Consciousness and dead matter, and the brahmin's daily prayer

Cit is consciousness in its barest sense, not thought or perception but the fact of awareness; jaḍa is its contradictory, the cold, stiff, unknowing. Nearly every Indian philosophical system runs a hard line between them. Sāṃkhya sets a conscious witness against an unconscious nature and calls liberation the discovery that they were never mixed. Advaita defines the insentient precisely as what cannot reveal itself, which is why the previous verse's svaprakāśā, self-luminous, is the technical opposite of jaḍa — and why finding jaḍātmikā two verses later is a deliberate provocation rather than an oversight. The hymn has said within a few lines both that she is what shines by its own light and that she is what has no light of its own.

Cicchakti is a term with a specific home. In the Pratyabhijñā philosophy of Kashmir, which this tradition draws on heavily, the absolute is analysed as possessing five powers — consciousness, bliss, will, knowledge and action — of which cit-śakti is the first and the ground of the rest. Śakti in that usage is not an energy added to consciousness but consciousness considered as capacity, the aspect under which awareness is able to do anything at all. Cetanā, from the same root, is sentience as a state rather than a power, and cetanārūpā says it is her form. The two names together cover both what consciousness can do and what it is.

The two jaḍa names then reproduce the structure exactly. Jaḍaśakti says that the power operating in insentient things is hers — that whatever holds a stone together or moves water downhill is not a rival principle but the same agency working where nobody is home. Jaḍātmikā goes further and says that insentience is her own nature, using ātman, self, where the previous pair used rūpa, form. This is a genuinely difficult claim and the commentators handle it in different ways. Some read the jaḍa names as referring to māyā and its products, her power of concealment rather than her essence; others take the identification at face value, on the grounds that a monism that quarantines a portion of the world is not a monism. Nothing in the grammar settles the question, and it is worth knowing that the tradition itself has not fully settled it either.

The second line is a different kind of writing altogether and requires no philosophy. Gāyatrī is the name of a Vedic metre — three feet of eight syllables — and, by long transfer, of the single most recited verse in that metre, a prayer to the sun god Savitṛ found in the third book of the Ṛgveda and ascribed to the seer Viśvāmitra. Strictly it should be called the Sāvitrī, since it addresses Savitṛ and is only in the gāyatrī metre, but usage settled otherwise many centuries ago. The traditional etymology derives the name from the idea that it protects the one who sings it, which is philologically loose but tells you how the verse was regarded. Gāyatrī is also a goddess in her own right in the Purāṇic material, and identifying her with the supreme Goddess is not this hymn's innovation.

Vyāhṛti, an action noun from vi-ā-√hṛ, is an utterance or calling-out, and names the short words prefixed to the Gāyatrī in recitation: bhūḥ, bhuvaḥ, svaḥ — earth, midspace, heaven. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad discusses them, adds a fourth on the authority of a named teacher, and identifies them with Brahman; later ritual manuals extend the series to seven for certain rites. They are not translated in practice and function less as words than as the naming of the levels through which the recitation is understood to travel.

Sandhyā, from sam-√dhā, to join, is the seam — the juncture of night and day at dawn, of morning and afternoon at noon, of day and night at dusk. It names both the hour and the observance performed at it, the sandhyāvandana, whose core is exactly the recitation of the Gāyatrī with its vyāhṛtis. So the three names are not three separate goddesses but three components of one rite, listed in the order in which a person performing it encounters them. And the fourth name supplies the person. Dvija, twice-born, refers to the second birth conferred at initiation, when a boy receives the sacred thread and, more importantly, the Gāyatrī itself; the ordinary word for a bird uses the same logic, born once as an egg and again out of it. The verse therefore closes a circle. She is the verse by which the twice-born became twice-born, and the throngs of them who now attend on her are attending on the thing that made them what they are. Coming immediately after two names in the previous verse about the approval of the learned, the line is doing the same work: a tantric hymn is claiming the most conventional Vedic observance in India as worship of its own goddess.

The very first word contains the hardest sandhi in this part of the hymn, and it is worth learning rather than imitating. The elements are cit and śakti. When a final t meets a following ś, the t becomes c and the ś becomes ch, so cit-śakti is written and said cicchakti. The result is a doubled affricate: hold the c, then release it as the aspirated ch. Then the visarga at the end of that word, standing before the c of cetanā, becomes ś — which is why the line begins cicchaktiś cetanārūpā and not cicchaktiḥ. Three consonant changes in the first four syllables, and all three are the same principle, that Sanskrit assimilates a sound to what follows it.

The corresponding join in the second half is easier. Jaḍaśaktiḥ before the voiced j of jaḍātmikā turns its visarga into r: jaḍaśaktir jaḍātmikā. The ḍ in jaḍa is retroflex, made with the tongue tip curled back, and it is a different letter from the dental d in words like dāyinī. English d is made in between the two and will sound wrong for both; for jaḍa, err toward the back.

The two halves of the first line are built to be confused, since each is a śakti-name followed by an identity-name. Fix the order by the argument: consciousness first, matter second, because the verse is moving outward from the least controversial claim to the most. Nobody objects to calling her the power of consciousness. Calling her the inert is the point of the line.

In the second line, vyāhṛtiḥ combines two things English lacks. The initial vy is a labiodental v released straight into the palatal glide y, and the ṛ is a vowel in its own right, one short beat with the tongue curled toward the roof of the mouth, not the two sounds of English rih. Sandhyā has the cluster ndhy: a dental n, then an aspirated dental dh, then the glide, all in one syllable and all without a vowel between them. Take it slowly; the temptation is to break it into san-dhi-yā, which adds a syllable the metre does not have.

Niṣevitā, at the end, shows the same kind of rule as śarīriṇī five verses earlier, but for sibilants. The prefix is ni and the root is √sev, and the s has become retroflex ṣ under the influence of the preceding i. Sanskrit does this after i, u, ṛ and k with great regularity, and once a reciter has seen the pattern, spellings like niṣevita, abhiṣeka and suṣumṇā stop looking like exceptions.

For archanā, the four ā-stems take -āyai — cetanārūpāyai, jaḍātmikāyai, sandhyāyai, dvijavṛndaniṣevitāyai — while the i-stems and the ī-stem give cicchaktyai, jaḍaśaktyai, vyāhṛtyai and gāyatryai, all of them turning the final vowel into y before the ending.

What the verse asks depends on who is chanting it. For a person who performs the sandhyā rite daily, the second line reclassifies an obligation as an encounter: the same syllables at the same hour, now addressed to somebody. For a person who does not — and most reciters of this hymn today do not, since the rite was never open to everyone and is now widely neglected by those to whom it was — the line has a different force. It names a practice the reciter is not doing and calls it her. The hymn does not resolve that either. It simply records that she is the prayer, the hour, and the crowd of people saying it.