Sunlight into the heart, and four ways of standing next to Śiva

The long first name needs unpacking element by element, and it should be said at the outset that the printed texts do not entirely agree on how to divide it. Some read bhakta-hārda, others bhaktā-hārda with the alternative stem āhārda; the sense is the same either way, since hārda and āhārda both derive from hṛd, heart, and mean what belongs to or is lodged in the heart. Tamas is darkness, and in the Sāṃkhya vocabulary the hymn was using two verses earlier it is also the name of the third constituent of nature, the one responsible for heaviness, dullness and obstruction. Bheda, from √bhid, to split, is a breaking apart rather than a dispersal — the darkness is cleft, not merely thinned. Bhānumat, possessed of rays, is a standard word for the sun; bhānu by itself is a ray; and santati, from sam-√tan, to stretch out together, is an unbroken continuity, the same root that gives tantra its sense of something stretched on a loom. The compound therefore says: she is the continuous stream of rays of the ray-possessing one, which splits the heart-lodged darkness of the devoted.

The choice of santati is the interesting part. A single blaze would have made the point about darkness more dramatically, and Sanskrit has plenty of words for a flash. What santati adds is duration and seamlessness. Sunlight is not an event; it is a condition that does not stop arriving. The image is of a room that is lit because the sun has not gone away, which is a different account of how ignorance is removed than the one implied by sudden illumination.

With the second line the hymn arrives at the name that carries a story. Śivadūtī, she whose messenger is Śiva, records an episode from the Devī Māhātmya. In the war against Śumbha and Niśumbha the Goddess needs an envoy sent to the demon kings, and she asks Śiva to go. He goes. When he returns, having delivered her terms, she declares that because she has made Śiva her messenger she will be known in the world by this name. The Devī Māhātmya is careful to make it her declaration rather than a narrator's aside: the name is one she takes for herself on the strength of what she has just been able to ask of him. In the same chapter Śivadūtī also appears as a distinct figure, the fierce power that issues from Caṇḍikā's own body and joins the śaktis of the male gods on the battlefield, so the name has both a narrative and an iconographic life.

Śivārādhyā continues the reversal in a quieter grammar. Ārādhyā is a gerundive from ā-√rādh, to propitiate or please: she who is to be worshipped, with Śiva in the instrumental as the one who must do it. The Saundaryalaharī opens with exactly this claim and draws the conclusion the tantric traditions want from it — that if she is worshipped by Hari, Hara and Brahmā, then a human being's praise is presumptuous unless some merit has already been accumulated. It is worth registering how systematically this hymn inverts the ordinary hierarchy. In most of the surrounding religious literature Śiva is the one addressed; here he is successively the errand-runner, the devotee, and finally the image.

Śivamūrtiḥ is read two ways and the commentators do not settle it. Mūrti, from a root meaning to become solid or congeal, is a form that has taken on definite shape, and hence the ordinary word for a consecrated image. On the first reading the compound is possessive of Śiva — she is his embodied form, the shape in which the formless one becomes available — which fits the sequence perfectly, since it moves the relation past envoy and worshipper into identity. On the second reading śiva is the adjective and the name means one whose form is auspiciousness. Nothing in the grammar decides between them, and the second reading has the advantage of preparing the fourth name.

Because in śivaṅkarī the word has certainly reverted to its adjectival sense. In the oldest layer of the language śiva is not a proper noun at all but an adjective — kindly, gracious, favourable — used of Rudra as a propitiatory address, on the widespread principle that a dangerous power is best spoken to by its mildest attribute. Only later does the euphemism harden into the name of a god. Śivaṅkarī, she who makes what is auspicious, belongs to a small class of Sanskrit compounds in which the accusative ending of the first member is preserved inside the word instead of being dropped — the grammarians call the retained syllable the mum augment, and the same pattern gives priyaṃvada, one who speaks pleasantly, and vaśaṃkara, one who brings under control. The preserved case-ending keeps the verbal force alive: this is not a name for a benign lady but for someone actively doing something to something.

The first line is one name and must be recited on one breath, which is the difficulty of the verse. It is also the most heavily aspirated line in this stretch of the hymn: bhakta, bheda, bhānumad, bhānu — four labial aspirates, plus the bh already inside the first syllable. Each bh is a single letter, b with breath forced through the release, and it is quite distinct from the unaspirated b. English speakers usually produce something close to the aspirated version by accident and the unaspirated one only with effort, so the risk in this line is the opposite of the usual one: not too little breath but a slack, indistinct b that could be either.

Two sandhis inside the compound are worth seeing, since they explain spellings that otherwise look arbitrary. Tamas ends in s, which before the voiced bh of bheda becomes o: tamas plus bheda gives tamobheda. And bhānumat ends in an unvoiced t, which before the same voiced consonant becomes d: bhānumat plus bhānu gives bhānumadbhānu. Both changes are the language doing what mouths do anyway, voicing a consonant before a voiced one, and once a reciter recognises the pattern a great many compound spellings in this hymn stop needing to be memorised.

The second line is easy to say and easy to miscount, for the same reason. Four names, each opening with śiva, and nothing but the endings to tell them apart. Fix them by the sequence of relations rather than by sound: messenger, worshipper, form, maker. The ś of śiva is palatal, made with the blade of the tongue near the hard palate, closer to the sh of sheep than to the s of see, and it should be the same sound all four times.

Śivārādhyā contains a join that swallows a vowel. The elements are śiva and ārādhyā, and a short a followed by a long ā produces a single long ā, so the word has four syllables and not five. In śivaṅkarī the nasal written ṅ is the guttural nasal, the ng of sing, and it is there because the following consonant is the guttural k; the tongue makes one closure at the back of the mouth for both sounds rather than two.

For archanā the four short names take three different endings, which makes the line a useful exercise. Śivadūtyai and śivamūrtyai and śivaṅkaryai all shorten a final ī or i into y before the ending, while śivārādhyāyai, being an ā-stem, takes the full -āyai. The long first name gives bhaktāhārdatamobhedabhānumadbhānusantatyai, which is worth attempting once slowly if only to feel how far a Sanskrit compound can be extended without ceasing to be a single word.

What the verse asks of the person chanting is contained in the first line's choice of image. The darkness it names is specifically located — hārda, in the heart, and belonging to bhaktas, to those who are already devoted, not to unbelievers or enemies. The hymn is not describing the enlightenment of the world. It is describing something inside the person reciting, and it does not promise that the darkness will be gone after this verse. Sunlight is continuous or it is nothing.