In the middle of the sun's disc

Take the first name against its counterpart. Six verses back she was candramaṇḍalamadhyagā, going in the middle of the moon's disc; here she is bhānumaṇḍalamadhyasthā, standing in the middle of the sun's. The verbs differ — √gam and √sthā — and so does the temperature. In the ritual of this school the sun, the moon and fire are three distinct luminaries, each with its own set of digits, and each is worshipped into a different vessel before the main rite begins: fire into the base, the sun into the offering vessel, the moon into the water. So the pairing of these two names is not a poetic symmetry. It is a report of a liturgical fact, and a third name for the fire is not needed because she has already been described as born from one.

The person in the sun is the oldest continuously maintained object of contemplation in the tradition, and this name is claiming his seat. The Chāndogya describes him with a golden beard and golden hair and gold to the very tips of his nails; the Īśa asks the sun to withdraw its blaze so the face inside it can be seen; and the Gāyatrī, which is still recited at dawn, noon and dusk by anyone keeping the old discipline, meditates on the light of the sun-god and nothing else. To be at the centre of the solar orb is to be what all of that has been aimed at.

Bhairavī, dropped between the sun and the garland with no transition at all, is the feminine of Bhairava, who was named eight verses ago as her worshipper. She is also a goddess in her own right — Tripurabhairavī, one of the ten Mahāvidyās — and the stotra is content to give her the fierce name in the middle of a line otherwise full of light and flowers. That kind of placement is characteristic of this text: it does not build up to its fierce names and does not apologise afterwards.

Bhaga is a rich word and worth ten minutes with a dictionary. Its root is √bhaj, to divide, to apportion, to allot; from that come a share, a portion, and then good fortune, prosperity, dignity, majesty, excellence, loveliness. Bhaga is also the name of a Vedic Āditya, the apportioner who distributes shares. And the classic definition, quoted everywhere in the theistic literature, fixes the sense at six: total sovereignty, power, fame, beauty, knowledge and non-attachment. Bhagamālinī says those six hang on her in a wreath; bhagavatī, four names later, says she possesses them. The same word twice, once as an ornament and once as a title. Bhagamālinī is also the name of the second of the fifteen Nityā goddesses worshipped in the Śrīcakra, so the name has a second address in the ritual as well as a meaning in the dictionary.

The last name is the most interesting and the most easily skated over. Sahodara does not mean brother in a loose or honorary sense. It is saha, together, plus udara, the belly: born from one womb. So the stotra is not saying that Viṣṇu behaves towards her as a brother would; it is asserting a shared origin. There are two strands behind the claim. In the purāṇic account of her marriage to Śiva, Viṣṇu performs the office of the bride's brother and gives her away — a role still enacted every year in the great wedding festival at Madurai, where Viṣṇu arrives to hand Mīnākṣī to Sundareśvara and the whole city turns out for it. And in the Devī Māhātmya the power that sleeps in Viṣṇu at the end of a world-age is the goddess herself, so the relation is prior to either of them having a story. Padmanābha, lotus-navelled, is the epithet that carries the cosmogony: the lotus grows from his navel and Brahmā sits on it. Calling her his uterine sister places her one step behind the point where that lotus opens.

The verse is built on the aspirated labial bh, and there is one thing to fix before anything else. Bh is a single consonant, not b followed by h. The lips close for a b, and the breath comes out after the release, voiced. Say a normal b, then add the breath to the release without inserting a vowel: bhā, not b'hā and not bə-hā. You get four goes at it in this verse — bhānu, bhairavī, bhaga, bhagavatī — and one more inside padmanābha, where it sits between two vowels and is even easier to soften into a plain b.

Bhairavī has the diphthong ai, which is a full-length vowel in Sanskrit, roughly as long as ā. Reciters who treat it as a short glide will clip the name to two beats and lose a syllable from the line.

Bhānumaṇḍalamadhyasthā is the longest word in the verse and it packs three separate difficulties into its second half. Maṇḍala has the retroflex pair ṇḍ, tongue-tip curled back for both. Madhya has dhy, an aspirated dental with the palatal glide. Sthā has sth, a dental s straight into an aspirated dental t — three consonants in a row from three different sources with no vowel to help. Take the word as bhānu, maṇḍala, madhya, sthā, and rebuild it slowly.

It is worth setting this name beside candramaṇḍalamadhyagā from the fifty-ninth verse and saying the two one after the other. They share ten syllables and diverge only at the end, and the divergence is a real difference in meaning: -sthā is from √sthā, to stand, and -gā is from √gam, to go. She stands in the sun and moves in the moon.

The second line is much softer. Padmāsanā is padma plus āsana, with the usual short a plus long ā giving one long ā at the seam; the cluster dm, a dental into a labial, is the same one you have met in padmarāga. Bhagavatī has no clusters at all and three short a sounds in a row, which is the trap — under speed the three tend to lengthen unevenly. Keep them all short and equal: bha-ga-va-tī.

Padmanābhasahodarī divides as padma, nābha, saha, udara, with the a of saha and the u of udara fusing to give o. That is the same guṇa fusion as in the next verse's nimiṣotpanna, and knowing it is what lets you hear the word udara, belly, inside a name that otherwise looks opaque.

Count the lines as eight, three, five and then four, four, eight. Bhairavī at three syllables is the shortest name here and, like all the short names in this hymn, the one most likely to be stretched. Give it exactly three beats and move on.

What to hold while chanting: the verse begins in the hottest place there is and ends in a family. If it is used as a contemplation on its own, the thing to sit with is the first name — not the sun, but the middle of it, which is a place nobody can look at.