Knowledge and ignorance, and the moonlight in Kāmeśa's eyes

Vyāpinī is a participle of vi-√āp, to reach through or pervade, and the noun from the same stem, vyāpti, is one of the load-bearing terms of Indian logic. In the analysis of inference, vyāpti is the pervasion that makes an inference valid: smoke is pervaded by fire, meaning that wherever smoke is, fire is, without exception. What the logicians care about is precisely the absence of exceptions, and the name carries that flavour into theology. To call her vyāpinī is not to say she is very widespread but to say the coverage is total, that no counterexample can be produced.

Vividhākārā turns immediately from the extent of that pervasion to its variety. Ākāra, from ā-√kṛ, is the outward figure or configuration of a thing, the shape it presents; the word is also used in epistemology for the form a cognition takes on when it grasps an object. Vividha, from vi-dhā, is of various sorts, differently arranged. Placed after vyāpinī, the name blocks a natural misreading. Pervasion might suggest a uniform medium, something like space or ether, equally featureless everywhere. This name says instead that she pervades as difference — that the manifold is not what obscures her but the mode in which she extends.

The third name is where the verse commits itself. Vidyā and avidyā are the standing pair of Indian soteriology, and in Advaita Vedānta their relation is asymmetrical: avidyā, beginningless ignorance, is what conceals Brahman and projects the world, and vidyā is the knowledge that removes it, after which nothing remains to be said about ignorance because it was never real. Ignorance in that scheme has no positive status. It is a defect to be cancelled, and it is emphatically not an attribute of the absolute. To say vidyāvidyāsvarūpiṇī is to take a different and harder road. If both members of the pair are her own form, then ignorance is not an intruder in a system that would otherwise be perfect; it is one of the two things she does. The Upaniṣadic material had already made room for this — the Īśa Upaniṣad advises knowing knowledge and ignorance together, crossing death by the one and reaching the deathless by the other, and the Śvetāśvatara sets them side by side as two eternal hidden things over which a third stands as lord. The tantric traditions generally push further than either, since for them the concealing power and the revealing power are two functions of a single agent, and worship is addressed to the agent rather than to one of the functions.

Then the poem stops arguing. Kumuda is the white night-lotus, which opens after dark and closes by day, and the Sanskrit poets keep it strictly distinct from the day-blooming padma; the two flowers give the language a pair of ready-made emblems for what wakes to the moon and what wakes to the sun. Kaumudī is the derivative noun, moonlight — literally what belongs to the night-lotuses, since the moon's light is defined by what it opens. The word is also the ordinary name of the full-moon night of the month of Kārttika, and it became a favourite title for works of exposition, on the sense that a good commentary is moonlight thrown on a difficult text. Āhlāda, from ā-√hlād, is gladdening or refreshment. So the compound reads: the moonlight that is the gladdening of the night-lotuses that are the eyes of the great lord of desire. Note who is which. In Sanskrit the moon is masculine and normally the wooer; here she is the light and he is what opens under it.

Mahākāmeśa is Śiva as Kāmeśvara, the form in which he is worshipped as her husband in this tradition and in which the two of them are seated at the central point of the Śrīcakra; the hymn elsewhere describes the marriage thread he has tied at her throat. The title is not innocent, because Śiva's most famous encounter with desire ended badly. Kāma, sent to break his meditation so that he would father a son on Pārvatī, loosed an arrow and was burnt to ash by the opening of the third eye, leaving his wife Rati to mourn a husband who thereafter existed without a body. The Lalitā material makes that heap of ash the beginning of its own plot: the Lalitopākhyāna relates that a servant of Śiva shaped a figure from the ashes of Kāma, that a glance from Śiva brought it to life, and that the creature so produced was Bhaṇḍāsura, whose destruction is the reason Lalitā is manifested at all. Read against that background, this name is doing something careful. The eye that burnt desire to nothing is the same eye that here opens like a flower, and the god whose glance made a monster out of the ashes is here called the lord of desire and shown looking at his wife.

The first line is a trap laid out of a single letter. Vyāpinī, vividhākārā, vidyāvidyā — six syllables in a row begin with v, and three of the words start vi-. Reciters who are going quickly arrive at vidyāvidyā and cannot remember whether they have said vividhākārā yet. The reliable fix is to count the line as three names of increasing weight, four, five, and seven syllables, and to feel it lengthening as it goes.

The vy of vyāpinī is a labiodental v released straight into the palatal glide y with no vowel between. English does not have the cluster at the start of a word and will want to insert one. Practise it by saying a word ending in v and one beginning with y, then removing the gap. The same cluster returns in vidyā, where dy is a dental d into the same glide, and in svarūpiṇī, where sv is a dental s into v.

Vidyāvidyāsvarūpiṇī hides its own join. The two members are vidyā and avidyā, and since a final long ā followed by a short a yields a single long ā, the compound comes out as vidyāvidyā with nothing to show that a negative prefix is buried in the middle. It is worth saying the two words separately once — vidyā, avidyā — before saying the name, so that the ear knows there is an opposition in there and not a doubled word.

The whole second line is one name of sixteen syllables, and it should be recited without a breath. This is the practical difficulty of the verse. The caesura that normally falls at the halfway point of an anuṣṭubh cannot be used here as a place to breathe, because it falls inside a compound; the breath has to be taken at the end of the first line and made to last. Take it deliberately, and do not begin mahā- until the lungs are full.

Two sounds in that line need attention. The hl of āhlāda is a genuine cluster, h followed by l, both released cleanly — not the l of English alone with a breath in front of it, but a puff of voiced breath and then the dental l. And kaumudī opens with the diphthong au, which is a full long vowel, roughly the ow of how but held, and distinctly longer than the o of the syllable before it. Getting au right matters throughout the hymn, since it is the vowel of Gaurī, Kaulinī and a good many other names.

In the namāvali this long name becomes mahākāmeśanayanakumudāhlādakaumudyai namaḥ, an ī-stem taking -yai with the vowel turning to y. The three names of the first line give vyāpinyai, vividhākārāyai and vidyāvidyāsvarūpiṇyai. Saying the four datives in succession is a good drill precisely because the last one is long enough to expose whether the breath was managed properly.

What the verse asks is a shift of scale performed inside a single breath cycle. The person chanting has just asserted that she pervades everything and holds both knowledge and ignorance, and is then given a domestic scene: a face, a pair of eyes, light falling on them, the eyes opening. The hymn does not explain the transition and does not soften it. Its habit, here as elsewhere, is to follow a metaphysical claim immediately with something small enough to picture, and to leave the reader to notice that the two are the same subject.