Witness of everything, witnessed by nothing

Sadyas is an indeclinable meaning on the same day, at once, without interval; prasāda is one of the great words of Indian religion and repays a moment's attention. It is built from pra and √sad, to sit or settle, and its first sense is what happens to muddy water when it is left alone: the sediment settles and the water becomes clear. From there it means serenity, then graciousness, then the concrete favour a gracious person confers, and finally the food that has been offered and returned. To say that she is sadyaḥprasādinī is to say that this settling requires no waiting. Placed immediately after a verse devoted to restricted and ordered rites, the name functions as a counterweight, and the hymn's habit of setting such counterweights is one of the reasons it has been recited far outside the initiated circles that produced it.

Sākṣin is a transparent compound: sa, with, and akṣi, eye — one who was there with his own eyes. In the legal literature it is the ordinary technical word for a witness in a lawsuit, and the dharma texts spend many pages on who may serve as one. Philosophy took the word over and made it a term of art. In Vedānta the sākṣin is consciousness considered purely as that before which everything appears, unaffected by what it observes: it is present in waking, in dream, and in dreamless sleep, and it is what allows a person on waking to report that he slept well and knew nothing, since something must have been present to the absence. Sāṃkhya makes the same move with the puruṣa, which is a witness precisely because it does nothing.

The two names that follow one another here are therefore doing careful work. A witness, in the ordinary sense, is a second party: someone other than the events, standing where he can see them. If she is the witness of viśva, of everything without remainder, then by definition nothing has been left outside to serve as a witness of her — and the next name says so at once. The point is not modesty about her but rigour about the concept. The Upaniṣads pose the same problem in the form of a question: by what should one know the knower? The pair also blocks a mistake that the word sākṣin invites, namely picturing the witness as a spectator seated somewhere at a distance from the world it observes. Sākṣivarjitā removes the seat.

The second line turns to ritual and to attribute. The six limbs are a fixed feature of tantric practice. Before worship, the practitioner performs nyāsa, placing the mantra on the body part by part, and the standard scheme uses six locations with six terminations: the heart with namaḥ, the head with svāhā, the tuft of hair with vaṣaṭ, the armour with huṃ, the eyes with vauṣaṭ, and the weapon with phaṭ. These six are not merely places. They are treated as deities in their own right, the aṅgadevatās, personified and worshipped, and in the Śrīvidyā rite they attend the goddess as a retinue. The compound calls her yuktā, joined with them, which keeps the relation ambiguous in a useful way: they are hers as limbs are a body's, and they are also her companions.

Ṣāḍguṇya is an abstract noun formed from ṣaḍguṇa, six qualities, and the commentators generally take the six to be the ones that the Purāṇic tradition uses to define the word bhagavat: complete sovereignty, heroic power, fame, splendour, knowledge, and dispassion. The Viṣṇu Purāṇa gives the definition in a verse that later theologians quote endlessly, and it is worth seeing what the hymn is doing by applying it here. Bhagavān is the title of a god who possesses these six in full; ṣāḍguṇyaparipūritā says of her that she is filled with them all round, paripūritā rather than merely pūritā, without gaps. She is Bhagavatī in the technical rather than the merely honorific sense.

One complication should be noted. Ṣāḍguṇya is also the standard term in the Sanskrit science of statecraft for the six measures of foreign policy — making peace, making war, marching, remaining in place, seeking shelter, and pursuing a double course — and an entire book of the Arthaśāstra is devoted to it. Since this hymn is embedded in the narrative of a military campaign against Bhaṇḍāsura, the second sense is at least available to a reader, and it is the sort of double meaning Sanskrit poets cultivate. The main line of interpretation takes the six as the lordly qualities, and there is no need to force the other reading; but a reader who meets ṣāḍguṇya elsewhere in Sanskrit literature is far more likely to meet it as a term of political science, and should know why.

This verse is the best drill in the neighbourhood for the three Sanskrit sibilants, because it uses all of them and distributes them by line. Sanskrit distinguishes dental s, palatal ś, and retroflex ṣ, and English has only two sounds in this area. The first line is built on the dental s, both names of the second line open on the retroflex ṣ, made with the tongue curled back, and the palatal ś appears inside viśva. That one word, viśvasākṣiṇī, contains all three in five syllables. Say it slowly enough to place each of them and the rest of the verse becomes straightforward.

Sadyaḥprasādinī keeps a visarga in the middle of the compound, before the p of prasādinī, and printed nāmāvalis often separate the elements for that reason. A visarga is not silent and it is not an h in the English sense: it is a short breath coloured by the vowel before it, so that sadyaḥ ends with a faint echo of its own a. The dy at the start of that syllable is a dental d released into a palatal y.

The conjunct kṣ, which appears three times here, is a guttural k followed by the retroflex ṣ. The common English rendering 'ksh' gets the two consonants right but tends to substitute the palatal sibilant for the retroflex one. In sākṣiṇī the following ṇ is retroflex, and the reason is worth knowing: the same rule that retroflexes an n after r, as in taruṇī and prāṇa, also retroflexes it after ṣ.

In ṣaḍaṅga, the numeral is ṣaṣ, six, whose final consonant becomes ḍ before a voiced sound — the same six that appears in ṣāḍguṇya. That second word is an abstract noun made by a standard procedure: take ṣaḍguṇa, lengthen the first vowel, add -ya, and you have the state of having six qualities. Its clusters are ḍg and ṇy, neither of which may be simplified.

Metrically the second line is tidy, eight syllables to each name, but the first line is not: the caesura falls inside viśvasākṣiṇī, so there is no breath available in the first line at all.

For archanā: sadyaḥprasādinyai namaḥ, viśvasākṣiṇyai namaḥ, sākṣivarjitāyai namaḥ, ṣaḍaṅgadevatāyuktāyai namaḥ, ṣāḍguṇyaparipūritāyai namaḥ. The first two are ī-stems and take -yai with the vowel turning into a glide.

Of the five, the first is the one that bears on the ordinary case. Anyone reciting the hymn in sequence has just come through a verse about rites that require initiation, a teacher, and privacy, and this name says without qualification that the favour is not on a schedule. The middle pair asks something different and less comfortable. A person chanting is necessarily treating her as the object of his attention, and sākṣivarjitā states that she is not available in that position — that there is no vantage point from which she can be regarded, because the regarding is hers. This is not an instruction that can be carried out. It is more like a correction that arrives while one is in the middle of doing the thing being corrected, which may be why the hymn puts it between a name about immediate grace and a name about ritual furniture, and does not dwell on it.