Approved by the learned, and out of reach of speech

Śivapriyā and śivaparā make a pair by grammatical direction. Priyā is dear, beloved, with Śiva in the genitive as the one to whom she is dear; parā, whose ordinary sense is highest or furthest, has a second and very common use with a locative, meaning wholly intent on, having something as one's chief concern, the way a person may be called dharmapara or satyapara. So the first name puts the regard on his side and the second puts it on hers. Taken with the four names of the previous verse, where Śiva was successively her messenger, her worshipper and her form, these two restore a balance that had begun to look one-sided. The tradition does not want a goddess who has simply displaced a god; it wants a couple in which the direction of dependence can be stated either way without falsehood.

Śiṣṭa is a technical term and should not be softened into good people. It is the past participle of √śās, to instruct or discipline, and means one who has been instructed — a person formed by training rather than born to it. In the Dharmaśāstra literature the word designates a definite class of authority. When revealed scripture and remembered tradition are silent on a question, the conduct of the śiṣṭas becomes itself a source of dharma; Manu lists the practice of the good, along with what satisfies one's own conscience, among the roots of law. There were long arguments about who qualified, since the category has to be narrow enough to be authoritative and open enough to be discoverable, and the standard answer defines a śiṣṭa by his learning, his observance, and his freedom from craving rather than by his birth alone.

This makes śiṣṭeṣṭā and śiṣṭapūjitā more pointed than they look. They are a claim about orthodoxy. The worship of the Goddess in her tantric forms had a long and uncomfortable relationship with brahminical respectability, since much of the surrounding scriptural literature prescribes practices that ordinary dharma forbids, and the schools of Śrīvidyā in particular expended great effort demonstrating that their tradition was Vedic in substance if not in letter. Bhāskararāya, the commentator most often consulted on this hymn, spent much of his working life on exactly that project, writing on the Upaniṣadic texts the tradition claims for itself. To say that the śiṣṭas desire her and that the śiṣṭas worship her is to say that this worship falls inside the conduct of the learned and therefore inside dharma. The claim is being made in a hymn, which is where such claims are most effective, because a reciter absorbs them without noticing that an argument has been conducted.

The second line changes discipline entirely and speaks the language of epistemology. Prameya is a term of art: from pra-√mā, to measure, it means what is measurable and hence what can be known by a valid means of knowledge. Indian philosophers organise the whole business of knowing around three items — the knower, the means, and the prameya, the knowable — and the Nyāya school makes prameya one of its sixteen fundamental categories. Aprameyā therefore does not mean immeasurably great. It means that she does not occupy the position of the object in the structure of knowledge, that no instrument of cognition has her as its target.

Svaprakāśā supplies the reason. Self-luminosity is the Advaita name for the peculiar status of consciousness: a lamp does not need a second lamp to be seen, and consciousness is not known by some further act of knowing but is the condition under which anything is known at all. The Nyāya thinkers disputed this, holding that a cognition is itself made known by a subsequent cognition, and the debate ran for centuries. What matters for the verse is the order of the two names. She is not a knowable because she is self-revealing, and these are not two independent compliments but a premise and its consequence stated backwards. Anything that shines by its own light cannot be turned into an object without ceasing to be what it is.

Manovācāmagocarā finishes the argument with an image drawn from cattle. Gocara is literally the going-place of cows, a pasture, and by extension the range within which anything operates — a hawk's territory, a sense organ's field, the scope of a faculty. To be agocara of mind and speech is not to be far away but to be outside the enclosure in which those two can graze at all. The Upaniṣads had said this first and more memorably, in the line about words turning back, unable to reach it, together with the mind. What is worth noticing is where the hymn chooses to put it. This is roughly the four hundred and fifteenth name of a thousand. Having announced that speech does not reach her, the text goes on speaking for another five hundred and eighty-five names, and the tradition has never regarded that as an inconsistency. The recitation is not an attempt to describe her; it is what one does with speech once it has been established that describing her is not on offer.

The first line contains one of the most useful pronunciation drills in the hymn, because it puts the two sibilants side by side in successive words. The ś of śiva is palatal, made with the blade of the tongue near the hard palate, close to the sh of sheep. The ṣ of śiṣṭa is retroflex, made with the tip of the tongue curled back toward the roof of the mouth, and it is followed immediately by a retroflex ṭ made at the same place. So śiṣṭa begins forward, moves back, and stays back: ś-i-ṣ-ṭ-a. Reciters who make no distinction produce shishta, which is not wrong so much as blurred, and the difference matters throughout this literature because ś and ṣ are separate letters that distinguish separate words.

Śiṣṭeṣṭā has a join that hides one of its vowels. The elements are śiṣṭa and iṣṭā, and a short a followed by a short i gives e, so the two words fuse into three syllables with an e at the seam. The name accordingly has the same śiṣṭa in it as the name that follows, though nothing on the surface shows it. Saying śiṣṭa iṣṭā slowly once, then closing the gap, makes the structure audible.

In the second line, manovācām is manas plus vācām, with the final s of manas becoming o before the voiced v — the same change that produced tamobheda in the previous verse. The form vācām is a genitive plural that has been kept intact inside the compound rather than reduced to its stem, which is slightly unusual and which the metre presumably wanted; the effect is that the name has an audible case-ending buried in the middle of it. Agocarā then adds the negative prefix a-, and because the preceding element ends in a consonant, no further change occurs.

Svaprakāśā opens with a cluster English does not use initially: a dental s released straight into v. Keep the s at the teeth and do not let a vowel appear between the two. The pra that follows is the same cluster met four times in the eighty-sixth verse, and the ā of -kāśā is long, which the metre requires.

For archanā this verse is the simplest in the neighbourhood and worth using as a confidence exercise. All seven names are feminine ā-stems, so all seven take the same dative ending: śivapriyāyai, śivaparāyai, śiṣṭeṣṭāyai, śiṣṭapūjitāyai, aprameyāyai, svaprakāśāyai, manovācāmagocarāyai. After the previous verse, where three different patterns appeared in four short names, the uniformity here is a relief and a good place to let the ending settle into the ear.

As for what the verse asks: it asks the reciter to hold two things that do not obviously sit together. The first half locates this worship inside a tradition, among people who have been taught and who observe what they were taught, and it does so in the vocabulary of social approval. The second half says that nothing anyone has been taught, and nothing anyone can say, reaches its object. The verse does not resolve the tension, and the practice it describes consists largely of living inside it — following a form of worship whose warrant is that competent people follow it, addressed to someone the same competent people agree cannot be addressed.