From radiance to root-nature: the hymn turns philosophical

The first two names differ by a suffix, and the difference is the whole point of putting them next to each other. Prabhā, from pra-√bhā, to shine forth, is light in the sense of radiance thrown off a source; it is the ordinary word for the halo around a lamp or a face. Prabhāvatī adds -vat, the possessive suffix that Sanskrit uses to say that something has a quality: she is possessed of radiance, the way a wealthy man is dhanavat, possessed of wealth. Prabhārūpā then says something stronger and slightly disorienting — that radiance is her form, that there is no object underneath which is doing the shining. Sanskrit theology returns to this distinction constantly, because it is the difference between a lamp and daylight. The first name would let a reader imagine a luminous person; the second removes the person and leaves the luminosity.

That move has a specific home in the doctrine of this school, which inherits from the Pratyabhijñā philosophers of Kashmir a pair of terms, prakāśa and vimarśa. Prakāśa is the sheer shining of consciousness, the fact that anything appears at all; vimarśa is consciousness's awareness of its own shining, the reflexive turn without which the light would illuminate nothing in particular. The tradition assigns prakāśa to Śiva and vimarśa to the Goddess, and then insists that the two are not separable, since a light that did not know itself would be indistinguishable from darkness. Prabhāvatī and prabhārūpā are not those technical words, but they run along the same track: light held as a property, and light as what one is.

Prasiddhā looks like the plainest name in the verse and has a second life as a term of art. Built from pra-√sidh, it means accomplished, established, and hence well known — the word a Sanskrit philosopher uses for what is loka-prasiddha, established in common usage, the sort of thing an argument may take for granted rather than prove. To call her prasiddhā in the middle of a verse that will shortly call her the unmanifest is to make a claim about the status of the Goddess in Indian religion that is close to sociological. She does not need to be established; she is what is already granted, the shared ground beneath the schools that disagree about everything else.

With mūlaprakṛti the hymn steps directly into the Sāṃkhya system, and the term should be taken exactly. Classical Sāṃkhya counts twenty-five principles and arranges them by a single question: is this thing a producer, a product, both, or neither? Root-nature is a producer and not a product — it is modified into everything else and is itself a modification of nothing, which is what mūla, root, is doing in the compound. Seven principles, beginning with mahat, the great one, are both producers and products. Sixteen are products only. Puruṣa, the conscious witness, is neither. Avyakta, unmanifest, is the same root-nature named from the other side: it is called that because it has not come out into appearance and never will, being the condition of appearance rather than an item within it. The Sāṃkhya writers habitually pair vyakta and avyakta as a way of dividing the whole of what exists, and add the knower as a third term.

The Śākta traditions took this vocabulary over and changed one thing in it, which changed everything. In classical Sāṃkhya prakṛti is unconscious; it works blindly, and the whole soteriology consists in the witness disentangling himself from it. When the Purāṇic and tantric literature identifies the Goddess with mūlaprakṛti — the ninth book of the Devī Bhāgavata is largely given over to this identification — the root-nature becomes conscious, intentional, and worth addressing in the second person. The philosophical cost is real and the tradition knows it, which is one reason the verse does not stop at avyaktā. Vyaktāvyaktasvarūpiṇī closes the door on a dualism that the previous name had left open. If she were only the unmanifest, the world would be something other than she is, and the whole enterprise of worshipping a visible image or a drawn diagram would be a concession to weakness. Saying that both the shown and the hidden are her own form makes the visible world not a veil over her but one of the two ways she is.

The first line is built on a single consonant cluster repeated four times: pra, pra, pra, and then para, which is the same syllables pulled apart. Pra is p followed immediately by r with no vowel between; the commonest English error is to insert one and produce something like puh-ra. Set the lips for p, release, and let the r follow at once. The bh of prabhā is one letter, an aspirated labial — b with breath pushed through it — not b followed by a separate h, and both prabhāvatī and prabhārūpā carry a long ā after it that the metre needs.

The two names look nearly identical and are easy to transpose. Fix them by their sense rather than their sound: having the light comes before being the light, because that is the order in which a reader gives up the idea of a luminous body. Prasiddhā has a doubled aspirate at its centre, ddh — a voiced dental d released into a voiced aspirated dental dh, both at the teeth, held long enough that the syllable feels heavy. It is a single conjunct, not two syllables.

At the join between the lines there is a sandhi worth learning, because it explains why the written text runs two names together. Mūlaprakṛtiḥ ends in visarga; before the vowel of avyaktā that visarga becomes r, and the text prints mūlaprakṛtiravyaktā as one word. The two names underneath are perfectly separate, and in the namāvali they are recited apart as mūlaprakṛtyai namaḥ and avyaktāyai namaḥ. A reciter who has only ever seen the joined form often does not realise there are two names there and miscounts the verse.

The vowel ṛ in prakṛti is not the ri of English ridge. It is a vowel in its own right, made with the tongue curled toward the roof of the mouth and held for one short beat; the r-colour runs through the whole of it rather than preceding it. Kṛ in prakṛti and hṛ elsewhere in the hymn are the same sound, and getting it wrong turns a two-syllable stem into a three-syllable one and breaks the metre.

Vyaktāvyaktasvarūpiṇī is the longest word in the verse and its shape is worth seeing before it is said. It is vyakta plus avyakta — and since a short a plus a short a gives a long ā, the join produces vyaktāvyakta — followed by svarūpiṇī. The kt cluster occurs twice, guttural k released into dental t with no vowel between, and the sv of svarūpa is a dental s straight into v. The final ṇ is retroflex because of the r earlier in rūpa, the same rule that governs śarīriṇī and kāriṇī throughout the hymn.

For archanā the verse is unusually instructive, because its seven names run through three different declension patterns. The ā-stems give prabhārūpāyai, prasiddhāyai, avyaktāyai. The ī-stems give prabhāvatyai, parameśvaryai, vyaktāvyaktasvarūpiṇyai, where the long ī shortens into y before the ending. And mūlaprakṛtyai is a short i-stem doing the same thing. Reciting the whole verse in the dative once, slowly, is a better grammar lesson than most beginners' exercises.

What the verse asks is a change of attention halfway through. The first line can be said devotionally; the second cannot, or not in the same way, because its terms are not praise but analysis. The person chanting is being handed the technical vocabulary of a philosophical school and told that it names the same being he has just called radiant and renowned.