A face assembled name by name, and then declared too fine to see

The first line's names are the common currency of Sanskrit description, and they gain their force from placement rather than novelty. Sumukhī, lovely-faced, is a plain possessive compound; so is subhrūḥ, which uses bhrū, the eyebrow, one of the small class of nouns that resist a separate feminine and simply stay as they are. The eyebrow is a technical piece of Sanskrit poetic equipment: it is the arc against which the bow of Kāma is measured, and the space between the brows is where meditation is directed and where this hymn locates one of the centres of the body. Nalinī, lotus, comes from nalina, and behind that lies nala, a hollow reed or stalk — the plant is named for the tube that carries it to the surface. The word means the plant, the flower, and by extension the whole pond crowded with them, so the name is at once a comparison for her face and a picture of the water she rises out of.

Suranāyikā is the one name in the first line that is about rank rather than appearance, and both its halves have histories. Sura, a god, is almost certainly a back-formation: the old Vedic word asura, meaning lord and used of the highest gods, came to be heard as a-sura, "non-god", and a positive sura was then invented to fill the gap the false negative had opened. Nāyikā is the feminine of nāyaka, leader, and in the technical language of Sanskrit drama and poetics the nāyikā is the heroine, the woman around whom the emotional action turns. Both senses are live. She leads the gods, and she is the heroine of the story the gods are in.

Kālakaṇṭhī is the verse's one mythological name and its darkest. When the gods and the demons churned the ocean for the nectar of immortality, what came up before the nectar was a poison so virulent that it threatened to destroy the three worlds. Śiva drank it. In the most widely repeated version his wife caught his throat with her hand to keep it from going further down, so that it stayed lodged there and stained it, and he has been Nīlakaṇṭha, the blue-throated, ever since. To apply the feminine form of that epithet to her is to make one of two claims, and the commentators use both. Either she is not different from him, so that his marks are hers; or she was the reason the poison stopped where it did, and the dark throat is as much a record of her act as of his. Kāla means black and also means Time, and the hymn is entirely capable of intending a name to be heard twice.

Kṣobhiṇī comes from a root meaning to shake, to agitate, to throw into commotion — the word is used of a churned ocean, the same field of imagery as the name before it. In this school it is also a term of art. Kṣobha is the disturbance of a perfect equilibrium without which nothing can be manifested at all: creation begins as an agitation, not as an act of will, and the tradition's ritual vocabulary accordingly gives the name Sarvasaṃkṣobhiṇī, the all-agitating, to one of the hand-signs used in worship and to figures in the enclosures of the Śrīcakra. The name is not saying that she causes trouble. It is saying that she is the reason anything moves at all, which includes whatever unsettles a settled practitioner.

Sūkṣma, the last word of the verse, is the standard technical opposite of sthūla, gross. Sanskrit philosophy uses the pair for the gross and subtle elements, for the gross and subtle bodies, and for the two levels at which anything can be said to exist. Śrīvidyā applies the distinction to the goddess herself: she is generally taught to have a gross form, which is the figure described in the meditation verse with her noose, goad, bow and arrows; a subtle form, which is the mantra; and a form beyond both. On that reading sūkṣmarūpiṇī is not a vague statement about her being hard to see. It is a specific claim that the sound the reciter is producing is a body of hers, no less than the face the first line of this verse has just finished describing.

One more thing about this verse is worth naming, because it becomes visible only when a reader is far enough into the hymn. Kāntiḥ was given as a name sixteen names ago, and kāntimatī is given here; śāntiḥ was given in the same recent group, and śāntimatī appears far earlier in the text. The hymn reaches a thousand partly by taking a word and turning it over — as a bare abstract noun, as a possessive, as a compound — and a reader who suspects padding should notice that the grammar changes the claim each time. To be radiance and to possess radiance are not the same statement.

The verse divides by sound as cleanly as any in the hymn. Four of the five names in the first line begin with the sibilant s or ś; three of the four in the second begin with k. Reciters who have just come through the six ku- names a few verses earlier will recognise the technique. Use it: if you lose your place here, you have lost it inside a block of s-names or of k-names, which narrows the search considerably.

Subhrūḥ is the hardest syllable in the verse and one of the hardest in the hymn. It is a single syllable: bh, an aspirated labial released as one sound, then r, then a long ū, then the light breath of the visarga. It is not bhu-rū, and there is no vowel between the bh and the r. Slow it down, hold the ū, and let the visarga be an exhalation, not a syllable. In archanā this name becomes subhruve — the ū-stem takes -ve — which is one of the handful of places in the thousand where the familiar -āyai does not appear.

The verse continues the lesson in retroflex assimilation that the preceding one set up. Nalinī and kāntimatī keep the dental n of the feminine suffix; kṣobhiṇī and sūkṣmarūpiṇī have the retroflex ṇ. The trigger in both is the retroflex sibilant ṣ inside the conjunct kṣ, exactly as an r triggers it elsewhere. Nothing is arbitrary, and the contrast is audible if the consonants are given their proper places.

Kālakaṇṭhī contains ṇṭh: a retroflex nasal followed by an aspirated retroflex stop, the tongue curled well back for both, with the breath released on the ṭh. Kṣobhiṇī and sūkṣmarūpiṇī each begin or turn on kṣ, and in sūkṣma the conjunct is followed immediately by m, giving a three-consonant sequence in the middle of the word: sūk-ṣma, with the long ū before it carrying the weight of the syllable. Śobhanā opens with the palatal ś, made further forward than the retroflex ṣ of kṣobhiṇī, and the two sibilants should not collapse into one another.

What the verse asks of the person chanting it is a small exercise in letting go, and the order of the names supplies it. Meditation on a deity in this tradition proceeds by construction: the practitioner assembles the figure detail by detail, face, brows, throat, ornaments, until it stands complete and stable, and only then dissolves it into the mantra or into a point of light. This verse performs that sequence in sixteen syllables per line. A reciter can follow it deliberately — hold the face through the first line, hold the dark throat and the radiance through most of the second, and then, at sūkṣmarūpiṇī, let the picture go and attend only to the sound.

The kṣobhiṇī immediately before it makes that easier rather than harder. Something has to unsettle the image before it can be released, and the hymn has named the unsettling as hers too. Practitioners who have found their concentration breaking up at exactly the point where it seemed most secure will recognise the sequence, and may find it useful that the text treats the disturbance not as a failure of attention but as the next name.