The wish-yielding creeper, the loosened tether, and the rule of good conduct

Kalpalatikā is built on a stock image of Sanskrit poetry that has hardened into a single word. The root is √kḷp, to be in order, to be fit, whose causative kalpayati means to arrange or produce; a kalpa-vṛkṣa is therefore a tree that produces to order, and the celestial garden of Indra is furnished with such trees, along with the cow that gives whatever is milked from her and the jewel that grants whatever is asked of it. The purāṇas generally place these among the treasures that came up when the gods and the antigods churned the ocean, though the lists differ from one purāṇa to the next and the number of items in them is not stable. What the hymn does with the image is small and deliberate. It does not call her a tree. Latā is a creeper, latikā its diminutive: a slender climbing thing, which by its nature cannot stand up on its own and must have something to grow along. And the creeper is not simply the world's; it is bhaktimatām, of those possessed of devotion. The gift is not being restricted out of stinginess. It is being located: the creeper grows where there is something for it to climb.

The second name moves into a vocabulary that Śaiva theology had made precise centuries before this hymn was composed. Paśu is an ordinary word for a domestic animal, and behind it stands the sacrificial victim of the Vedic rite, tied by a rope to the stake. Pāśa is that rope. From at least the Pāśupata movement onward, the two words are taken as a diagram of the human condition: the soul is the tethered animal, its bondage is the tether, and the lord — pati, the third term — is the one who owns the animal and can loose it. Śaiva Siddhānta systematised the fetters as three: āṇava, the impurity that shrinks an infinite awareness to the size of a person; karma, the accumulated momentum of action; and māyā, the material stuff that gives that momentum something to work in. The name assigns to her the office that the systems assign to Śiva. She is the one who unties.

There is a second and more domestic sense of paśu that a tantric reader will hear at the same time. Tantric texts classify practitioners by temperament into paśu, vīra and divya — the herd-natured, the heroic, and the divine — and the paśu is the practitioner who is not yet fit for the transgressive rites and must be held to conventional observance. Both senses are live in this verse, and the fourth name will pick up the second one.

Pāṣaṇḍa, in the third name, is the hardest word in the verse, and its history is worth knowing before anyone decides how harsh it is. In the Prakrit of Aśoka's inscriptions the word appears as pāsaṃḍa and means simply a religious community or sect, with no pejorative charge at all; the emperor's edicts use it while enjoining that the various pāsaṃḍas be honoured and not disparaged. By the classical period the word has slid downhill and means a heretic — someone outside the Vedic fold, or a fraudulent ascetic wearing the marks of a piety he does not have. Commentators on this name generally soften it in one of two ways: by reading pāṣaṇḍa as the false doctrine rather than the person who holds it, or by pressing on saṃhṛta. That participle is from sam-√hṛ, to draw together, the same verb that gives saṃhāra, the drawing-in of the cosmos at the end of an age. Withdrawal in that sense is not extermination; it is reabsorption of something into the source it came from. Traditions differ on how much weight the milder reading can carry, and it is honest to say so.

Sadācāra, finally, is a technical term of dharmaśāstra and not a vague commendation of being good. The lawbooks list the sources from which dharma may be known, and after the Veda and the remembered texts they place ācāra, the settled practice of people who are themselves good — precedent, in effect, where scripture is silent. Pravartikā is from pra-√vṛt in the causative: she who sets rolling. The pairing matters for a tantric hymn, because Śrīvidyā has an internal argument between the samaya lineages, which keep the rite interior and the conduct orthodox, and the kaula lineages, which do not. The sahasranāma itself carries names from both vocabularies and does not resolve the quarrel; Lakṣmīdhara's well-known commentary on the Saundaryalaharī takes the samaya side vigorously and reads the poem against kaula practice throughout. Whatever a given lineage decides, the name insists that liberation from the tether is not the end of the matter, and that the goddess who unties the rope is also the one who keeps ordinary decency in motion.

Metrically this is the easiest verse in a long stretch of the hymn, and it is worth noticing why. Each of the four names is exactly eight syllables, so each fills one quarter of the anuṣṭubh exactly. Nothing spans the caesura, nothing has to be split across a breath. The units of sense and the units of metre coincide four times over, which means the verse can be chanted at speed without any of the place-losing that afflicts the mahā- runs earlier in the stotra.

The real work here is sibilants. Sanskrit has three — dental s, palatal ś, and retroflex ṣ — and saṃhṛtāśeṣapāṣaṇḍā contains all three in a single word, in the order s, ś, ṣ, ṣ. Say it slowly: saṃ with the tongue nowhere near the roof of the mouth and the sibilant at the teeth; śe with the blade of the tongue at the hard palate, close to the English sh but further forward; ṣa with the tongue tip curled back. English collapses the last two into one sound and will do so here unless you deliberately keep them apart. Paśupāśavimocinī gives you the palatal twice with nothing else to confuse it, so it makes a useful warm-up: run paśu-pāśa a few times to fix ś, then take up the longer name.

Two further points of articulation. The hṛ of saṃhṛta carries the vocalic ṛ, which is a vowel in its own right with the tongue in retroflex position — not the ri of English "rip", and not a schwa with an r after it. And ṇḍā at the end of the same word is a retroflex nasal followed by a retroflex stop, both made with the tongue curled back; the whole final third of the word is produced in that one position, which is why it feels like a knot and why slowing down there is the only cure. In pravartikā the r closes and the following t is dental, so the tongue moves forward, not back.

Used as archanā, the four names take the dative: bhaktimatkalpalatikāyai namaḥ, paśupāśavimocinyai namaḥ, saṃhṛtāśeṣapāṣaṇḍāyai namaḥ, sadācārapravartikāyai namaḥ. Three of the four are ā-stems and take the familiar -āyai. The second is an ī-stem, and its dative is -yai attached directly, giving vimocinyai — the same pattern that appears throughout the hymn wherever a name ends in -inī, and a good place to hear the difference between the two declensions in immediate succession.

As for what the verse asks of the person saying it: the second name requires you to accept a description of yourself as an animal on a rope, which is not flattering and is not meant to be. The fourth then withholds the consolation that might follow. Having been untied, one might expect to be told that conduct no longer matters. Instead the verse ends by making her the source of ordinary right behaviour, which is to say that the loosened rope leads back into the world rather than out of it.