Sixty-four services, sixty-four arts

Sixty-four is four cubed, and it recurs across Indian learning wherever a set needs to be marked as complete: sixty-four tantras, sixty-four yoginīs, sixty-four bhairavas, sixty-four arts, and here sixty-four ritual services. It is not a count arrived at by counting. It is a shape the mind can hold, in the same way that a hundred and eight is, and lists that carry the number regularly turn out to contain a different number of items when you actually enumerate them.

The upacāras are the most concrete thing in the verse, and the least often explained. Upacāra means an approach or an attendance — literally a going-near — and the underlying idea is domestic hospitality: what you do for an honoured guest who has come to your house. Ordinary image-worship uses sixteen of them, the ṣoḍaśopacāra, and most temple ritual anywhere in India is a variant of that list. The elaborate Śrīvidyā rite uses sixty-four, and they are worth reading in order at least once, because they are not sixty-four kinds of incense. They are a morning. The old ornaments are taken off; there is a massage with scented oil; she is led into the bathing hall and seated on a jewelled stool; hot water; drying; red silk and a red upper cloth; then into the anointing hall for sandal, aloe, saffron, musk, camphor; incense held under the mass of her hair; garlands of jasmine, campaka, aśoka; then into the jewel hall for the crown of nine gems, the crescent, vermilion in the parting of the hair, collyrium, earrings, a nose ornament, lac for the lower lip; then necklaces, armlets by the pair, bangles, rings, girdle, anklets; then the noose in one hand, the goad in another, the sugarcane bow in the third, the flower arrows in the fourth; then she mounts the great cakra and takes her seat on Kāmeśvara's lap; then a cup of nectar, water for the mouth, camphored betel, laughter; then the waving of lamps, the parasol, two fly-whisks, a mirror, a fan. The list ends with scent, flower, incense, lamp and food — which is to say that the sixty-four services finish at the point where an ordinary short worship begins.

Kalā in the second name is one of the great multipurpose words of Sanskrit and this is the verse to learn it in. Its root sense is a small division of something larger. From that it means a sixteenth part; a digit of the moon; a fraction of time; and, in the sense used here, a skill or an art, a discrete competence that can be enumerated and taught. All the meanings stay alive at once, so catuḥṣaṣṭikalāmayī can be heard as made of the sixty-four arts and equally as made of sixty-four parts. The word will matter again: this recension divides the thousand names into kalās, and the moon and the sun are each said to have their own set of them.

The standard list of the sixty-four arts is Vātsyāyana's, in the third chapter of the first book of the Kāmasūtra, where they are prescribed as the education of a cultivated person alongside the Kāmasūtra itself. Other lists exist and differ; his is simply the best known. What is striking about it is how unhierarchical it is. Singing, instrumental music, dance and painting come first, but the same list contains the cutting of stencils for face-decoration, arrangements of coloured rice and flowers, the making of flower-beds, tooth powders and body paints, water-games, garland design, perfumery, conjuring, sleight of hand, cookery, the mixing of drinks, needlework, riddles, recitation, carpentry, architecture, the testing of gems, metallurgy, arboriculture, the arranging of cock and quail fights, teaching parrots and mynas to talk, massage, codes and secret writing, knowledge of regional languages, prosody, lexicography, and physical training. A goddess who is made of that list is being credited with skill as such, from the highest art to the most domestic knack.

The last name is the loudest and the least literal. A koṭi is ten million, so sixty-four koṭis is six hundred and forty million yoginīs, and no one is being asked to audit the figure. But the sixty-four yoginīs behind the hyperbole were the object of a real and geographically specific cult, and it left buildings. Circular open-air temples survive at Hirapur and Ranipur-Jharial in Odisha, at Bheraghat near Jabalpur, and at Mitaoli in the Morena district, most of them built between the ninth and the twelfth centuries. They are round, roofless, and lined on the inside with niches, each niche holding one goddess facing the centre. The lists of names differ from site to site, and the number is sometimes eighty-one instead of sixty-four. When this verse says she is served by troops of yoginīs it is not inventing a decorative crowd; it is invoking a form of worship that people once walked into.

This verse is the hardest thing to say in the whole of this stretch of the stotra, and the difficulty is concentrated in one word. Catuḥṣaṣṭi is catur, four, plus ṣaṣṭi, sixty — Sanskrit counts four-and-sixty, like the older English. The r of catur has become a visarga before the sibilant, and ṣaṣṭi itself has a retroflex sibilant followed by a retroflex stop. So in five syllables you have a visarga, then ṣ, then ṣṭ. The tongue-tip curls back and stays back. Say ca-tuḥ-ṣaṣ-ṭi at half speed until the two ṣ sounds are identical to each other and neither of them has drifted forward into an English "sh".

Then the compound makes it worse. In catuḥṣaṣṭyupacārāḍhyā, the final i of ṣaṣṭi meets the u of upacāra and becomes the glide y, which is the sandhi rule that turns i into y before any dissimilar vowel. That leaves the cluster ṣṭy: retroflex sibilant, retroflex stop, palatal glide, three articulations with the tongue moving back, staying back, then springing forward. And the word ends in āḍhyā, which is an aspirated retroflex ḍh followed by y. Two of the nastiest clusters in the language are in one word, and there is no way round them except slowly.

Against that, the second half of the first line is a rest. Catuḥṣaṣṭikalāmayī has no conjunct after the opening, and the suffix -mayī, feminine of -maya, means simply made of — the same suffix as in cinmayī three verses later. Let the line relax there.

The second line is one name of sixteen syllables: mahācatuḥṣaṣṭikoṭiyoginīgaṇasevitā. The caesura falls after the eighth syllable, which lands inside the word between koṭi and yoginī. Hear the pause without opening a gap in the sound, the same discipline the fourth meditation verse asks for. Yoginī has a plain dental n and gaṇa has a retroflex ṇ, and they are three syllables apart, so this is another of the free drills the stotra keeps handing out.

One small grammatical point that helps the sense. Āḍhya means rich in, well supplied with, and it governs an instrumental: rich by means of the sixty-four services. Mayī means consisting of. Sevitā is a past passive participle, waited upon. So the three names are grammatically three different relations — she is enriched by the first sixty-four, composed of the second, attended by the third — and knowing that keeps the verse from sounding like a chant on a single number.

In archanā the names become catuḥṣaṣṭyupacārāḍhyāyai namaḥ and so on, which is a mouthful worth attempting precisely because it forces the ṣṭy cluster to be produced twice in one breath. If you can manage that dative you have solved the verse.

What to hold while chanting: the number is a claim about scope, not about quantity. Sixty-four means all of them.