Fullness, and the plainest of her names

The puruṣārthas are the four things a human life is understood to be for: dharma, the doing of what one ought; artha, the securing of means; kāma, pleasure and desire; and mokṣa, release. The older texts count three, the trivarga, and mokṣa is added to make the standard four. Puruṣārthapradā says she grants all of them, and the claim has already been made once in this stretch: the Saundaryalaharī verse quoted at the fifty-sixth verse of this hymn distinguished her tantra from the sixty-four precisely by saying that hers assembles every human aim at once while each of the others yields only one thing. What is a whole verse there is one word here.

Pūrṇā is the flattest word in the verse and the largest. Its classic statement is the peace invocation that stands at the head of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka: that is full, this is full, the full comes out of the full, and when you take the full away from the full, what is left over is the full. It is not a mystical paradox so much as a definition. A thing is full in this sense if no operation performed on it changes the amount, which rules out fullness being a quantity at all.

Bhoginī then places her on one side of a division that Sāṃkhya and Vedānta both organise themselves around: bhoktṛ and bhogya, the enjoyer and the enjoyed, the experiencer and the experienced. Everything that can be an object is bhogya; what has experiences is bhoktṛ. To call her the enjoyer is to say that in every experience anyone has, the one actually having it is her. There is a second sense the dictionary records and it is hard to believe a tradition this attentive to serpents left it unnoticed: bhogin also means a snake, from a different bhoga meaning the coil or the expanded hood of one.

Bhuvaneśvarī is a title — mistress of the worlds — and also the proper name of a specific goddess, one of the ten Mahāvidyās, whose seed-syllable is hrīṃ. That is worth holding on to for one more verse, because the very next verse of the stotra names hrīṃ twice. The syllable and the goddess belong together, and the hymn has just introduced them in order.

Ambikā is the one to slow down for. It is amba, mother, with the affectionate suffix -kā, and it is by a long way the least elaborate name in this part of the hymn. It is also very old and its earliest use is not what a reader of the purāṇas would expect. In the Tryambaka offering of the White Yajurveda, Rudra is given his share and told to enjoy it together with his sister Ambikā, and the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, explaining the rite, says outright that Ambikā is the name of his sister. In the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa she is identified with the autumn, the season of fevers, and the pair of them together are said to strike down creatures. She becomes Śiva's wife later, and by the time of the Devī Māhātmya, Ambikā is one of the principal names of the great goddess. Traditional commentators, uncomfortable with the sibling reading, gloss the Vedic word differently. Either way, the name in this verse has the longest continuous history of anything in the verse and the shortest form.

Anādinidhanā is a compound of two negatives sharing one prefix: no ādi, beginning, and no nidhana, which literally means a laying down and by usage means death or cessation. The formula is old and is applied to Brahman in the epic literature. Placed immediately after ambikā, it produces the verse's sharpest juxtaposition: the word a child uses, and then the statement that no date can be put at either end of her.

The last name lists her attendants and the list is worth reading for who is missing. Hari, Brahmā and Indra — the preserver, the creator and the king of the gods — are in attendance. Śiva is not on the list, and he is not on it because in this system he is not a servant. Twelve verses earlier the stotra called her his consecrated queen.

The first line alternates long names and short ones — six syllables, two, three, five — and the two-syllable pūrṇā in second position is the one most likely to be rushed. It carries a long ū and a retroflex ṇ and it deserves its full weight; the whole line hinges on it.

Puruṣārthapradā has the retroflex ṣ in the middle of an otherwise soft word, and the seam is puruṣa plus artha, two short a sounds fusing into a long ā. That fusion has now appeared in carācara, dharmādharma, sarvāvastha, varṇāśrama, padmāsana and puṇyāpuṇya. If a long ā turns up in the middle of a compound in this hymn and you cannot see why, look for a lost short vowel.

Pūrṇā and bhuvaneśvarī both end in retroflex sounds preceded, at some distance, by an r; that is the rule that produces most of the retroflex nasals in the text, and once you know it you can predict them rather than memorise them. Bhoginī, sitting between them, has a plain dental n, which makes the first line a three-step drill: retroflex, dental, retroflex.

Bhoginī and bhuvaneśvarī also give you the aspirated bh twice. Lips closed for a b, breath out on the release, no vowel inserted.

The second line opens with a mark that hides a name boundary, and this is the second time in six verses. Ambikā ends in a long ā; anādinidhanā begins with a short a; the short a is elided and Devanagari prints the small hook, the avagraha, in its place — अम्बिकाऽनादिनिधना. Two names, not one. The fourth verse of this group did the same thing with sadāśivā and anugrahadā. Whenever you see that hook, expect a swallowed a and a seam.

Haribrahmendrasevitā is the fourth guṇa fusion in this batch of verses and by now it should be automatic: brahma ends in short a, indra begins with short i, and a plus i gives e. So brahmendra is two gods and the e between them is the join. The name also gives you brahma with its hm cluster one last time — h and m inside a single conjunct, no vowel between them — and there is nowhere in this hymn where that word is easy.

Count the second line as eight and eight, with the caesura falling exactly between the two names. That is a rest, after a first line broken into four unequal pieces.

What to hold while chanting: everything in this verse is enormous except one word, and the enormous things are arranged around it. If the verse is used as a contemplation on its own, stop on ambikā. It is three syllables, it is the oldest name here, and it is what the whole apparatus of the preceding sixty-eight verses has been elaborating.