Moonlight on scorched ground, and the dark driven off

The three afflictions are not a poetic flourish but a piece of standard technical vocabulary, and Sanskrit philosophy is nearly unanimous about their contents. Ādhyātmika affliction arises within the person — illness, injury, grief, the mind's own disorder. Ādhibhautika affliction comes from other beings — animals, insects, enemies, the ordinary friction of living among others. Ādhidaivika affliction descends from what no one controls: heat and cold, storm, flood, the planets, fate. The classification is old enough that the Sāṃkhyakārikā can open with it as something the reader already knows, making the whole enterprise of philosophy begin from the fact of being under assault from three directions at once. Purāṇic and Vedāntic writers took the inventory over wholesale, and by the time this hymn was composed tāpatraya was as settled a term as any in the language.

What the compound then does with it is to call the three a fire and the sufferer santapta, scorched through. This is where the root-play begins that governs the whole verse. Tāpa and tapas are the same root under two aspects: heat that happens to you, heat you generate. The ascetic in the third name is a tāpasa precisely because he burns, and the Sanskrit word for austerity never lost its literal sense of heat — in the oldest layer of the tradition the creator broods the world into being by tapas, and the practitioner's discipline is understood on that model, as something that cooks. So the verse puts two kinds of burning at either end of the same line and asks what relation she has to each.

To the first she is candrikā, moonlight. Indian poetry treats the moon as a cold body: śītaraśmi, the cold-rayed one, a vessel of amṛta whose light is not merely bright but physically cooling, so that moonlight on hot ground is a description of relief and not only of illumination. The convention is stable enough that poets get their effects by inverting it — for the lover in separation the same moonlight scalds — and something of that ambivalence is worth keeping here, since the name does not say she extinguishes the three fires. It says that to those already burnt she comes as moonlight comes.

Taruṇī is a young woman at the height of youth, and the tradition is unusually insistent on her age. Tripurasundarī is contemplated as perpetually sixteen, a figure the school treats as marking not a biography but a condition: the point at which vitality is complete and decline has not begun, held permanently. Her other well-known form, Bālā, is younger still, a girl. Set immediately before tāpasārādhyā, taruṇī produces the juxtaposition this literature likes — the goddess whose iconography is frankly erotic named in the same breath as the men who have renounced everything erotic, and worshipped by them. Śrīvidyā makes a doctrinal point of this refusal to separate enjoyment from liberation, and the sequence of these two names is one of its compressed statements.

Tanumadhyā, slender-waisted, belongs to the conventional catalogue of feminine beauty in kāvya, where a waist narrow enough to be spanned by the hand is standard praise. Commentators generally do not leave it there. Madhya is also simply the middle, and tanu means fine or subtle as much as it means thin — it is the adjective Patañjali uses for afflictions that have been attenuated rather than destroyed. A physical description of the middle of her body is therefore read as pointing at the subtle centre: the central channel of the yogic body, or the point at the heart of the diagram in which she is invoked.

The last name closes the frame the first one opened. Tamas is darkness, and in the Sāṃkhya scheme that gave us the three afflictions it is also the third of the three constituents of nature — the one that manifests as heaviness, obstruction, and the dullness in which a mind cannot think. Tamo'pahā thus removes two things at once, and the ambiguity is intended. The name also hides a piece of sandhi worth seeing: the underlying words are tamaḥ and apahā, the visarga becomes o before the voiced vowel, the initial a of apahā drops out, and the resulting elision is marked by the sign ऽ, though printed nāmāvalis often simply write tamopahā. Having named her as light against darkness, the hymn is positioned for the verse that follows, which abandons imagery altogether and calls her consciousness itself.

The first line is one word. Sixteen syllables of anuṣṭubh filled by a single compound, tāpatrayāgnisantaptasamāhlādanacandrikā, and then a second line holding four separate names in the same sixteen. Nothing else nearby is shaped like this, and the contrast is the thing to hear. It also creates a practical difficulty: the caesura of the metre falls after the eighth syllable, which lands in the middle of santapta, so there is no breath available anywhere in the first line. Take the air before you begin it.

Break the compound at its joints rather than by syllable count — tāpa-traya-agni, santapta, samāhlādana, candrikā — and the vowel arithmetic explains itself: traya ends in short a, agni begins with short a, and the two combine into the long ā of trayāgni. Two clusters in it will need attention. The hl of samāhlādana is a voiced aspirate followed by a dental l, and English has no equivalent; produce the h with the throat open and let the l emerge out of the breath rather than after it. The ndri of candrikā is three consonants in a row, dental n, dental d, and r, all of which must be heard.

The governing sound of the whole verse is the dental t, and this is the single most common place where English speakers go wrong in Sanskrit. The t here is made with the tongue against the back of the upper teeth, not the ridge behind them, and it carries no puff of air. An English t is retracted and aspirated, which produces something a Sanskrit ear hears as ṭha, a different letter altogether. Five names beginning with ta, tā, ta, ta, ta make this verse an unusually good drill for it: say the line slowly with a finger on the upper lip to check that no breath escapes.

Taruṇī has a retroflex ṇ, and the reason is mechanical: a preceding r retracts the following n, which is why the same shift shows up in rūpiṇī and dozens of other feminines in this hymn.

Tāpasārādhyā and tanumadhyā stand next to each other and both end in -dhyā, an aspirated dental followed immediately by the palatal glide: d, breath, y, with no vowel between them. Reciters tend to let the second name collapse into an echo of the first. Keep the internal vowels distinct — a long ā in the middle of ārādhyā, a short u in tanu — and the two will not fuse.

For the recitation performed as archanā, the names take the dative: tāpatrayāgnisantaptasamāhlādanacandrikāyai namaḥ, taruṇyai namaḥ, tāpasārādhyāyai namaḥ, tanumadhyāyai namaḥ, tamopahāyai namaḥ.

As for what the verse asks: it places whoever is chanting it inside the first name rather than outside it. Everyone reciting is among the scorched, since the three afflictions are defined broadly enough that no one is exempt from all of them. But note what the name declines to promise. It does not say the fires are put out. It says that on the burnt ground moonlight falls, and the ascetics named two words later are not people who escaped the heat but people who took more of it on deliberately.