The great tantra, the great mantra, the great diagram

Take the three technical words apart before doing anything else with them, because all three are perfectly ordinary Sanskrit nouns built on perfectly ordinary roots, and a learner who meets them first as an exotic triad will never see that. Tantra comes from √tan, to stretch: the warp stretched on a loom, and from there any framework, system or arrangement, and finally a class of revealed text and the practice it prescribes. Mantra comes from √man, to think, with the suffix -tra that forms instrument nouns: a device for thinking with. Yantra comes from √yam, to hold or restrain, with the same suffix: a device for holding something in place. Yantra is the everyday word for a machine, for a water-lifting engine, for the mechanism of a lock. So the triad is not three mysteries but three tools, distinguished by what each of them holds: the system holds the teaching, the formula holds the sound, the diagram holds the form.

For this school the three have particular referents. The tantra is the Śrīvidyā corpus, the mantra is the fifteen-syllabled pañcadaśākṣarī whose three segments the nyāsa before the stotra has already placed on the reciter's body, and the yantra is the Śrīcakra, the nine interlocking triangles with their surrounding lotuses and enclosures. What the verse adds to all three is possession. The compounds are bahuvrīhis: she whose tantra is the great one, she whose mantra is the great one, she whose yantra is the great one. The practitioner who thinks of the mantra as something he has acquired is being corrected in the space of three names.

The Saundaryalaharī makes the same point with a story. Śiva, it says, put sixty-four tantras into the world, each of them able to produce one particular power and nothing else, and then stopped; it took her insistence to bring down the one system that could deliver everything a human life is for. Lists of those sixty-four exist and disagree with one another, and the disagreement is itself informative: what the number is doing is marking a completed set, not counting titles on a shelf. Against a complete but fragmentary sixty-four, mahātantrā names the one that is whole.

Mahāsanā, she whose seat is great, admits two readings and the tradition uses both. Five verses further on, the stotra will seat her on a couch made of five corpses who are the five great gods, and mahāsanā is the compressed anticipation of that. It is also read of the central point of the Śrīcakra, the bindu, where she is invoked and where the whole diagram converges. Neither reading is figurative in the way a modern reader might expect: in the rite, an ordinary metal or crystal plate is treated as the actual furniture of an actual throne room, and everything offered is offered to somebody sitting there.

The fifth name is the one to slow down over, because it turns on the word krama, sequence. Mahāyāgakramārādhyā does not say she is worshipped by the great rite; it says she is worshipped by the order of the great rite. Śrīcakra worship proceeds through nine enclosures, each with its own resident goddesses, and the practitioner may travel them outward from the centre, in the order of emission, or inward from the outermost square, in the order of reabsorption, or hold to the middle order of maintenance. Which direction is taken changes what the rite means. To insert krama into the name is to say that the sequence is not an administrative detail of the liturgy but part of what is being offered.

Bhairava, in the last name, is the form of Śiva that carries a skull and haunts the cremation ground, and the Sanskrit tradition connects the word with bhīru and bhaya, fear. A large body of tantric scripture is named after him — the Bhairava tantras — and in the Kashmirian schools Bhairava is not a fierce aspect of the absolute but simply a name of the absolute, unpacked as the one who supports, holds and dissolves the universe. Either way the name closes the verse with a reversal that the stotra likes and will use again: the most frightening thing anyone can imagine is here found in the posture of a worshipper, with his hands full of flowers.

The first line is four names of four syllables each, laid down like four beats of a drum, and it is the most mechanically dangerous line in this part of the stotra. Mahātantrā, mahāmantrā, mahāyantrā differ from one another by a single consonant. Reciters lose their place here, repeat a name, or drop one, and the loss is almost impossible to hear. The remedy is to fix the order by its logic rather than by its sound: system, then formula, then figure — the thing thought, the thing said, the thing drawn. Once you know why they come in that order you will not transpose them.

The cluster in all three is ntr, three consonants in a row: dental n, dental t, and r. English has nothing like it and will want to swallow the t. Say tan-tra with the n fully closed at the teeth, the t released, and the r following as its own articulation. Then hold the tongue exactly where it is and change only the opening consonant to get man-tra and yan-tra. Doing the three in sequence at half speed is a better drill for the dental series than any isolated word.

Every name in this verse carries mahā with a long second vowel, and the metre depends on it. Six long ās in the first line alone, and the temptation under speed is to clip them to something like the a of mahā's first syllable. Keep the two vowels of mahā distinctly unequal in length and the anuṣṭubh holds its shape by itself.

In the second line, mahāyāgakramārādhyā hides a join worth seeing. The elements are mahāyāga, krama and ārādhyā; krama ends in short a, ārādhyā begins in long ā, and a short a followed by a long ā gives a single long ā. So kramārādhyā is krama plus ārādhyā, and the word ārādhyā — to be propitiated, a gerundive from ā-√rādh — is the same formation you have already met in ārādhitā elsewhere in the hymn. The cluster dhy in ārādhyā is an aspirated dental followed by the palatal glide: d, breath, y, with no gap.

Mahābhairavapūjitā gives you the diphthong ai in bhairava, which is a full-length vowel, not the short glide of English "eye", and a long ū in pūjitā. The bh at the head of bhairava is a single aspirated labial, not b followed by h.

The caesura falls where it always does in an anuṣṭubh, after the sixteenth syllable, which here is the end of mahāsanā — a clean break between the four short names and the two long ones. Breathe there and nowhere else.

For the recitation done as archanā, these names are turned into the dative: mahātantrāyai namaḥ, mahāmantrāyai namaḥ, and so on. Every one of the six is a feminine ā-stem, so every one takes -āyai, and this verse is therefore about as good a place as exists in the stotra to fix that ending in the ear by repetition. As for what to hold while chanting it: you are using a formula, following a sequence, and sitting in front of a diagram, and the verse is telling you that all three belong to somebody else.