From a seat on the map to the point at the centre, and what is done there in private

Oḍyāṇa appears in the sources under a family of spellings — Oḍḍiyāna, Uḍḍiyāna, Oḍyāṇa, Oḍra — and its identification has been argued about for a century. The two serious candidates are the Swat valley in what is now northwestern Pakistan and the coastal region of Odisha, with the Swat identification the more widely accepted. Whichever is right, the seat is a shared possession. Uḍḍiyāna is at least as important in Buddhist tantra as in Śaiva and Śākta tantra: it is remembered as the homeland of Padmasambhava and as the country of the ḍākinīs, and a great deal of Buddhist tantric literature claims to have come from there. The sacred geography of the seats is one of the places where the boundary between the Buddhist and the Hindu tantric worlds is hardest to draw, and Oḍyāṇa is the clearest single instance of the overlap.

Pīṭha means a seat or pedestal — the base a statue stands on — and in this use it names a place where the goddess is understood to be actually resident rather than symbolically commemorated. Lists of the seats vary from four to fifty-one and beyond, but the older tantric reckoning works with four, of which the hymn has now named two in successive verses. The seats were also mapped inward, correlated in various schemes with points along the axis of the practitioner's own body, and the correlations differ from text to text; the two haṭha yoga locks named after seats, uḍḍiyāna at the abdomen and jālandhara at the throat, preserve a trace of one such scheme.

Bindu is a drop, and by extension a point — the dot of ink, the geometrical point that has position without extension, the nasal dot written above the line in Devanāgarī. In the Śrīcakra it is the centre. The diagram is worked through in nine enclosures, and the ninth and innermost of them is the bindu itself, the point at which the interlocking triangles converge and where the goddess herself is invoked and seated. To call it a maṇḍala, a disk or region, is a small deliberate paradox: the point is given an extent so that something can be said to live in it. Behind the term stands the doctrine of nāda and bindu, sound and point, the first two condensations by which the undifferentiated absolute begins to become a world with parts — a scheme that lets the same word do duty in phonetics, in cosmology and in the description of a drawing on a copper plate.

The second line turns to secrecy, and the vocabulary is precise. Rahas means solitude or a hidden place; a rahoyāga is a rite performed out of public sight. Tantric ritual is conventionally divided into outer worship, bahiryāga, performed with physical substances before a physical diagram, and inner worship, antaryāga, performed entirely within the practitioner's own body and imagination, and the second is generally reckoned the higher. But rahas carries a second charge as well. The kaula streams of tantric practice included rites using substances and acts that ordinary religious society treats as polluting or forbidden, and those rites were performed in private for reasons that had nothing to do with contemplative interiority. Śrīvidyā contains both tendencies and has argued about them for centuries: the samaya position, represented in the commentarial literature by Lakṣmīdhara, rejects the external and left-handed rites in favour of a purely internal worship, while Bhāskararāya, the most influential commentator on this hymn, was a kaula who defended the older practice. A reader should know that these two names have been claimed by both parties and read very differently by each.

Krama, sequence, is the word that ties this verse back to the earlier one. The nine enclosures of the diagram are traversed in a prescribed order, outward from the centre in the order of emission or inward from the perimeter in the order of reabsorption, and to say that she is worshipped by the sequence of the rite rather than simply by the rite is to say that the order is part of the offering. Tarpaṇa comes from √tṛp, to be satisfied, and names the offering of liquid — the daily pouring of water for the gods, the sages and the ancestors that a householder performs at the junctures of the day, and, in tantric usage, the liquid offered into the diagram. The name doubles the root deliberately: tarpaṇa and tarpitā, the satisfying and the satisfied, so that the last word of the verse is the same idea as its penultimate one seen from her side.

This is the most regular verse in the neighbourhood: four names, each filling one quarter of the anuṣṭubh exactly, so that the breaks of the metre and the breaks between names coincide. Breathe at the middle and end of each line and the verse recites itself.

It is also unusually rich in retroflex consonants, which makes it a good place to work on them. Oḍyāṇapīṭha alone has three: the ḍ of oḍyāṇa, made with the tongue curled back against the roof of the mouth; the ṇ that follows, the retroflex nasal; and the ṭh of pīṭha, a retroflex t with a puff of breath after it. The initial o is an independent vowel, written with its own character and always long. The conjunct ḍy asks for a retroflex stop released directly into a palatal glide, which requires the tongue to travel.

Bindumaṇḍalavāsinī sets up the best available contrast between the dental and retroflex series, because it contains both in adjacent syllables. In bindu the n and d are dental, tongue against the teeth; two syllables later in maṇḍala the ṇ and ḍ are retroflex, tongue curled back. Alternate the two clusters — ndu, ṇḍa, ndu, ṇḍa — and the distinction that English does not make will start to be audible.

The two names of the second line begin from the same word, and it is worth seeing why they do not look alike. The stem is rahas. Before the voiced y of yāga its final s becomes visarga and then o, giving rahoyāga; before the unvoiced t of tarpaṇa it stays as s, giving rahastarpaṇa. One word, two sandhi outcomes, side by side in the same line. Further in, kramārādhyā is krama plus ārādhyā, short a and long ā combining into a single long ā — the identical formation found in mahāyāgakramārādhyā earlier in the hymn. The dhyā that ends it is a voiced aspirated dental followed immediately by the palatal glide. In rahastarpaṇatarpitā, note that the ṇ of tarpaṇa is retroflex because of the r earlier in the word, the same automatic rule that governs prāṇa and rūpiṇī.

For archanā: oḍyāṇapīṭhanilayāyai namaḥ, bindumaṇḍalavāsinyai namaḥ, rahoyāgakramārādhyāyai namaḥ, rahastarpaṇatarpitāyai namaḥ. Only the second is an ī-stem and takes -yai with the vowel becoming a glide.

There is an obvious awkwardness in chanting, in a temple or from a recording, two names that describe worship performed where no one can see it. It is worth facing rather than smoothing over. The general position of the tradition is that the hymn and the rite are differently gated: the sahasranāma may be recited by anyone who wants to recite it, while the rites these names refer to require initiation and a teacher, and most people who know this verse by heart will never perform them. What the verse offers such a reciter is not a description of something withheld but a distinction that applies to any practice at all: between what is done where it can be seen and what is done where it cannot. One of them is a place that can be visited and photographed; the other is a point at the centre of a diagram, which is not smaller than the world only because it has no size.