Thick compassion

The last name of the verse is a quotation, compressed to eight syllables. The Śvetāśvatara says of the supreme that no action and no instrument of action can be found in him, and that no one equal to him or greater than him is seen. Samānādhikavarjitā takes the second half of that line and turns it into a name. The rest of the stanza matters just as much, because it continues by saying that his highest power is heard of as manifold, and that it is natural to him, consisting of knowledge, strength and action. That sentence is the oldest and most quoted upaniṣadic use of the word śakti, and the tradition that made a goddess of śakti has always treated it as its charter. It is also, as it happens, the seed of the next four verses of this hymn: sarvaśaktimayī comes at the start of the next verse, and knowledge, strength and action arrive as mahābuddhiḥ, mahābalā and mahāvīryā in the last verse of this batch.

Sarvajñā is the only occurrence of that name in the thousand, which is surprising for so obvious an epithet. The word is old and precise. The Muṇḍaka says that from the one who knows everything and is aware of everything, whose austerity consists of knowledge, come forth this brahman, name, form and food — knowing there is productive rather than merely comprehensive. And Śaṅkara's opening sentence in the Brahmasūtra commentary, from which this batch has already drawn three names, ends with exactly these two words: all-knowing, and furnished with every power. Sarvajñā here and sarvaśaktimayī in the next verse complete the borrowing.

Duṣṭadūrā is the name that gives commentators trouble and it deserves to. A goddess who keeps her distance from the wicked is not the goddess of the phalaśruti, which promises that reciting these names destroys the sins of anyone who recites them, nor of pāpanāśinī four verses back. Two readings are available and both are old. On the first, the distance is not hers: she is equally present everywhere, and the corrupt are the ones who fail to find her however close they stand, which is what the word dūra, far, means when it is used of something omnipresent. On the second, dūra keeps its ordinary force and the name is a warning rather than a description of her nature. The next name settles which reading the verse intends. Durācāraśamanī uses śamana, the causing of quiet — the same word that produced krodhaśamanī three verses ago — and not any of the many available words for punishment. Bad conduct is put to sleep rather than answered.

The contrast with the Bhagavad Gītā is worth making because the Gītā's line is so familiar. There the descent of the divine into the world has three purposes: to rescue the good, to destroy the wrongdoers, and to establish dharma. Vināśāya duṣkṛtām — the wrongdoers, not the wrongdoing. The sahasranāma, in a verse using the same root as duṣkṛt, declines the second purpose. It quiets durācāra and keeps its distance from the duṣṭa, and it never says that she destroys anybody except demons.

Sāndrakaruṇā is the name that makes the verse. Sāndra is a physical word before it is anything else: Monier-Williams gives viscid, unctuous, thick, solid, dense, and then intense. It is used of forests, of clouds, of ointment. Compassion described with that adjective is compassion that has body — poured rather than sprinkled, and continuous rather than occasional. The Devī Māhātmya reaches for the same idea with a different image when it asks who else has a heart that is always wet. Placed immediately after sarvajñā, the name also makes a claim about the relation of the two: she knows everything about you, and the compassion is not in spite of that.

This verse breaks a name across the caesura, which happens rarely and is worth knowing in advance. The first line is duṣṭadūrā, four syllables, then durācāraśamanī, seven, then doṣavarjitā, five. Four and seven make eleven, so the quarter boundary at the eighth syllable falls inside the second name, between durācāra and śamanī. Reciters do not break there. Take the whole first line in one arc and breathe at the end of it.

Duṣṭadūrā puts two retroflexes side by side at the start: ṣ then ṭ, tongue-tip curled back for both with no forward movement between them. Then the ordinary dental d of dūrā. Duṣ-ṭa-dū-rā. The contrast between the retroflex ṭ in the first half of the word and the dental d in the second is the whole pronunciation lesson, and it is a lesson that will be needed again immediately, because the next line is full of dental sibilants.

The second line is a study in s against ś and ṣ. Sarvajñā, sāndrakaruṇā and samānādhikavarjitā all open with the plain dental s, tongue-tip forward. There is no palatal ś anywhere in the line — the only other sibilant is the ṣ inside duṣṭa in the line above and the ś in śamanī. After seven verses in which almost every name opened with a retroflex ṣ or a palatal ś, the ear has to be reset.

Sarvajñā carries the cluster jñ, which is the same one that appeared in the very first verse of the stotra in mahārājñī. The value the grammarians describe is a palatal j followed by the palatal nasal ñ, both made with the tongue-body flat against the hard palate. Northern reciters will say something close to gy and southern reciters something close to jñ; the letter is jñ. Say sar-va-jñā with the tongue in one position for the whole cluster.

Sāndrakaruṇā holds three difficulties in five syllables. The cluster ndr is a dental nasal, a dental stop and an r with no vowel among them: sān-dra. The ṇ of karuṇā is retroflex, pulled back by the r earlier in the word, exactly as in kāraṇa and guṇa in the earlier verses. And the word begins long and ends long with three short syllables between, sān-dra-ka-ru-ṇā, so the rhythm must not sag in the middle.

Samānādhikavarjitā is eight syllables and fills the last quarter by itself. The join in the middle is a sandhi: samāna plus adhika, equal and greater, with the two a vowels merged into a single long ā. In the Devanagari it shows as one stroke and the eye has to reconstruct it. Say sa-mā-nā-dhi-ka-var-ji-tā and know that the fourth syllable is doing the work of two words.

For what to hold while chanting: the verse asks to be taken as one movement rather than two. It is easy to chant the first line as severity and the second as sweetness. The tradition reads them together, and the reading turns on the middle name — that what she does with wrongdoing is not to strike it but to settle it, which is also what she does with anger and doubt in the verses just past. Held that way, duṣṭadūrā stops sounding like a threat and starts sounding like a diagnosis.