Rows of worlds, made and unmade in a blink

Unmeṣa and nimeṣa are the opening and the shutting of the eyelids, and nimeṣa is also the standard Sanskrit unit for the shortest measurable stretch of time — the blink is what you divide time by. So the first name is not merely saying that worlds appear and vanish at her pleasure. It is saying they appear and vanish within the smallest interval anyone can name, which is a very different claim: not that she destroys the world but that the world's arising and perishing are continuous and are happening now.

That pair of words is the signature of a particular school. The foundational verse of the Spanda tradition of Kashmir — spanda means a throb, a vibration, the smallest possible movement — opens by praising Śaṅkara as the one by whose unmeṣa and nimeṣa the world dissolves and appears. The Spanda literature grows out of the Śiva Sūtras associated with Vasugupta and is usually placed in the ninth century, and its whole project is to describe reality as a pulsation rather than a substance. Whether the sahasranāma is drawing on that literature, or the two are drawing on a formula older than either, cannot be settled: the date of this stotra is not established, and the estimates that scholars offer are wide. What can be said is that the vocabulary is identical and that the idea does not appear in this form in the older strata of the tradition.

Āvalī, the last element of the compound, means a row, a line, a series. She does not make and unmake a world; she makes and unmakes rows of them. The purāṇas are comfortable with an unbounded plurality of world-eggs, and the third verse of this very stotra had them floating submerged in her red radiance. Utpanna and vipanna are two past participles of the same root, √pad, with different prefixes — arisen and gone to ruin — and they rhyme on purpose. The whole life of a world is the difference between two syllables.

Then the register changes completely. The Puruṣa Sūkta is one of the latest hymns in the Ṛgveda and by far the most influential; it describes a cosmic person with a thousand heads, a thousand eyes and a thousand feet, who is sacrificed and out of whose body the world and its orders are made. Its first line is what the stotra's second line is. The changes are small and worth counting: sahasraśīrṣā, thousand-headed, becomes sahasraśīrṣavadanā, with faces added; sahasrākṣaḥ becomes sahasrākṣī, the feminine; and sahasrapāt is left exactly as the Veda has it. That last is a small grammatical event. Nearly every one of the thousand names is a feminine nominative singular in long ā or long ī. This one ends in a consonant, because pād- is an old root noun and the stotra has chosen not to smooth it into a regular feminine. For one word the hymn is speaking Vedic.

Sahasra means a thousand and, like the same figure in most languages, also means uncountably many. It is not a coincidence that it appears three times in a hymn of a thousand names. The Ṛgvedic hymn used the number to say that the cosmic person exceeds enumeration; the stotra has organised itself around the same number and is here quoting the source of the convention.

The Bhagavad Gītā's eleventh chapter does the same thing at greater length and is the middle term between the two. Arjuna sees a form with numberless arms, bellies, mouths and eyes, and no beginning, middle or end that he can find. The vocabulary is the Puruṣa Sūkta's and the situation is a vision rather than a hymn, which is the step this stotra also takes: the Vedic hymn describes a person, and the later texts describe someone looking at one.

The first line is a single word of sixteen syllables, and there is no way to chant it except as one arc. Its pieces are unmeṣa, nimiṣa, utpanna, vipanna, bhuvanāvalī. Fix them by their sense: eyes open, eyes shut, arisen, perished, rows of worlds. Once you can say those five in English you can say the name.

The join between the second and third pieces is the most instructive sandhi in this stretch of the stotra. Nimiṣa ends in a short a; utpanna begins with a short u; a plus u gives o. So nimiṣotpanna is nimiṣa plus utpanna, and the o in the middle is a fusion, not a vowel that belongs to either word. You have already met the companion rule in maheśvara, where a plus i gave e. Between them, e and o account for most of the vowels in this text that seem to come from nowhere.

Unmeṣa and nimiṣa both end in a retroflex ṣ. Note that the stotra writes nimiṣa where the Kashmiri verse writes nimeṣa: both are formed from √miṣ, to open the eyes, and the difference is only the vowel grade, so neither is a mistake. Whichever you say, keep the ṣ retroflex — tongue-tip curled back — and distinguish it from the palatal ś you will meet in the next line's śīrṣa.

Utpanna and vipanna each have a doubled n, and the doubling has to be heard: ut-pan-na, not utpana. The metre depends on the length the doubled consonant gives the preceding syllable.

The second line is a drill in three sounds that occur close together. Sahasra has the cluster sr, dental s into r. Śīrṣa has the palatal ś at the front and the retroflex ṣ after an r — so the tongue starts flat against the hard palate and ends curled back, in one syllable. Sahasrākṣī has kṣ, which Sanskrit treats as a single conjunct: a k released directly into a retroflex ṣ. Run sahasraśīrṣa and sahasrākṣī against each other slowly and you will have covered two of the three sibilants and the retroflex series in about four seconds.

Sahasrapāt is the one name in this part of the hymn that does not end in a vowel. The stem is pād-, foot, and at the end of a word a voiced d is devoiced to t, which is why the citation form is pāt. In archanā this produces an unusual dative too — sahasrapade namaḥ — because a consonant stem does not take the -āyai of the ā-stems. Doing that one deliberately is worth more than reading a page of a grammar.

The caesura in the second line falls after sahasraśīrṣavadanā, so the line breathes eight and then four plus four. In the first line there is no caesura you can use, only a metrical one inside vi-panna. Take a full breath before beginning and do not plan to take another.

What to hold while chanting: the first name is describing something happening at this moment and at the rate of a blink, not an event at the end of time. If the verse is used as a contemplation, that is where to stay.