The couch of five corpses

The five are Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Rudra, Īśvara and Sadāśiva, and they are the standard five of Śaiva theology, associated with the five cosmic acts that this stotra will list three verses further on. In the visualisation the four lesser ones are the legs of the couch and Sadāśiva is the board laid across them, and she sits on the board. The word for what they are is deliberately brutal. A preta is a corpse, or the wandering shade of one; the participle means gone forth, departed, from pra-√i. There is nothing gentle about the picture and it is not meant to be gentle. It is meant to be a proof.

The reasoning behind it is the same as the reasoning in the Saundaryalaharī's opening verse, which the tradition quotes whenever this question comes up: joined with Śakti, Śiva can bring things about; without her, the god cannot so much as stir. Corpses on a couch are that sentence turned into furniture. Tantric teachers put the point more bluntly still with a play on words that has become proverbial — śiva without śakti is śava, a body. It is a pun rather than an argument, but it is an accurate summary of the doctrine, and the fifth verse of this same poem describes a dissolution in which Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Yama, Kubera and the ranks of Indra are all dead or unconscious while Śiva alone continues to move.

Pañcabrahmasvarūpiṇī then says the same thing from the other side. In Śaiva usage the five brahmans are the five faces of Sadāśiva — Sadyojāta, Vāmadeva, Aghora, Tatpuruṣa and Īśāna — and they correspond, face by face, to the five acts of creating, preserving, withdrawing, veiling and blessing. So the pair of names in the first line is not repetition. In the first she is above them; in the second she is them. The transition between those two claims — from mistress of the five to identity with the five — is the argument the whole verse is making, and it is exactly the transition the second line goes on to justify.

Cinmayī is built with the suffix -maya, which means made of, consisting of, and which the grammarians allow both for material and for essence. Cit is consciousness in the bare sense of awareness, not thought and not mind; the stotra used the same word in its fourth name, where she rose out of a fire-pit made of cit. This is the second time in the thousand names that the poem has reached for the plainest possible term for awareness, and both times it has done so at a moment when it wanted to say what she is rather than what she is like.

Vijñānaghanarūpiṇī is a direct quotation from the Upaniṣads in all but the prefix. The word there is generally prajñānaghana or vijñānaghana — the manuscripts vary and the sense does not — and the image is developed at length in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, where a lump of rock salt is used to explain it: cut it anywhere and it is salt; it has no interior that is not salt, no inside and no outside. Ghana is exactly that, a solid lump, a compacted mass, the same word used of a cloud and of a hammer. So the name is not saying she has a great deal of knowledge. It is saying there is no cross-section of her at which awareness would fail to be present, which is a statement about density rather than quantity.

Paramānandā, standing between the two, is the third term of the formula that Vedānta abbreviates as sat-cit-ānanda, being, awareness and bliss. The Taittirīya's treatment of ānanda is the one the tradition has in mind: not pleasure, which has a cause and therefore an end, but the state of a being who has nothing left to fear. Placed where it is, between consciousness and the mass of knowing, it keeps the line from becoming purely epistemological. Whatever this awareness is, it is not neutral about being itself.

Both lines of this verse are dominated by the nasal that most learners never quite believe in. Pañca has ñ, the palatal nasal, made with the tongue-body against the hard palate — the same place as the c that follows it, which is why the two sit together. It is not the n of "pan" and not the ny of "canyon" said quickly. Set the tongue for c, then let air out through the nose, then release into the c. Pañca opens both names in the first line, so you get two chances at it in eight syllables.

Pañcapretāsanāsīnā contains two vowel fusions in a row and they are worth unpicking, because the word looks impenetrable and is not. The pieces are pañca, preta, āsana and āsīna. Preta ends in a short a and āsana begins with a long ā: short a plus long ā gives a single long ā. Āsana ends in a short a and āsīna begins with a long ā: the same rule again. So the two long ās in the middle of the word are seams, and the word means seated on a seat made of five corpses, with each element visible once you know where to cut.

Brahma is the word reciters most often pad. It is bra plus hma, an h followed by an m within a single cluster, and there is no vowel between them. Many trained singers in both north and south insert one, producing something like ba-ra-ha-ma. Try instead to keep it two syllables: brah-ma, with the h audible as breath at the close of the first and the m beginning the second.

Svarūpiṇī has the initial cluster sv — a dental s directly into a v that in Sanskrit is closer to a soft w than to an English v — and then the retroflex ṇ. After a verse with no retroflexes at all, this ṇ and the one at the end of rūpiṇī are the only two in the whole of this one. They are easy to miss for exactly that reason.

Cinmayī hides the same sandhi you met in jagannāthā. The word is cit plus maya: a final unvoiced dental t before a nasal becomes the matching nasal n. So chanting cinmayī you are in fact saying cit, and the fourth name of the entire stotra, cidagnikuṇḍasambhūtā, showed you the other outcome of the same final t, voiced to d before a vowel. One consonant, two fates, and both of them worth recognising while the word is in your mouth.

Vijñānaghanarūpiṇī gives you jñ, the cluster from mahārājñī in the first verse: a j and a palatal ñ, both made flat against the hard palate. Then gh, a genuinely aspirated g — the breath comes after the stop, not before it — and then the same -rūpiṇī ending as the second name of the verse, which is why the two eight-syllable names rhyme.

On what to hold while chanting: this is one of the very few verses in the hymn where the second half explains the first, and reciting it as six unrelated epithets throws that away. Carry the couch through the caesura. The gods are lying there because of what the second line says she is.