Anger, greed, doubt, and becoming

Look back over the last five verses and a list emerges. The traditional enumeration of the enemies within is six: kāma, krodha, lobha, moha, mada and mātsarya — wanting, anger, greed, delusion, intoxication and envy. Since the beginning of the negative series the hymn has removed five of them by name, in this order: niṣkāmā at a hundred and forty-two, nirmadā at a hundred and fifty-eight, nirmohā at a hundred and sixty-two, and now niṣkrodhā and nirlobhā. It has also added rāga, passion, which is not on the standard list but is on the Yoga Sūtra's list of afflictions. Only one of the six is missing, and it is mātsarya, envy — and the word does not occur anywhere in the thousand names. Whether that is deliberate or simply the result of composing under an alliterative constraint is not knowable, but the omission is complete.

Anger returning here has the same force that passion had two verses ago. In the second verse of this hymn the goad in her hand was said to have the shape of krodha: not a weapon against anger but a weapon made of it. Now she is free of anger and quells it in others. Both of the objects she was described as holding at the beginning of the stotra have now been taken back and turned into things she abolishes, and neither statement is withdrawn.

Saṃśaya is the interesting member of the set because it belongs to a different order of trouble. In Indian philosophy doubt is a technical category — one of the standing obstacles to knowledge, the state in which two alternatives are entertained and neither settles — and the Gītā is unusually harsh about it, saying that the man of doubt has neither this world nor the next nor any happiness at all, and instructing Arjuna to cut doubt with the sword of knowledge rather than to resolve it item by item. Saṃśayaghnī does exactly that: the suffix ghnī is from the root han, to strike, and it makes her a killer of doubt rather than an answerer of questions.

The most important passage behind this pair is in the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad, where the knot of the heart is split, all doubts are cut and one's works are exhausted, all at the moment of seeing. That verse matters for this hymn twice over. It supplies the language of cutting doubt, and it supplies the knot: at names one hundred, one hundred and two and one hundred and four, only nine verses back, Lalitā was called the splitter of the knot of Brahmā, the knot of Viṣṇu and the knot of Rudra as she rose through the cakras. The three knots are the tradition's expansion of the Muṇḍaka's single hṛdayagranthi. The stotra used the image then and now uses the sequel.

Nirbhavā and bhavanāśinī close the verse and close a circle. This batch of verses opened seven verses ago with bhavānī, wife of Bhava, and then bhavāraṇyakuṭhārikā, the axe to the forest of bhava, where the same syllable was made to mean the god and the world in consecutive names. Here, sixty names later, the negative series collides with the same word from a third direction: she does not come into being at all, and she brings coming-into-being to an end. Three treatments of bhava within one batch, each in a different register, and the alliterative machinery that governs this whole section is what brought them together.

The verse is built out of four pairs and the pairs are not all the same length, which is where reciters trip. The first, second and fourth quarters run three plus five — niṣ-kro-dhā, kro-dha-śa-ma-nī; nir-lo-bhā, lo-bha-nā-śi-nī; nir-bha-vā, bha-va-nā-śi-nī. The third quarter is four plus four: niḥ-saṃ-śa-yā, saṃ-śa-ya-ghnī. That one asymmetry in the middle of an otherwise mechanical verse is worth marking deliberately, because a reciter running on the three-plus-five rhythm will arrive at saṃśayaghnī a syllable early.

Niṣkrodhā opens with three consonants in a row across a syllable boundary: retroflex ṣ, then k, then r. Say niṣ as a closed syllable with the tongue-tip curled back, then release into kro with the r fully tapped. The same krodha then begins the next name unencumbered, which makes the pair a useful before-and-after drill for the cluster.

Niḥsaṃśayā is the last of the prefix's shapes and the plainest: before a sibilant the s of nis stays a visarga, a light voiceless breath. Say niḥ with a faint echo of the vowel after it — nihi, very short — and then saṃ. Do not turn it into nis or nish. Across these seven verses the same prefix has now appeared as nir, niṣ, niś, nis, nī and niḥ, and this is the last of them.

Saṃśayaghnī contains two things worth slowing for. The anusvāra before ś is a nasalisation coloured by the sibilant that follows, not a full n. And ghnī is a voiced aspirated guttural followed immediately by a dental n: gh-nī, with the breath released on the gh before the tongue moves forward for the n. It is one of the rarer clusters in the language and most reciters simplify it to a plain g.

The aspirates carry this verse generally. Krodhā has dh, lobhā and bhavā have bh, ghnī has gh, and every one of them must be heard as a stop released with breath. In a verse this repetitive the aspiration is the first thing to go.

One length to guard: nirlobhā has a long o, and lobhanāśinī keeps it long in the first syllable and then goes short. Lo-bha-nā-śi-nī. The same pattern holds in bhavanāśinī, where the first two syllables are both short.

The breath goes after lobhanāśinī, at the end of the first line.

For contemplation, the third pair is the one to sit with, because it is the odd one out. Anger and greed are things one would obviously like to be rid of; doubt is a state most educated people rather respect. The hymn puts it between greed and death and treats it as the same kind of thing. Whether that is right is itself a question the verse is not proposing to answer, which is roughly the point. The traditional use of this verse is straightforward: it is among the passages recited by people who want something specific stopped, and the second name of each pair is what they are asking for.