The field, the knower of the field, and the one who guards both

The Gītā's thirteenth chapter opens by defining its terms: this body is called the field, and the one who knows it is called the knower of the field. The pair is inherited from Sāṃkhya, where the whole of nature stands over against a consciousness that is not part of it, and it is the most economical apparatus classical Indian thought has for stating the difference between what is observed and what observes. Kṛṣṇa then makes his own move: know me also as the knower of the field in every field. The stotra is quoting the same chapter, and the first two names track it faithfully — she is the field, and she is the field's ruler.

The third name does something else. Kṣetrakṣetrajñapālinī makes her the protector of the field and of the knower, which puts her outside the pair rather than on either side of it. Where the Gītā identifies the god with the knowing term, this verse declines to. The reason is not obscure once the rest of the hymn is in view: within the same fifteen verses she will be called pure consciousness, the referent of the word "that", and, at name 385, the one who has no witness. A tradition that will eventually say the witness itself needs no second witness cannot rest with making her the witness of the field. So she guards the pair, and the pair is not the last thing there is.

Kṣayavṛddhivinirmuktā is the pivot. Kṣaya and vṛddhi are the standard terms for the moon's waning and waxing; they are also the words for loss and gain in an account, and for the decay and growth of a body. What has a field undergoes both. The name says she does not — which is the plain sense of pūrṇa, full, in the famous verse in which fullness taken from fullness leaves fullness behind. Read against the neighbouring verses this is more pointed than it looks: two verses back she was called kalāvatī, possessor of the digits, and nine verses on she will be the sixteen eternal goddesses. The digits of the moon are exactly the things that wax and wane. The tradition's answer is the sixteenth digit, the one that is said to remain when the other fifteen have gone; and a name declaring her free of waxing and waning is a way of saying which digit she is.

The last name changes register completely, and the pun that lets it do so is old. Kṣetra is a field of grain, a field of enquiry, the body, and a holy place — Kurukṣetra is a kṣetra in the last sense, and so is any temple town. A kṣetrapāla is, in the dictionary's flat first gloss, a man employed to guard fields; in practice it is the tutelary deity of a sacred site, usually a form of Bhairava, whose shrine stands at the boundary rather than in the sanctum and who receives offerings the principal deity would not accept. These are frequently the older, more local, less brahminical powers of the place, given a post at the gate when the temple was built over them. Monier-Williams notes drily that their number is given as forty-nine. Saying that the kṣetrapālas worship her is therefore a statement about religious politics as much as about theology: the fierce guardians at the edge of the ground are inside her hierarchy.

And the two senses of kṣetra are not kept apart. The body is a field, a temple is a field, and the tantric traditions built a whole system on the identity — mapping named sacred places onto sites in the practitioner's own body, so that going on pilgrimage and sitting still could be described in the same vocabulary. Six and seven verses further on this hymn will name Jālandhara and Oḍyāṇa, two of the four great seats, and expect the reader to hear both a map and an anatomy. This verse, with its five kṣ names, is where the equipment for that is assembled.

The conjunct is the whole verse. क्ष is not a single sound and is not the x of English "axe": it is k released directly into the retroflex sibilant ṣ. Say a clean unaspirated k, then curl the tongue-tip back for the ṣ, and join them without a vowel between. Regional habits vary a good deal — some reciters produce something close to kkh, others to ksh with a palatal — and the analytic k plus ṣ is what the letters say. You get five consecutive chances to build the habit here, which is why this verse is one of the best drills in the hymn.

After kṣ comes tra in three of the names: a dental t, tongue-tip at the teeth, and then the tapped r. Kṣetra is two syllables, kṣe-tra, and the e is long — every e and o in Sanskrit is long, which is why kṣetra scans heavy and why the metre works. Kṣetrakṣetrajñapālinī then puts the whole cluster in twice and finishes with jña, so the name runs kṣe-tra-kṣe-tra-jña-pā-li-nī and fills a half-line exactly. Practise it as two halves joined: kṣetra-kṣetrajña, then pālinī.

Kṣayavṛddhivinirmuktā contains the syllabic ṛ, which is a vowel and must be short — one beat, with the tongue in roughly the retroflex position. Northern reciters generally approximate it with ri and southern reciters with ru; whichever you use, do not let it stretch. Then comes ddh, a doubled consonant of which only the second half is aspirated: hold the d closed for a full beat and release the breath once, at the end. Vṛddhi with a short ṛ, a long held d, and one puff.

The fifth name is easier than it looks: kṣetra-pāla-sama-arcitā, with sam and arcitā fusing into samarcitā. The c of arcitā is the unaspirated palatal, the ch of "church" without the puff of air; and the r before it is a tap, not a colouring of the vowel.

The caesura is clean at eight in both lines, and the second half of the first line is a single eight-syllable name. Reciters often accelerate slightly across kṣetrakṣetrajñapālinī because the repetition invites it. Resist that: the two occurrences of kṣetra are the whole point of the name, and blurring them loses the pair the name is protecting.

One thing to hold in mind while chanting. This is the most purely philosophical verse so far in the hymn, and it is worth noticing that it does not sound philosophical. It sounds like five hammer-blows on the same consonant. The technical content — a Sāṃkhya distinction, a Vedāntic refusal, a lunar doctrine, and a note about village guardian shrines — arrives inside a piece of deliberate sound-patterning that a child could recognise as a set. That combination is characteristic of the whole text, and this verse is the clearest place to notice it.