Six goods of practice, and the sovereign of those who obtain them

Bhoga is from √bhuj, to consume or enjoy, and it is the standing counterpart of mokṣa, release, in every discussion of what a religious life is for. The renunciate traditions treat the two as alternatives; the tantric traditions of this school characteristically refuse the choice, and are often described, by themselves and by their critics, as promising both. Placing mahābhogā immediately after the previous verse's mahāratiḥ makes the refusal about as explicit as a litany can. It is worth adding that bhoga has a second and quite separate lexical life as the expanded hood or the coiled body of a snake, and a hymn that has already called her the coiled one leaves that pun lying available; the tradition of commentary on these names is fond of such double readings, though not every reader will want to press it.

Aiśvarya is a vṛddhi derivative from īśvara, lord: the condition of being a lord, dominion. In the yogic and purāṇic literature the word has a more specific reference as well. It names the set of superhuman capacities usually counted as eight — making oneself minute, making oneself weightless, making oneself vast, reaching anything, having one's will unobstructed, mastery, control over others, and the guaranteed fulfilment of desire. The same eight are commonly called the siddhis, so the second and the sixth names of this verse are, on the technical reading, two names for one thing, separated by four others. That kind of redundancy is normal in a text of a thousand names, and it is one reason the commentators work so hard to differentiate near-synonyms.

Vīrya and bala are two more of them. Sanskrit has a large vocabulary for power and does not use it loosely: śakti is capacity or potency considered abstractly, bala is force and physical strength, vīrya is heroic energy — built on vīra, hero — with a strong secondary sense of generative potency. The distinctions are real but they are not stable across texts, and a reader who tries to assign each name a distinct metaphysical office will end up inventing one. What is clear is the register. These are martial and bodily words, and they are not decorative here: the earlier part of this hymn described the goddess raising armies and destroying Bhaṇḍāsura, and the wider Śākta literature makes her a fighter before it makes her anything else.

Buddhi is the term where the verse becomes technically interesting. In Sāṃkhya, buddhi is the first product of primal matter, the faculty of determination and discernment, and its other standing name in that system is mahat, the great. So mahābuddhi is very nearly a technical tautology — the great that is the great one — and the coincidence is unlikely to have been lost on a composer working through a chain of mahā- names. Whether the name intends the Sāṃkhya sense or the ordinary one of intelligence and good judgement is not settled, and different expositors take it differently.

Siddhi is from √sidh, to succeed or be accomplished, and it carries the same doubleness as the English word attainment: the powers acquired along the way, and the arrival that makes the way worth taking. The Yoga Sūtra devotes most of its third chapter to cataloguing the first kind and then states flatly that they are obstacles to absorption even while they count as achievements in the ordinary state. The sahasranāma inherits the vocabulary and drops the warning, which is a real doctrinal difference and not merely a difference of tone.

The last name is the most elaborately built thing in this stretch of the hymn. Yoga plus īśvara gives yogeśvara, lord of yoga, which is a serious title — it is how Kṛṣṇa is addressed in the Bhagavad Gītā, including in the poem's final verse. Prefix mahā and you have the great lords of yoga. Then the compound adds īśvarī on top, so that she is the sovereign of the sovereigns. Sanskrit likes this doubling for the highest rank, as in devadeva, god of gods, or rājādhirāja, king over kings, and the effect here is to close a verse of enumerated attainments by putting the adepts themselves into the position of subjects.

There is one thing in this verse that everybody gets wrong at least once, and it is the second name. Mahaiśvaryā is mahā plus aiśvarya, and long ā followed by the diphthong ai fuses into a single ai. So the name is ma-hai-śva-ryā, four syllables, and the syllable you have said thirteen times already in this chain does not appear in it. Reciters who have drilled mahā as a unit will try to restore it, producing five syllables and wrecking the quarter. Learn this name against the pattern rather than inside it.

The two lines are shaped as a crescendo and should be recited that way. The first is four names of four syllables, evenly spaced. The second is four, four, and then eight — the longest name in the verse standing alone as the final quarter. Do not let the pace of the four short names carry into mahāyogeśvareśvarī; it is the terminus of the verse and it needs room.

The second line has two visarga joins in a row, which is unusual. Mahābuddhiḥ and mahāsiddhiḥ both end in visarga, and both are followed by the voiced m of the next name, so both become r: mahābuddhir mahāsiddhir mahāyogeśvareśvarī. Neither r belongs to a name. In archanā the forms are mahābuddhyai namaḥ and mahāsiddhyai namaḥ, with the final i of the stem turning into a glide and the r gone entirely.

Buddhi and siddhi share the cluster that most defeats English speakers: ddh, a voiced dental d followed by a voiced aspirated dental dh. Both are made at the teeth, the first is released into the second without a vowel, and only the second carries the breath. The usual English result is a single flat d, which erases the distinction between these names and words with a plain dh. Practise the two words back to back, since they differ only in their opening consonant and drill the same cluster.

Śv occurs three times, once in mahaiśvaryā and twice in the last name, and it is the palatal sibilant, made forward with the blade of the tongue, not the retroflex ṣ. The sequence ryā, which ends three of the first four names, is a tapped or trilled r followed directly by the palatal glide y — two liquids in succession, with no vowel smuggled between them. And bh in bhogā is one sound, an aspirated voiced labial, not b followed by h.

The last name is worth taking apart before you try to say it. Yoga plus īśvara gives yogeśvara, since a short a and a long ī combine to e; yogeśvara plus īśvarī gives yogeśvareśvarī by the same rule. Both of the e vowels you hear are therefore seams, and both are long, as every e in Sanskrit is. Knowing where the joins fall turns eight difficult syllables into three familiar words.

As for what the verse asks, the honest answer is that it asks the reciter to notice what he is being offered and what he is not. Six names enumerate the goods of practice, including the ones the philosophical literature treats as traps, and the hymn withholds any caution about them. It withholds something else too. Every one of the six is stated as hers, not as available; the grammar never turns toward the person chanting. Only in the seventh name does anyone else appear, and they appear as her subjects.