The fourth, and then the first of the five acts

The Māṇḍūkya's description of dreamless sleep is one of the most quoted sentences in Indian philosophy, and it is the direct source of prājñātmikā. The sleeper wants nothing and sees nothing; awareness has become one, undivided; it is a solid mass of knowing, made of bliss, feeding on bliss. The name of that self is Prājña, from prajñā, and it means the wise one — wise not because it knows a great deal but because nothing in it is separated out to be known. The previous verse of the stotra called her a solid mass of knowing using very nearly the Upaniṣad's own compound, and here, one line later, the same idea is attached to sleep. That is not an accident of the poem. Deep sleep is the tradition's standing evidence that awareness can exist without an object.

What happens next is the subtle part, and it explains why the verse needs two names for the fourth rather than one. When the Māṇḍūkya comes to the fourth quarter, it defines it by negation, and among the things it denies is the very phrase it had just used of deep sleep: the fourth is not aware inwardly, not aware outwardly, not aware both ways, not a solid mass of knowing, not aware, not unaware. So the fourth is not sleep intensified, and it is not a better grade of the same substance. It is not on the scale. Turyā names it and sarvāvasthāvivarjitā immediately takes the name back, and Gauḍapāda's commentary makes exactly this move: the fourth is called a quarter only for the purpose of teaching, since it is not a part of anything.

One small philological point. The word appears in Sanskrit both as turya and as turīya, and the two are the same ordinal, fourth. Turya is the shorter and older-looking form; turīya, with the extra syllable, is commoner in the Upaniṣadic prose. The stotra uses turyā because it has two syllables to spend and not three.

With sṛṣṭikartrī the text changes subject and does not signal it. The five acts are creation, preservation, withdrawal, concealment and grace, and they are the standard Śaiva analysis of what divine agency consists of. The stotra will complete the list in the next verse; here it gives the first two, and it gives each of them twice, once as the act and once as the god. Brahmā is the face of making, Govinda the face of keeping. The point of doubling is the same as in the previous verse's treatment of waking and dream: to prevent the reader from settling on either the function or the personality as the real answer.

Goptrī and govinda are placed side by side and they have nothing to do with each other, which is precisely why they are placed side by side. Goptrī is an agent noun from √gup, to guard. Govinda is built on go, which means both a cow and, in older usage, the earth, and the tradition offers competing derivations to match: the finder of cows, the cowherd, or the one who recovered the earth. The names sound as though they share a root and do not, and Sanskrit poetics has a name for that kind of collision and considers it a merit rather than a coincidence.

There is one more thing worth noticing about this verse and the next, and it is structural. The five gods who are about to be listed as the agents of the five acts — Brahmā, Govinda, Rudra, Īśvarī and Sadāśiva — are the same five who two verses ago were lying under her as corpses. The stotra has shown you the five inert and is now showing you the five at work, and the only thing that has changed between the two pictures is that she has been described in the meantime as consciousness itself.

This verse is front-loaded with difficulty and then relaxes, which is unusual and worth exploiting: take the first line slowly and let the second carry you.

Suptā is a past passive participle of √svap and is only two syllables, so it goes past quickly; make sure the pt is heard as two consonants, not as a single stop. Prājñātmikā then gives you the cluster jñ, which is a j followed by the palatal nasal ñ, both made with the tongue-body flat against the hard palate. You met it in mahārājñī in the very first verse of the stotra. Northern reciters commonly say something like "gy" and southern reciters something like "jñ"; the value the grammarians describe is the second, and it is worth producing at least once deliberately even if you then revert to the pronunciation of your tradition.

Turyā has the cluster ry, an r immediately followed by y with no vowel between. The Sanskrit r is a tap of the tongue-tip, not the English glide, so tur-yā should have a flick in the middle of it.

Sarvāvasthāvivarjitā is eight syllables and looks worse than it is. The seam is sarva plus avasthā, another short a meeting a short a and giving a long ā — the same fusion as in carācara and dharmādharma. Then vi-varjitā, from vi-√vṛj, to exclude, the same word that ended the second name of the previous verse. Two names in adjacent verses ending in vivarjitā is the poet's way of bracketing the whole passage on the states, and hearing the echo tells you the passage is over.

The second line is the easier one and it contains a small paradigm lesson. Sṛṣṭikartrī and goptrī are both feminine agent nouns in -trī, from √kṛ and √gup, and they are the feminine counterparts of the -tṛ nouns like dhyātṛ in the previous verse. Sṛṣṭi opens with the syllabic ṛ followed by the retroflex pair ṣṭ, so the tongue-tip goes back and stays back for three sounds running; kartrī then piles r, t and r into one cluster. Goptrī has ptr, three consonants, and reciters routinely reduce it to "potri". Give the p its own closure.

Brahmarūpā has the same hm that you drilled in the previous verse's pañcabrahmasvarūpiṇī: an h and an m inside a single cluster, no vowel between them. Govindarūpiṇī is the only name in the verse with nothing difficult in it at all, and it is the last, which is a kindness.

The caesura is after the eighth syllable of each line: after prājñātmikā in the first, after brahmarūpā in the second. Note that the first of these falls in the middle of the passage on the states and the second in the middle of the list of acts, so in both cases you are breathing inside a thought. Let the pause be metrical rather than semantic.

What to hold while chanting: the verse asks you to say, within four seconds of each other, that no condition can be attributed to her and that she makes the world. Do not try to resolve it while chanting. The resolution, if there is one, is that making a world is not a condition.