No division, no death, no act

Nirvikalpā is a word with three careers. In the analysis of perception it names the first bare instant of seeing, before the thing seen has been sorted under a name; in Yoga it is the higher of the two kinds of absorption, the one in which no object, word or idea remains; and in ritual grammar a vikalpa is simply an option, a place where the rules allow a choice. Patañjali defines vikalpa tightly: an idea that follows on words and has no object behind it. To call her nirvikalpā is to say that she is not one of the things a mind arrives at by talking to itself, and it is the closest this hymn comes to admitting that its own thousand words are in a difficult position.

Nirbhedā and bhedanāśinī are the doctrinal centre of the verse. Advaita analyses difference into three kinds: the difference between a thing and its own parts, between a thing and another of the same class, and between a thing and something of an entirely different class. A tree differs from its branches in the first way, from another tree in the second, and from a stone in the third. To be nirbheda is to have none of the three, which is the technical definition of the absolute. The upaniṣadic version of the claim is blunter and is the sentence this verse is standing on: there is no plurality here at all, and whoever sees as if there were goes from death to death. That sentence is doing double duty, because it also supplies the verse's next pair. In the upaniṣad the penalty for seeing division is death, and here the destroyer of division is followed immediately by the crusher of death.

Mṛtyumathanī is what a great many people who recite this hymn are actually asking for, and the tradition has never pretended otherwise. The oldest prayer in the language on this subject is the tryambaka verse of the Ṛgveda, which asks to be released from death as a cucumber is released from its stalk, and which is recited in South India to this day for the sick and the dying. The verb in the name is worth noticing: manth or math, to churn, to grind by turning — the same root that produced the epithet of Śiva as the churner of the three cities, which Śaṅkara uses of him in the Saundaryalaharī. Death here is not defeated in single combat. It is worn away by rotation.

Niṣkriyā puts the paradox of this whole section at its sharpest. The hymn began with a war. She rose from the fire to kill Bhaṇḍāsura, she burnt his city of Śūnyaka to nothing with the Kāmeśvara weapon, and eighty names ago the stotra described the battle in detail. Now she does not act. The Śvetāśvatara had already put the two together, calling the one controller of the many inactive ones, and the tradition's reading is that action is a category that applies to what is inside the world and she is not. It is the same manoeuvre that Vedānta makes about brahman as the cause of everything and the doer of nothing.

Niṣparigrahā is the last name and it is stranger than it looks. Parigraha means a taking hold of on all sides, and it runs from acceptance of a gift, through property, to a household, a retinue, and a wife. As aparigraha it is one of the five restraints binding a yogin in Patañjali's list, and there it means not accumulating. Said of Lalitā it is startling in three directions at once. She is worshipped with offerings, and accepts nothing. She is enthroned in the middle of a Śrīcakra whose nine enclosures are populated entirely by attendant goddesses, and she has no retinue. And she has been called the wife of Bhava, Śarva and Śaṅkara in this very batch, and here she belongs to no household. The negative series, which began by removing a support and a stain, ends by removing her possessions, her staff and her marriage.

The rhythm of this verse alternates rather than repeating, and knowing the pattern is the whole trick. The first quarter is four plus four, nir-vi-kal-pā and ni-rā-bā-dhā. Then three quarters of three plus five: nir-bhe-dā, bhe-da-nā-śi-nī; nir-nā-śā, mṛ-tyu-ma-tha-nī; niṣ-kri-yā, niṣ-pa-ri-gra-hā. That last pair is the only one in the verse whose two names are not built out of the same word, which is why it feels like a stop.

Nirnāśā deserves attention because of what it does not do. Elsewhere in the hymn an r pulls a following n back to the retroflex position — that is why śarvāṇī has a ṇ where bhavānī has an n. Here the r of nir stands immediately before the n of nāśa and the text as transmitted keeps a dental n throughout: nir-nā-śā, two dental sounds in succession. Say it with the tongue-tip forward for both and do not let the r drag the n backwards out of habit. Listening for this is a good test of whether the retroflexes elsewhere in the verse are being made deliberately or by accident.

Mṛtyumathanī has the vocalic ṛ, which is a syllable in its own right: a short r sound with a faint vowel colour around it, made with the tongue-tip curled towards the roof of the mouth. It is not ri and it is not ru, though most reciters approximate one or the other according to where they were trained. Then tyu, a dental t with y. Then tha, the aspirated dental — again not the th of English. The whole word is five syllables and the only long one is the last.

Niṣkriyā stacks retroflex ṣ, k and r before the vowel: niṣ-kri-yā. Niṣparigrahā stacks ṣ and p at the same place and then adds gr in the middle: niṣ-pa-ri-gra-hā. Both are easier if the closed syllable niṣ is finished cleanly before the next consonant begins.

Nirvikalpā has the cluster lp, and nirābādhā has an aspirated dh between two long ā vowels. Neither is hard, but nirābādhā is the only wholly open, unhurried word in the verse and it is worth letting it be one.

Bhedanāśinī repeats bheda from the name before it, and this is the last of the echoing pairs; from the next verse the hymn changes its prefix and its method. Give the join its full value one more time.

The breath goes after bhedanāśinī.

For what to hold: the second name of the second pair is the one the tradition points to. Bheda between worshipper and worshipped is the difference that a thousand names in the third person keep manufacturing, and the meditation verses at the head of this stotra had already dealt with it in three words, saying that one contemplates Bhavānī as simply I. Chanting bhedanāśinī with that line in mind is the intended use of this name. The other thing to notice, if the verse is taken slowly, is the order of the last four: no perishing, death crushed, no action, nothing possessed. Having removed death, the hymn removes the two things a person spends a life doing.