Six names on one syllable, and the hymn names its own tradition

Kuśala, the first name, is one of those Sanskrit words whose two senses have drifted far enough apart that English needs two words for them. It means skilful, expert, adroit; it also means well, sound, in good order, and it is the ordinary word in the ordinary greeting — is all well with you? The grammarians offer a folk etymology from kuśa, the sacred grass used in every Vedic rite, on the theory that the skilled man is the one who knows how to cut it; the derivation is unlikely but it shows what kind of skill the word was felt to name, the competence of someone who performs a rite correctly. Komalākārā, which follows, is a plain bahuvrīhi: soft is her form. The two of them are the last easy words before the technical vocabulary starts.

Kurukullā is a goddess with a life outside this hymn, and an unusually wide one. In Buddhist tantric literature she is a well-attested figure, red in colour, associated with the power of enchantment and drawing others to oneself, and depicted with a bow and arrows made of flowers; the great Sanskrit collection of Buddhist visualisation manuals preserves a whole series of sādhanas addressed to her. The flowered bow is worth noticing, because Lalitā carries one too, and the shared iconography is a reminder that these traditions were neighbours who borrowed freely. In the Śrīvidyā setting Kurukullā is placed at the ring of nectar-water that encircles the goddess's city, and a line often repeated in this connection makes her the mother of the kula, paired with Vārāhī as its father — the two figures standing to an initiate as parents stand to a child. Readers should know that the sources for this pairing are ritual handbooks and commentary rather than a single scriptural verse, and that the details vary.

Kula is the pivot of the verse. In ordinary Sanskrit it means a family, a clan, a herd, a lineage. Tantric usage takes that sense of a bounded totality and enlarges it enormously. In the Kaula traditions kula comes to mean the whole embodied, energetic, manifest side of reality — power, the body, the group of yoginīs, the community of initiates — set against akula, the unmanifest Śiva who is not part of any family. A definition much quoted in this literature says that kula is Śakti, akula is Śiva, and Kaula is the joining of the two; the verse itself is variously attributed, but the formula is old and stable. So kuleśvarī, mistress of the kula, is both a modest claim — she rules the lineage — and an immodest one: she is sovereign over the entire manifest order, which is her own body.

Kulakuṇḍālayā localises all of this. Kuṇḍa is a round hollow, and in ritual it is specifically the pit in which the fire is laid; the word behind kuṇḍalinī belongs to the same family of round and coiled things. The kula pit is the hollow at the base of the spine where the coiled power is said to sleep with her mouth over the opening of the central channel, and the yogic literature of this school treats it as a real address rather than an image. To say that her dwelling is there is to say something quite specific about where a practitioner should be looking, and it stands in productive tension with the earlier names of the hymn that place her in the thousand-petalled lotus at the crown.

Kaulamārgatatparasevitā closes the verse with the practitioners. Tatpara means having that as one's highest object, wholly given over; sevitā is a past participle in the passive, so she is the one served, and the grammar keeps her from ever being the one who serves. The Kaula path is the tradition that admits the five substances — including wine, meat and ritual intercourse — into worship, on the argument that what binds an ordinary person liberates the one who is qualified. This has been contested inside Śrīvidyā for as long as the tradition has had commentators. The best-known dispute set the samaya school, which insists on purely internal worship in the upper centres of the body and reads every external element figuratively, against the kaula school, which retains the substances. The hymn declines to settle it. Only three hundred names earlier it has already called her the guardian of the kula's covenant and the yoginī of the kula, and immediately after those it calls her the one abiding within the samaya and devoted to the samaya practice. Commentators of each persuasion take their own set literally and the other set as a figure of speech, and a reader is entitled to notice that the text itself does not choose.

The alliteration is the first thing to deal with, because it is both a help and a trap. Six names, all beginning with the same velar stop, and four of them opening with a syllable that sounds nearly identical: ku-ru, ku-le, ku-la, kau-la. Reciters skip a name here more often than almost anywhere else in the hymn, and because the sound continues unbroken the ear does not catch the loss. The reliable defence is to memorise the sequence by its sense rather than by its sound, so that a missing step registers as a missing idea.

The difference between kula and kaula is a single vowel and a whole grammatical operation. Kaula is the vṛddhi derivative of kula: the initial u is strengthened to au, giving the sense "belonging to, deriving from the kula". The same process produces vaiṣṇava from viṣṇu, and it explains a great many names in this hymn. In recitation the au must be given its full length, twice the duration of the short u it derives from, which is exactly what separates kaula-mārga from kula-kuṇḍa two words earlier.

Kuleśvarī hides a join. The elements are kula and īśvarī; a final short a followed by an initial long ī combines into e, which is why the compound comes out as kuleśvarī rather than kulaīśvarī. Sanskrit e is always long, so the middle syllable of this name is a full-length vowel. The śv that follows is a palatal ś released directly into v, with no vowel between. In archanā the name gives kuleśvaryai, the ī contracting to y before the ending, while the other five names in the verse are ā-stems and take the expected -āyai.

Kurukullā has a doubled l, and the doubling is audible: hold the l for a full extra beat, kurukul-lā. Kulakuṇḍālayā contains the retroflex cluster ṇḍ, tongue curled back, immediately followed by the long ā that results from kuṇḍa joining ālaya. The final name is ten syllables and fills more than half its line; break it for practice into kaula-mārga, tat-para, sevitā, and then run it as one word, since it is one word.

The names do not fall into even quarters here as they did in the verse before, so the metre gives less help than usual. Take the caesura after kulakuṇḍālayā and breathe only there.

What the verse asks is more difficult than how to pronounce it. Most people who recite the Lalitā Sahasranāma today have not been initiated into a Kaula lineage, and this verse tells them, in the plainest language the hymn uses, that the goddess they are addressing is served by people who have. There are two dishonest ways to handle that and one honest one. The dishonest ways are to pretend to a status one does not hold, and to explain the verse away, deciding in advance that kula can only mean the body so that nothing is being said about an actual tradition with actual practitioners. The honest way is to recite the names as they stand, acknowledging that the hymn comes out of a specific and still-living lineage and that its last name is about somebody else. Reciting a text well includes knowing whose text it is.