Tender to whoever bows, and seated in the ring of fire

Vijayā is a name in its own right before it is an adjective. Durgā's two companions in purāṇic iconography are Jayā and Vijayā, and this hymn distributes them: vijayā here at name 346, jayā at 377 six verses later. Vijayā is also one of the sixteen Nityās, the goddesses of the lunar days whose company the hymn will make her body at name 391. Names in this text are rarely only descriptions; a good proportion of them are also somebody, and the reader who knows the pantheon hears a second layer that the translation cannot carry.

Vandārujanavatsalā repays being taken apart. Vandāru is a rare word — the dictionary gives praising, reverential, polite — and jana is simply people, so vandārujana is the reverent sort of person. Vatsala is the specific one. It comes from vatsa, a calf, and the dictionary's first sense is affectionate towards offspring, with the illustration being a cow longing for her calf. Vātsalya became one of the standard categories of devotional feeling in later bhakti literature, always with the animal image intact. So the name is not saying she is kind in general. It is saying that towards people who bow she has the particular helpless attachment of a cow to a calf, and that the tenderness is a response — it is directed at vandāru-jana, the ones who bow, and the previous name has just said that bowing is the appropriate thing to do.

Vāgvādinī brings speech into the verse, four verses before the hymn devotes an entire verse to the stages of speech. The name has a further resonance in this particular text. The Lalitopākhyāna says that the thousand names were composed by the Vāgdevatās — the goddesses of speech, Vaśinī and her seven companions — at Lalitā's own command, and that they recited them in her presence. A name meaning "she who speaks the word" is therefore close to a statement about how the hymn thinks it exists: the goddesses of speech spoke it, and she is the one speaking wherever speech occurs.

Vāmakeśī reads as an ordinary compliment — vāma is lovely, dear, beautiful, and keśa is hair — and it may be no more than that. But vāma also means left, and Vāmakeśvara is the title of the root tantra of this tradition. The Vāmakeśvarīmata, whose first section is called the Nityāṣoḍaśikārṇava, the ocean of the sixteen Nityās, and whose companion text is the Yoginīhṛdaya, is the closest thing Śrīvidyā has to a foundational scripture, and Jayaratha's commentary on it is among the tradition's central works. Eight verses further on the hymn will call her nityāṣoḍaśikārūpā. Between them, vāmakeśī here and that name there put both halves of the title of the tradition's root text into the thousand names. The ambiguity of vāma — lovely and left, the beautiful and the left-hand path — is one the tradition has lived with for a thousand years, and nothing in the name resolves it.

Vahnimaṇḍalavāsinī places her in the fire. Tantric physiology divides the body into three regions, the circles of fire, sun and moon, running from the base of the trunk to the crown, and the same three are mapped onto the Śrīcakra and onto the divisions of the mantra. The fire circle is the lowest and hottest, and it is where the coiled power sleeps. Śaṅkara's ninth verse walks up through the whole scheme, placing earth, water, fire, air and space in successive centres and ending at the thousand-petalled lotus. There is also a letter-level connection that is hard to ignore in this stretch of the text: the seed syllable of fire is raṃ, and Monier-Williams records vahni as a mystical name of the letter r — six verses after the run of sixteen names beginning with that letter. Whether or not the composers arranged it, the material is all of a piece.

The v's are relentless and the verse will expose whatever your habit with them is. A Sanskrit v is a light approach of the lower lip to the upper teeth, without the strong buzz of an English v and without the full lip-rounding of an English w; the sound sits between the two. Crucially it is not a b. If vandyā and bandhyā sound alike in your mouth, this verse is the one to fix it on.

The first line stacks three consonant clusters in eight syllables: the ndy of vandyā, then the nd of vandāru, then the ts of vatsalā. Vandyā is van-dyā, with the dental d joined to y; do not insert a vowel. Vatsalā has t followed by the dental sibilant s, a sequence English only has across word boundaries — think of the end of "cats" and then attach a lā to it.

Vāgvādinī shows a voicing sandhi in the script. The word is vāc, speech, plus vādinī, and a final c before a voiced sound becomes g: वाग्वादिनी. So the k-series letter you see is the trace of a c you cannot hear, and the same change is at work in vāgdevatā, the name for the goddesses who are said to have composed this hymn. Say vāg-vā-di-nī with the g fully voiced and the two v's distinct.

Vahnimaṇḍalavāsinī is the long one and has three separate difficulties. First the hn of vahni, written ह्न, a voiced h running into n — the same class of problem as the hv of vihvalā three verses back, and solved the same way, by keeping the voice on through the h rather than treating it as a breath. Then the ṇḍ of maṇḍala, both retroflex, tongue curled back and staying back. Then the plain dental s of vāsinī, which after all those retroflexes wants to curl back too and must not.

The caesura is at eight in both lines and both second halves are single names, so the rhythm of the verse is three short names, one long, two short names, one long. Take the breath after vandyā if you need one, not in the middle of the fourth name.

A note on the ā's. Vijayā and vimalā are light, three short syllables and a long; vandyā is heavy from the first syllable because of the cluster; vāgvādinī, vāmakeśī and vahni- all begin with a long ā except the last. Getting vahni- short at the start of an eight-syllable name, after two names that started long, is the small technical demand of the second line.

For contemplation, the last name gives an instruction rather than an image. It says where to put the attention: low, at the base, in the region the tradition calls fire. It is worth noticing that the hymn has arranged the sequence so that this comes immediately after four names about conduct and reverence and one about speech. The move from the ethical to the physiological happens without a seam, and the text plainly does not regard them as different subjects.