Where the fourth digit ends and the fifth begins

Start with the structure, because this is the verse where it becomes visible. The recension this site follows divides the text into twelve sections and labels each one in the margin. The first is called the upoddhāta, the prologue. Then come ten labelled divisions of a hundred names each: tāpinī for names one to a hundred, dhūmrikā for the second hundred, marīci for the third, jvālinī for the fourth, ruci, suṣumṇā, bhogadā, viśvā, bodhinī and dhāriṇī. The twelfth and last, covering the phalaśruti, is kṣamā.

Those are not arbitrary labels. Take the ritual handbooks of this school, which have the practitioner worship the digits of fire into the base, the digits of the sun into the offering vessel and the digits of the moon into the water. The sun is given twelve digits and they are named, in order: tapinī, tāpinī, dhūmrā, marīci, jvālinī, ruci, suṣumṇā, bhogadā, viśvā, bodhinī, dhāriṇī, kṣamā. Set that list against the margins of this text and they agree from the second to the twelfth, with only the first renamed for its contents. The thousand names have been laid out on the twelve digits of the sun. Sixty-nine verses ago the hymn placed her at the centre of the lunar disc and five verses ago at the centre of the solar one; the arrangement of the text she is being praised in is, if the labels are taken at their word, the sun's own.

Whether that arrangement is original or was imposed by an editor is not something the text says, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What can be seen is where the seam falls. Nāmarūpavivarjitā, free of name and form, is the three hundredth name and the last word of the fourth digit. Hrīṅkārī, she who utters hrīṃ, is the three hundred and first and the first word of the fifth. A hymn of a thousand names closes a hundred of them on the name that says she has none.

Nārāyaṇī is a straightforward feminine derived from Nārāyaṇa, and the traditional etymology of that name turns on the waters: nāra is taken as the waters, and ayana as a resting place, so Nārāyaṇa is the one whose resting place is the waters — the god asleep on the cosmic ocean between one world and the next. The Devī Māhātmya uses Nārāyaṇī as the refrain of its longest hymn, ending eighteen consecutive verses with the same three words, and this stotra picks up a name that had already been established as the goddess's own.

Nādarūpā requires a piece of tantric phonology. In this literature speech is described as unfolding through levels: an utterly undivided supreme speech; then paśyantī, the seeing level, where something is present but not yet articulated; then madhyamā, the middle, where it has structure but no sound; then vaikharī, the level of audible speech. Nāda is the resonance that belongs to the earliest of these, sound before it has broken into syllables and therefore before it can mean anything. To call her nādarūpā is to place her body at that level, which is why the very next name can deny her a name at all. And it is why the second line can then give her hrīṃ. A bīja is a syllable that has been deliberately kept from becoming a word.

Hrīṃ is the seed-syllable of Bhuvaneśvarī, whom the previous verse named. It is also called the māyā-bīja and the hṛllekhā, and the Saundaryalaharī's coded spelling of the fifteen-syllabled mantra ends each of its three segments with one. So hrīṅkārī is not a general statement that she makes sacred noises; it names the specific syllable that punctuates her own mantra three times.

The pun in hrīmatī is genuine and is old. Hrī is also an ordinary Sanskrit noun meaning shame, bashfulness, modesty, and in that sense Hrī is a goddess: the closing anuvāka of the Puruṣa Sūkta names Hrī and Lakṣmī as the two consorts of the Person. So the syllable and the virtue are spelt the same, and the stotra puts hrīṅkārī and hrīmatī side by side so that both readings sound at once — she who utters the seed-syllable, and she who possesses modesty.

The verse then ends on a technical pair. Heya and upādeya, what is to be rejected and what is to be taken up, are the terms in which both the yoga literature and the medical literature frame a course of treatment: identify what must go, identify what must be adopted, act accordingly. Yoga Sūtra 2.16 puts the whole of the practice under the first of them, saying that the suffering which has not yet come is what is to be avoided. Heyopādeyavarjitā says that in her case the distinction has nothing to work on, which quietly closes the door on the entire project the reciter is presumably engaged in.

The verse is two breathing exercises, one on n and one on h, and they should not sound alike.

The first line is four, four and eight, the same shape as the fifty-ninth verse. Every name begins with a dental n, and there is exactly one retroflex in the whole line: the ṇ at the end of nārāyaṇī, which is there because of the r earlier in the word. So the drill is nā-rā-ya-ṇī with the tongue-tip forward for the first n and curled back for the last, and then nādarūpā and nāmarūpavivarjitā entirely forward. If you can hear the single retroflex in a line of dentals you have solved a problem that recurs on nearly every page of this hymn.

Nāmarūpavivarjitā ends in the same vivarjitā you have already met twice in this group of verses, at sarvāvasthāvivarjitā and dharmādharmavivarjitā. Three occurrences of one word inside nine verses is unusual for this text, and the last of them is where a division of the hymn ends.

The second line is the hard one and hrīṃ is the reason. In Devanagari it is ह्रीं: an h that is a full consonant in its own right, released directly into an r, then a long ī, then the nasal. English never begins a syllable this way and the instinct is to insert a vowel and produce something like hirīṃ. Do not. Start the breath for the h, and while it is still running, tap the tongue-tip for the r. It is one movement.

In hrīṅkārī the nasal has changed shape. The syllable is hrīṃ, and when the anusvāra meets the k of kāra it takes the place of articulation of that k and becomes the guttural nasal ṅ. So the written form is hrīṅkārī and what you are saying is hrīṃ plus kāra, the standard way Sanskrit names a sound — the same construction as oṃkāra. Knowing that keeps the seed-syllable audible inside the name.

Hṛdyā is the tightest word in the verse: an h, then the syllabic ṛ, then the cluster dy. Two syllables, three difficulties. Take it as hṛd, the word for heart, plus the suffix -ya, and remember that the ṛ is short.

Heyopādeya is the last of the vowel fusions in this batch of verses: heya ends in short a, upādeya begins with short u, and a plus u gives o. That o in the middle of the word is a seam, and the word means the rejected and the accepted.

Count the second line as three, three, two and eight; hṛdyā, the shortest name in the verse, is the easiest to swallow between two long ones.

On traditional use: a division of the text ends inside this verse, and the printed editions that carry the marginal labels put the heading between the two lines. Whether you pause there or not, it is worth knowing while chanting that the hymn chose to make its break at the point where it stops using words and starts using a syllable.

What to hold while chanting: the second name says she is sound before it divides, the third says no name will fit, and the fourth gives her a syllable that means nothing. Those three are one thought, and it is the thought a reciter of a thousand names most needs and least wants.