Consciousness, and what the word 'that' was pointing at

Citi is a feminine noun formed from √cit, to be aware, with the suffix -ti that makes action nouns: not consciousness as a substance but the fact or activity of being conscious. Sanskrit also has the neuter cit for the same thing, and the choice here is not accidental. In the non-dual Śaiva schools of Kashmir, citi is the standard word for consciousness considered as free and self-moving rather than as an inert light, and Kṣemarāja opens the Pratyabhijñāhṛdaya by defining it exactly so. For a theology whose absolute is a goddess this is a considerable convenience: the highest term in the system is already grammatically feminine, and no strain is needed to let her occupy it.

The second name is the densest piece of technical vocabulary in this part of the hymn, and it cannot be understood without the exegetical machinery behind it. Tat-pada means the word 'that', and the reference is to the sentence Uddālaka repeats nine times to his son in the sixth chapter of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad: tat tvam asi, you are that. Indian theories of meaning distinguish what a word directly expresses, its vācyārtha, from what it indirectly indicates, its lakṣyārtha. The standard schoolroom example is the phrase 'a hamlet on the Ganges': taken literally the hamlet would be in the river, which is impossible, so the hearer shifts to the indicated sense and understands the bank.

Advaita applies the same operation to the great sentence. Read for their direct meanings, 'that' denotes the omniscient cause of the world, remote and unlimited, while 'you' denotes this particular person, bounded by a body and a biography. The two cannot be identified without absurdity. So the interpreter drops the incompatible portions of each meaning and keeps what is common to both — pure consciousness — by a procedure the manuals call bhāgatyāgalakṣaṇā, indication by abandoning a part. Their illustration is the sentence 'this is that Devadatta', said of a man met again after twenty years in another city: the contradictory times and places fall away and the person is retained. Tatpadalakṣyārthā says that when the word 'that' is read in this way, what it lands on is her. A Śākta hymn is here claiming the central sentence of Vedānta for its goddess, using the vocabulary of the Vedāntins themselves — which tells you a great deal about the intellectual world in which this text circulated, and about why its most influential commentator, Bhāskararāya in the early eighteenth century, could be equally at home in tantric ritual and in scriptural hermeneutics.

Ekarasa means having a single savour. Rasa is taste, and by extension essence, and by further extension the dominant emotional flavour of a work of art. The Upaniṣads use taste for exactly this purpose when they compare the self to a lump of salt dropped into water: you cannot find an inside or an outside to it, and wherever you sip, it is salt. Cidekarasarūpiṇī blocks the picture that comes most naturally to a reader — a conscious being who also has non-conscious parts, awareness plus a body, awareness plus attributes. There is no second ingredient. Whatever is analysed in her turns out on analysis to be the same thing.

The last name presupposes a specific passage. The second chapter of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad conducts what it calls an inquiry into bliss, and it proceeds arithmetically. Take a young man, well-educated, disciplined and quick, in command of the entire wealth of the earth: that is one unit of human bliss. A hundred such units make one unit of the bliss of the gandharvas among men; a hundred of those, one unit for the gandharvas among gods; and the scale climbs by hundredfold steps through the ancestors, the gods by birth, the gods by action, the gods proper, Indra, Bṛhaspati, Prajāpati, and finally Brahmā. That unbroken ascending series is the santati the name refers to, and brahmādi, 'Brahmā and the rest', names it from the top down. The claim then made is that the whole ladder, every rung of it summed, is lavībhūta with respect to the bliss of her own Self — reduced to a shred of it. The formation lavī-bhūta uses a construction that means 'turned into', 'having become': the joys of the gods do not merely fall short of hers, they are converted into a fragment when set beside it. And the compound specifies svātmānanda, the bliss of her own Self, not bliss taken from anything: what she has is not the pleasure of a possessor enjoying an object, which is the only kind the graded scale measures.

Two pieces of sandhi have to be undone before this verse can be read at all, because in both cases the join disguises where one name ends and the next begins. The first line opens citistatpadalakṣyārthā, which looks like one word and is two: citiḥ and tatpada. Final visarga before an unvoiced dental becomes s, so citiḥ tat becomes citistat. In the second name of the second quarter, cidekarasarūpiṇī begins from cit, whose final t is voiced to d before the vowel of eka. Recite both joins as continuous sound — do not restore the visarga or the hard t — but know they are there, because the nāmāvali will separate them again.

The conjuncts are the hardest in this stretch of the hymn. Lakṣyārthā carries kṣ followed immediately by y: the ṣ is retroflex, and the y after it must be heard as a separate articulation rather than absorbed. Then rthā puts r before an aspirated dental th, a t with breath after it and not the th of English 'thin'. In the long final name, work through svā (s then v, both fully sounded), tmā, hmā in brahmā (the h aspirating into the m, not a separate syllable), and dyā.

That final name is a single word occupying all sixteen syllables of the second line, and the only way to hold it is by its joints: svātma-ānanda, lavī-bhūta, brahma-ādi-ānanda, santati. Two of those joints are vowel arithmetic worth learning here. Sva plus ātman gives svātma, short a and long ā combining into a single long ā. Brahmādi plus ānanda gives brahmādyānanda, where a final short i before a dissimilar vowel turns into the glide y — the same rule that produces dozens of forms elsewhere in the hymn.

The caesura of the first line falls cleanly between lakṣyārthā and cidekarasa, and that is the only breath in the verse; the second line offers none.

For archanā the datives here are unusual and reciters routinely get them wrong. Most names in this hymn are feminine ā-stems and take -āyai. Two of these four are not: citi and santati are feminine i-stems, and they take -yai, giving cityai namaḥ and svātmānandalavībhūtabrahmādyānandasantatyai namaḥ. The other two are regular: tatpadalakṣyārthāyai namaḥ, cidekarasarūpiṇyai namaḥ — this last with the long ī of rūpiṇī becoming the glide before the ending.

As for what the verse asks of the person chanting it: the second name is not praise but assent. To recite tatpadalakṣyārthā is to accept a particular reading of a particular Upaniṣadic sentence and to say that the goddess being addressed is its subject. Anyone reciting the hymn attentively will notice that this changes the relation the previous verse set up. There the reciter was among the scorched and she was the moonlight; here the sentence being invoked ends with the word 'you'. The hymn does not draw the conclusion, and neither should the reciter in a hurry. The fourth name is the safeguard against drawing it cheaply: it exists to dismantle the habit of measuring bliss in quantities, by first constructing the largest quantity the tradition knows how to construct and then calling it a shaving.