Seated on the principles, hidden in the sheaths, flushed with wine

Tattva is one of the plainest words in philosophical Sanskrit and one of the hardest to translate. It is the pronoun tad, "that", with the abstract suffix -tva: that-ness, the state of being what a thing is. So a tattva is a reality in the strict sense, a principle that is not reducible to anything further down the list, and each school of Indian philosophy is partly identifiable by how many it counts. Sāṃkhya counts twenty-five, running from the five gross elements up through the senses, mind, ego and intellect to unmanifest nature and, standing apart from all of it, the conscious witness. The Śaiva and Śākta systems accept that list and extend it upward by eleven more, adding the veils that individuate consciousness — the constraints of time, limited agency, limited knowledge, desire and fate, together with māyā — and above those the pure principles that end in Śiva and Śakti. Either way, a tattva is a rung, and the whole set is the ladder by which the world is built downward from consciousness into matter.

Tattvāsanā is a bahuvrīhi: she whose seat is the tattvas. What the compound does with that ladder is startling if you have just been reading Sāṃkhya. The entire apparatus of world-construction, the thirty-six principles that between them account for everything there is, is here demoted to furniture. She sits on it. The hymn is fond of this move and makes it more than once, seating her elsewhere on a couch whose supports are the five great gods; the point in every case is that whatever a system takes as its ultimate terms turns out, in her case, to be the thing beneath her.

The second word of the verse is written as a single unit, tattvamayī, "made of the tattvas", and the received list of a thousand names divides it into three: tat, tvam, ayī. This is one of a handful of places where the count only comes out right if a written word is broken, and the commentators generally accept the division rather than argue for it. What it yields is the great sentence of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, tat tvam asi, "that thou art", which Uddālaka Āruṇi repeats nine times to his son Śvetaketu — with one substitution. The copula asi, "thou art", has been replaced by ayi, the ordinary Sanskrit particle of address, lengthened here to fit. The statement of identity has become a calling out. Read as one word, the name says she is the substance of everything; read as three, it says she is the subject of that identity and also the vocative in which someone turns toward her. Both readings stand in the tradition, and neither cancels the other.

Kośa means a sheath, the scabbard a sword goes into, and also a treasury and a bud. The five sheaths belong to the second chapter of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad, which proceeds by a repeated formula: within this one, another, further in. The self made of food gives way to one made of breath, that to one made of mind, that to one made of understanding, and that to one made of bliss. Each is described as having the shape of a bird, with a head, wings and a tail, and each is said to be filled by the next. Later Vedānta made this into a standard method of self-inquiry, peeling the layers to find what is not any of them. Pañcakośāntarasthitā places her at the end of that peeling. She is not a sixth sheath; she is what abiding within all five means.

The last three names let the pressure out. Niḥsīma-mahimā uses mahiman, the abstract noun of greatness — the same word that stands behind the ritual phrase for a god's own majesty — and denies it any sīman, any boundary line of the sort that separates one field from the next. Nityayauvanā fixes her at the age the tradition always visualizes her at, sixteen, an age that in this school is also a number of syllables and a name of the goddess. And mada, the last word, is the word for wine, for the intoxication wine produces, and for the rut-fluid that runs down a bull elephant's temples in season. The commentators generally read it in two registers at once: as the ritual wine of the left-hand offering, and as the bliss of her union with Śiva, described in yogic terms as a nectar flowing at the crown of the head. The hymn does not choose between them, and it does not apologise for the word.

The first line is a run of dental stops and it will punish carelessness. Tattvāsanā opens with tat, closed firmly on the teeth, and then tvā — so the doubled t is genuinely doubled, held for a beat, with the v released after it as its own consonant and the ā long. Say tat-tvā-sa-nā rather than letting the cluster collapse into something like "tatwa". The same cluster returns immediately in tattvamayī, which is the whole difficulty of the line: two nearly identical four-syllable words in a row, differing only in their endings.

When this verse is used for archanā, name by name with an offering at each, it produces one of the few real irregularities in the whole stotra. Almost every name in the hymn is a feminine ā-stem and takes the dative ending -āyai, and the ear comes to expect it. Here the ear is broken three times over. Tat becomes tasmai, the neuter dative of the demonstrative; tvam becomes tubhyam, the dative of the second-person pronoun; ayī becomes ayyai. And niḥsīmamahimā, because it ends in the an-stem mahiman rather than in -ā, takes niḥsīmamahimne, which looks and sounds masculine and is simply what that declension does. Reciters who have learned the -āyai ending as a reflex regularly stumble at these four, and the remedy is to learn them as exceptions before the reflex sets in rather than after.

Pañcakośāntarasthitā is eight syllables and fills the second half of the line by itself. It hides a join: kośa ends in short a, antar begins in short a, and the two combine into the long ā of kośāntara. Knowing that keeps the vowel long, which the metre requires. The cluster sth in sthitā is a dental s followed by an aspirated dental th, with no vowel between them and no English "th" sound anywhere in the vicinity — release the s directly into a t with breath behind it.

In the second line, niḥsīma begins with a visarga, normally heard as a light breath carrying a faint echo of the preceding vowel before the s; do not turn it into a full syllable. Nityayauvanā contains au, which is a full-length diphthong and takes twice the time of a short vowel; clipping it toward the vowel of English "cow" is the commonest fault in the line. Madaśālinī ends in a long ī and gives madaśālinyai in the dative, where the ī contracts to y before the ending.

The caesura falls where the anuṣṭubh always puts it, after the sixteenth syllable, which here is the end of pañcakośāntarasthitā. That is the seam between the philosophical half of the verse and the intoxicated half, and it is the only place to breathe.

As for what the verse asks of the person chanting it: the second line is not decoration attached to the first. A reciter trained in Vedānta will want to hurry past mada, or to convert it into a metaphor before it has been allowed to mean anything. The verse puts the analysis and the wine in the same breath group on purpose. What is found inside the five sheaths, it says, is not an abstraction but something with a face, and the face is flushed.