The king of diagrams, and the mountain's daughter

Carācara is worth a moment because it is a habit of thought as much as a word. Cara is what moves; a-cara is what does not; put together they mean everything there is. Sanskrit prefers to say totality by naming a pair of opposites rather than by using a word for all, and the same manoeuvre gives sthāvara-jaṅgama, standing and going, and dyāvāpṛthivī, heaven and earth. There is an extra turn in this case. Jagat, the ordinary word for world, is itself a present participle of √gam, to go — the world is literally the thing that is going. So a compound that includes acara inside a phrase about the jagat is quietly saying that the going thing contains what does not go, and that both are under one rule.

Cakrarāja is the Śrīcakra, and niketana means a dwelling — a house, a residence, the place someone actually lives. She is not depicted in the diagram and not symbolised by it; she is at home in it. The construction is described in the Saundaryalaharī more precisely than anywhere else in the devotional literature: four triangles with their apex upward, taken as Śiva, and five with their apex downward, taken as Śakti, overlaid so that their intersections generate a field of smaller triangles, and around that the eight-petalled lotus, the sixteen-petalled lotus, three circles and a triple-lined square with four gates — nine enclosures in all. That verse also gives an interesting textual problem. It says forty-four, and the count of small triangles in the drawing as it is normally executed is forty-three. Manuscripts of the poem preserve both readings, forty-four and forty-three, and commentators who keep forty-four generally reach it by counting the central point as one more. It is a good example of how a tradition handles arithmetic that will not quite close: it does not suppress the discrepancy, it records the variant.

Then the tone changes. The stotra has used proper names before — Bhavānī, Durgā, Mahālakṣmī all stand earlier in the thousand — but Pārvatī is the first that identifies her by parentage. It is a vṛddhi derivative, the type of formation that lengthens the first vowel of a stem to mean belonging to or descended from: parvata, a mountain, gives pārvatī, the mountain's daughter. Kālidāsa builds the opening of the Kumārasambhava out of exactly this etymology, first spending twelve verses on the Himālaya as a person and only then producing the daughter whose name is simply his. The name is thus the opposite of every name in the first line: not a title conferred by function but the ordinary patronymic that any child of that household would carry.

The two lotus names close the verse and they pun on each other. Padma is the lotus; padmarāga, lotus-coloured, is the ruby. So the same word gives her eyes and her complexion, once as a flower and once as a stone. The stotra has been reaching for red gems since its first verses and has already used three different words for a ruby; padmarāga has appeared before, of her cheeks. What is new here is samaprabhā, equal in radiance, which for once does not defeat the thing compared. After a long run of names in which coral and the bimba fruit and a mirror of ruby were all put to shame, this one simply says she shines as much as a ruby does. It is a rest.

One small point about placement. This verse sits at the exact centre of the fourth of the divisions this recension marks in the thousand names, and it does the same thing in miniature that the whole hymn does: it starts at the outside of the diagram and moves in until there is a face.

Say this verse immediately after the previous two and the first thing you will notice is relief. There is not a single retroflex consonant in it — no ṭ, no ḍ, no ṇ, no ṣ anywhere in either line. Every stop and nasal is dental, labial, palatal or guttural. After the ṣṭy of catuḥṣaṣṭyupacārāḍhyā and the ṇḍ of candramaṇḍala, the tongue-tip gets to stay forward for thirty-two syllables. Use the verse as a chance to hear what your dental n and d actually sound like when nothing retroflex is pulling at them.

The alliteration does the structural work. Two names in c, then three in p. Line one is eight plus eight; line two is three plus five plus eight. Knowing that pārvatī is only three syllables stops you from stretching it, which is the commonest fault here — reciters give the name more weight than the metre allows because they recognise it.

Carācara contains a sandhi that carries the meaning. The word is cara plus acara, and a short a followed by a short a gives a single long ā. So the long vowel in the middle of the word is the seam where moving meets unmoving. Reciters who shorten it are not just mispronouncing; they are erasing the negative particle and leaving the word saying nothing.

Jagannāthā shows the other common junction. Jagat ends in t; nātha begins in n; a final t before a nasal becomes the corresponding nasal, giving jagan-nātha with a doubled n. Hold both n's. This is the same rule that gives cinmayī in the next verse, where cit plus maya becomes cinmaya, and seeing them a verse apart fixes it.

The cluster kr in cakrarāja is straightforward but often rushed; give the k its own release before the r. Padma has dm, a dental into a labial, which most English speakers manage without trouble. Pārvatī has rv, and the r in Sanskrit is a tap or a light trill, not the American approximant — a single flick of the tongue-tip.

The long vowels are the skeleton of the line: carācara, jagannāthā, cakrarāja, pārvatī, padmarāga, samaprabhā. Every name still ends in the long ā of the feminine nominative singular, as almost all thousand do, except pārvatī, which ends in the long ī of its own stem class. In archanā that difference surfaces at once: the ā-stems take -āyai, so carācarajagannāthāyai namaḥ, but pārvatī is an ī-stem and takes -yai, giving pārvatyai namaḥ. This verse is therefore a free lesson in the two commonest feminine datives in the whole nāmāvalī.

What to hold while chanting: resist the urge to treat the second line as a softening of the first. A diagram of nine enclosures and a girl from the hills are being asserted as the same person, without a joint, and the verse gives you exactly one breath at the caesura to accept it.