From all the diagrams and all the scriptures to the beloved of the gracious one

Yantra and tantra are ordinary Sanskrit nouns before they are technical ones. Yantra, from √yam, to hold or restrain, with the instrumental suffix -tra, is a device for holding something in place — a machine, a lock, a water-lifting engine — and in this tradition the geometrical figure that holds a deity. Tantra, from √tan, to stretch, is the warp stretched on a loom and then any framework, and finally a class of revealed text with the practice it prescribes. The two names here take these in opposite grammatical directions, and the difference is worth catching. Sarvayantrātmikā makes her the ātman of the diagrams, their self or animating principle, so that the drawing is a body and she is what is in it. Sarvatantrarūpā makes the scriptures her rūpa, her form, so that the corpus is the outside of her rather than the inside. Interior and exterior of the same claim, in that order.

Elsewhere the hymn will call her mahātantrā and mahāyantrā, she whose tantra and diagram are the great ones. It is worth noticing that these are different assertions. The mahā- names single out one system as the complete one against the partial others; the sarva- names here take in every system there is, including the partial ones. A litany of a thousand names can afford both, and the fact that it makes both is characteristic. Absorption and supremacy are the two moves available to a tradition that wants to claim everything, and this hymn declines to choose.

Manonmanī is a technical term of the Śaiva tantric schools and does not mean simply a peaceful mind. It belongs to the analysis of the sound of a mantra as it thins out into silence. Above the audible syllable the tradition counts a ladder of increasingly subtle phases — the point, the half-moon, the resonance, the end of resonance, and beyond them still the levels called samanā, with mind, and unmanā, without it or beyond it. Unmanā is the last, where sound has passed out of anything that could be heard and mind out of anything that could be thought. Manonmanī is manas joined to that word: the transmental condition of mind itself, and in the Śaiva texts also a proper name of Śiva's power. Placed where it is, immediately after two claims of universal extent, it does the work of a hinge. Everything can be listed until the lister stops.

The three great-names that follow are the hymn doing something a sahasranāma is peculiarly good at. Māheśvarī is a vṛddhi derivative from Maheśvara, and it is also the name of one of the mother goddesses, the mātṛkās, who is Śiva's power in the standard set and rides his bull. Mahālakṣmī belongs to a different lineage entirely: Viṣṇu's consort, the goddess of the Śrī Sūkta, and in the systematisation of the Devī Māhātmya one of the three great forms under which the whole work is organised. To place her here, unremarked, among Śaiva titles, is a doctrinal act carried out by list rather than by argument. Neither goddess is being compared to Lalitā. Both are being named as her.

Mṛḍa is the last word of the verse and the mildest. It comes from √mṛḍ, to be gracious or to show mercy, and it is one of the euphemistic names of Rudra, the placating epithet used of a god who is otherwise addressed as an archer whose arrows are disease. The Vedic hymns to Rudra are full of the imperative of this root: be gracious to us. Pāṇini's grammar treats mṛḍa as one of a small closed group of divine names — with indra, varuṇa, bhava, śarva and rudra — whose feminines take a special augment, which is how Indrāṇī, Bhavānī, Rudrāṇī and Mṛḍānī are formed; so mṛḍa has its own goddess already built into the language. The verse chooses not to use that form. It names him instead, and calls her his beloved, ending a catalogue of sovereignty on a word that means nothing but kindness.

The two lines of this verse are shaped quite differently and should not be recited at the same pace. The first is two long compounds and a shorter name, six syllables plus six plus four; the second is four names of four syllables each, laid down evenly. The natural effect is an acceleration into the second line, and it is worth letting that happen rather than resisting it, because the sense does the same thing: elaborate descriptions giving way to bare titles.

There is a trap in the first line that catches almost everyone. The quarter ends at the eighth syllable, which falls inside sarvatantrarūpā — after sar-va, with tan-tra-rū-pā belonging to the second quarter. Do not breathe there and do not let the name break in half. The pause in this verse comes at the halfway mark, after manonmanī, and nowhere else.

Manonmanī hides a seam. It is manas plus unmanī; the final s of manas becomes o before a voiced sound, so the o you hear in ma-no-nma-nī is the product of a join rather than a vowel of either word. Knowing this also fixes the nm cluster that follows, which is dental n released directly into labial m with no vowel between them.

The clusters in this verse are its real difficulty. Ntr appears twice, in yantra and tantra: dental n, dental t, then r, three separate articulations with nothing swallowed. Tm in ātmikā is dental t followed by m, again with no intruding vowel. Śv in māheśvarī is the palatal sibilant, made further forward than the retroflex ṣ, plus v. And kṣm in mahālakṣmī is the hardest thing here, three consonants at three different places of articulation — velar k, retroflex ṣ, labial m — which must be got through without an English speaker's instinctive vowel appearing in the middle.

The join between the last two names is instructive because it disappears in ritual use. In the shloka you say mahālakṣmīr mṛḍapriyā: the visarga that ends mahālakṣmīḥ turns into r before the voiced m that follows. That r belongs to neither name. When the verse is broken up for archanā the two are separate — mahālakṣmyai namaḥ, mṛḍapriyāyai namaḥ — and the r is simply gone. Reciters who have learned the shloka first often carry it across by mistake.

The archanā forms otherwise sort into the two familiar patterns. The ā-stems take -āyai: sarvayantrātmikāyai, sarvatantrarūpāyai, mṛḍapriyāyai. The ī-stems take -yai: manonmanyai, māheśvaryai, mahādevyai, mahālakṣmyai.

What the verse asks is mostly a matter of not stopping early. Its first half is the kind of statement that invites a certain expansiveness of feeling — she is all diagrams, all scriptures, the state past thought — and a reciter can be forgiven for wanting to rest there. The verse does not rest there. It goes on to name her as the wife of a god called the gracious one, and the last word of thirty-two syllables of grandeur is a term of affection. The proportions are the instruction.