Ḍākinī at the throat, three-eyed and armed

The six wheels are stations on the central channel that runs from the base of the trunk to the crown, each pictured as a lotus with a fixed number of petals, a seed-syllable, an element, a presiding god and goddess, and a set of attendant powers seated on the petals. The scheme in the form best known today was systematised late — the Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa, a sixteenth-century chapter that Arthur Avalon translated as The Serpent Power, is the text most people are actually quoting when they describe the cakras — but its components are much older and the tantras vary considerably in the details. This hymn's version is one such variant, and readers who come to it from a yoga manual will find the correspondences do not always match.

The order is the first surprise. The hymn does not start at the base and climb. It starts at the throat, works downward through the heart, the navel, the genitals and the base, and only then jumps to the brow and the crown. Commentators account for this in different ways and there is no settled explanation; what can be said is that the descent follows a coherent sequence of bodily tissues, from the skin inward to the marrow, and that this ordering by tissue rather than by ascent gives the section its logic.

Viśuddhi is vi plus śuddhi, thorough cleansing, from the root śudh. Its element is space, its lotus has sixteen petals bearing the sixteen vowels, and it sits at the base of the throat. The association of the throat with purification has an obvious mythological anchor. When the gods and the antigods churned the ocean of milk for the draught of immortality, what came up first was not the nectar but a poison, halāhala, dense enough to end the world. Śiva drank it and held it in his throat, which turned dark and gave him the name Nīlakaṇṭha, the blue-throated. He neither swallowed it nor spat it out. The wheel of purification is placed exactly where that happened, and the point is not that impurity is removed but that it is held and neutralised at the passage.

The goddess who holds the wheel is Ḍākinī. The ḍākinī in earlier literature is a fearsome female spirit of the cremation ground, an attendant of Kālī, and in Buddhist tantra the word names a whole class of enlightened female figures. Here she has been drawn into the Śrīvidyā body-scheme and made an aspect of the central goddess herself, which is what allows the hymn to name her among the thousand. She is three-eyed, and three eyes are the standard mark of Śiva; the tradition reads them as sun, moon and fire, the two lights that measure time and the one that consumes it. The third eye is also the weapon: when Kāma shot his flower-arrow at Śiva to break his meditation and turn him toward Pārvatī, Śiva opened the middle eye and burned him to ash on the spot, after which Kāma was known as Ananga, the bodiless — a story this hymn returns to elsewhere, and one that makes the third eye an instrument of destruction rather than of insight alone.

The khaṭvāṅga is a club made from the leg of a bedstead with a skull fixed at the top, and it belongs to a specific religious world. It is the emblem of the Kāpālikas, the skull-bearing ascetics, and behind it stands the story of Śiva striking off the fifth head of Brahmā and having to wander as a beggar with the skull stuck to his hand until the guilt of brahmanicide was worked off. The staff is the penance made into an ornament. Its appearance in the hands of the throat-goddess of a hymn otherwise full of jewels and flowers is a deliberate importation of the cremation ground into the body. The compound ends in ādi, and the rest, which is the text's own admission that the full list of what she carries is not fixed; the iconographic manuals give her different numbers of arms and different implements.

One face, finally, and the number is meant literally. The count rises by one at each wheel as the hymn descends, reaching six at the brow. Whatever else the series does, it makes the section impossible to recite out of order once you have heard it: the faces count you down the body.

The line-break in the first line falls inside a word, and the printed text shows it with a doubled avagraha: viśuddhicakranilayā''raktavarṇā. Two separate names have run together in sandhi. Nilayā ends in long ā and āraktavarṇā begins with long ā, and two long ās give a single long ā, so what you actually say is one continuous vowel — nilayāraktavarṇā — with nothing audible at the join. The double mark is an editorial convention telling you that a long ā has been absorbed, not an instruction to stop. Reciters who pause there produce a word that does not exist.

Because the names have fused, this is a place where people lose count. It is one word in the mouth and two names in the archanā, where they separate cleanly again as viśuddhicakranilayāyai namaḥ and āraktavarṇāyai namaḥ.

The consonants to work on are the retroflexes and the aspirates in khaṭvāṅgādipraharaṇā, which is the hardest word in the verse. It opens with kha, a single aspirated guttural — k with a following puff, not k plus h as two sounds. Then ṭvā, with the tongue curled back to the roof of the mouth for ṭ before the v. Then ṅgā, where ṅ is the nasal made at the same place as g, the sound English writes in singer; hold the nasal, then release the g cleanly. Then a long stretch of light syllables, di-pra-ha-ra, before the retroflex ṇā at the end. The word rewards being broken into its pieces — khaṭvā, aṅga, ādi, praharaṇa — and rebuilt.

In āraktavarṇā, note that the ṇ is retroflex because of the r that precedes it. This is a regular rule of Sanskrit and you will meet it constantly: an r or ṛ earlier in a word turns a following n into ṇ under the right conditions. Once you hear varṇā correctly you will hear praharaṇā correctly too, and both keep the tongue curled where careless recitation flattens them to dental n.

Trilocanā is easier than it looks. The tri is t followed by r, not the English tr of tree, which is made much further back; keep the t at the teeth. The o in locanā is always long in Sanskrit — there is no short o — so lo gets full value.

Vadanaikasamanvitā hides a join: vadana plus eka gives vadanaika, because a short a followed by e produces ai. Knowing this makes the word mean something instead of being a string of syllables, and it also fixes the diphthong, which is a full-length vowel, not a glide.

What the verse asks of the reciter is a shift of attention. Up to this point the hymn has described a goddess seated on a throne somewhere else. From here it describes the inside of the body of the person chanting. The traditional way of taking the section is to let the attention rest at the named place as the name is said — here, the hollow at the base of the throat, where the voice is being made. There is a plain physical sense to that: this is the one wheel you can feel working while you recite.