The phalaśruti appended to this stotra claims among other things that reciting the thousand names destroys accumulated wrongdoing, and the hymn will come back to the subject with a much bigger word at name two hundred and fourteen, mahāpātakanāśinī, the destroyer of the great sins — the specific and enumerated crimes of the law books, for which ordinary expiation was held not to suffice. Here the word is the ordinary one. What is being offered at this point in the hymn is not yet the extraordinary remedy but the everyday one.

The rhythm of this verse is exact and worth internalising before anything else: three syllables then five, four times over. Niś-cin-tā, ni-ra-haṅ-kā-rā. Nir-mo-hā, mo-ha-nā-śi-nī. Nir-ma-mā, ma-ma-tā-han-trī. Niṣ-pā-pā, pā-pa-nā-śi-nī. Four quarters, all built the same way. If the count is right the verse almost recites itself.

Niścintā gives the prefix another face. Before the palatal c of cintā, the s of nis becomes the palatal sibilant ś: niś-cin-tā. That is now the fifth shape of the same prefix in five verses, and the reason is simple assimilation — the sibilant takes the place of articulation of the consonant it is about to meet. Compare niṣ- before k in niṣpāpā's neighbours and nis- before t in nistulā three verses from now, where the sibilant stays dental because t is dental.

Nirahaṅkārā has the guttural nasal ṅ, made at the back of the mouth where the k is made. Do not substitute the n of English sing-along by moving the tongue forward. Say ni-ra-haṅ-kā-rā with the ṅ and the k as one gesture at the velum, and let the h before it be a full breathy sound rather than a swallowed one.

Mamatāhantrī holds the hardest cluster: ntr, dental nasal, dental stop and r in succession, with no vowel among them. Break it as ma-ma-tā-han-trī. The trī at the end is the feminine agent suffix that also gave dāyinī its counterparts elsewhere in the hymn, and it is always long.

The three pairs are joined by repeated words and the repetition should be heard rather than smoothed away. Nirmohā mohanāśinī puts moha at the end of one name and the start of the next; nirmamā mamatāhantrī repeats mama; niṣpāpā pāpanāśinī repeats pāpa. This is a recognised figure in Sanskrit poetics, and the effect is of a word being handed across a gap. Chant each pair as one arc and let the joint be audible.

Watch the vowel lengths in the third pair. Niṣpāpā has three long syllables in a row, niṣ-pā-pā, and pāpanāśinī begins long and then goes short: pā-pa-nā-śi-nī. Reciters who have got into a rhythm will tend to lengthen the second a of pāpanāśinī and the metre will collapse.

One clean contrast in the sibilants: the ś of niścintā and of the three -nāśinī endings is palatal, while the ṣ of niṣpāpā is retroflex. Both appear in the same verse and neither is the s of English.

The breath goes after mohanāśinī. In the archanā form the verse gives eight salutations, and the pairs are usually offered without a pause between them.

For what to hold: the two names in the middle are the instruction, and they are unusually concrete for this stretch of the hymn. Not a doctrine about the self, but two words — I and mine — presented as the things to be given up. The traditional counsel is to notice, while chanting, how often either word has been used in the last hour, and to let the pair that follows do its work on that rather than on anything abstract.