Meditation, the meditator, and the thing meditated on

Look at the first name as grammar before looking at it as doctrine, because the grammar is the argument. One root, √dhyai, to contemplate, takes three suffixes: dhyāna is the action noun, the activity itself; dhyātṛ is the agent noun in -tṛ, the one who does it; dhyeya is the gerundive in -ya, that which is to be done to, the target. Sanskrit generates such triads freely — jñāna, jñātṛ, jñeya for knowing; grahaṇa, grahītṛ, grāhya for grasping — and the tradition calls the resulting structure the triputī, the threefold. Every ordinary mental act has this shape, and the whole of Indian contemplative theory is organised around the question of what happens when it stops having it.

Patañjali's answer is the standard one and the stotra is using his vocabulary. Concentration is the mind tied to one place; meditation is the unbroken running of a single content in that place; and when the same practice goes on until only the object shines and the act seems to have lost its own form, that is absorption. The three together, applied at once, he calls saṃyama. The name dhyānadhyātṛdhyeyarūpā takes the endpoint of that process and makes it a description of her rather than of a practitioner's achievement. Which has a practical consequence for anyone reciting the verse: whatever is happening while you chant it is not something you are doing to her.

Dharmādharmavivarjitā is harder than it looks, and it is worth resisting the easy reading that she is above right and wrong in some libertine sense. Dharma in the ritual literature is very specific: it is the merit generated by performing prescribed acts, an invisible credit that ripens later, and adharma is the corresponding debit. The name says she has no entry in that account. Three verses before the end of this stretch the stotra will say that she is the one who hands out the fruits of merit and demerit to everyone else, and the two statements go together rather than colliding. The person who awards the result is not among those receiving it.

Then the states. The text behind this passage is the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, twelve sentences of prose, the shortest of the principal Upaniṣads and the one that has generated the most commentary in proportion to its length. It maps the syllable OM onto the self and the self onto four quarters. The first is the waking self, called viśva or vaiśvānara, whose awareness faces outward and whose objects are gross and public. The second is the dreaming self, taijasa, whose awareness faces inward and whose objects are subtle; the name means the luminous one, from tejas, brightness, because there is no external light in a dream and the scene has to be lit from within. The third is the sleeper. The fourth is not a fourth of the same kind, and the next verse of the stotra will deal with it.

That the stotra is following this scheme and not merely listing moods is clear from the pairing. Viśvarūpā can be read on its own as she whose form is the universe, and that reading is correct and is the one most translators give. But it stands immediately before jāgariṇī, the waking one, and viśva is precisely the Māṇḍūkya's name for the waking self, so the two names together say the state and the self of the state. Svapantī and taijasātmikā then do the same for dream, and in the next verse suptā and prājñātmikā will do it for deep sleep. Three conditions, each named twice, in strict order.

One formal detail is worth noticing while chanting. Svapantī is a present participle in the feminine — she who is sleeping — and the thousand names contain almost nothing else of the kind. Nearly every name in this hymn is a compound or a derived adjective; a live participle from a common verb is a jolt, and it comes at exactly the moment when the text wants to describe not a property she has but something she is in the middle of doing.

The first name is the most demanding cluster drill in this part of the stotra and there is no way to make it easy. Dhyānadhyātṛdhyeyarūpā has dhy three times in its first six syllables. The cluster is an aspirated dental d — tongue-tip at the back of the upper teeth, then a distinct puff of breath — followed immediately by the palatal glide y. English wants to turn the whole thing into a j. Take it apart: say a clean d, then breathe out, then y, then the vowel. Then compress it until it is one release. Then do it three times in a row.

Between the second and third occurrences sits dhyātṛ, which ends in the syllabic ṛ. It is short. It is one beat, not two, and northern reciters who render it as "ri" and southern reciters who render it as "ru" both go wrong only if they lengthen it. Whatever colour you give the vowel, keep it brief, or the eight-syllable name becomes nine.

Dharmādharma is the same seam you met in carācara two verses ago: dharma plus adharma, a short a meeting a short a and producing one long ā. The long vowel in the middle of the word is the negative particle. Shorten it and the name says the opposite of what it means. This fusion is so common in the hymn that it is worth adopting a rule of thumb — when a long ā appears in the middle of a compound with no obvious reason, suspect a hidden a-.

The second line is much gentler and is a good place to recover. Viśvarūpā opens with the palatal ś, tongue-body flat against the hard palate, followed by v, which in Sanskrit is closer to a soft w than to an English v: say śwa rather than shva. Jāgariṇī ends in a retroflex ṇ and is otherwise plain. Svapantī has the initial cluster sv and then a dental n before a dental t, which is one tongue position for both. Taijasātmikā gives you the diphthong ai, a full long vowel, and then the cluster tm, a dental into a labial, which most people manage without thinking about it.

Count the second line as four, four, three, five. Svapantī at three syllables is the shortest name in the verse and the easiest to stretch; keep it tight and the line balances.

A point of grammar that changes the sense. Jāgariṇī and taijasātmikā are both nouns describing a standing condition; svapantī, between them, is a live participle. Give it a slightly lighter, more mobile delivery than its neighbours, because it is the only word in the verse that is happening rather than being. In archanā the difference surfaces at once: viśvarūpāyai, jāgariṇyai, svapantyai, taijasātmikāyai, three dative patterns in one line.

What to hold while chanting: the first name has already told you that the meditation, the meditator and the object are the same. Everything after it in this verse and the next is an unpacking of that one claim across the whole of your day and night.