Milk-rice, the skin, and terror to the bound

Pāyasa is rice cooked in milk, sweetened, the plainest festival food in India and the offering made at almost every domestic rite. Each of the six yoginīs in this section is given her own dish, and the assignment is not decorative: in the tantric handling of the body, feeding the deity at a wheel is a real operation, and the food named is what the practitioner actually cooks and offers when the worship of that wheel is performed. Milk-rice for the throat is the mildest of the six, which suits a wheel whose element is space and whose business is purification.

Tvac is skin. The hymn assigns each yoginī a bodily constituent, and taken together they run from the outside of the body to its innermost core: skin, blood, flesh, fat, bone, marrow, and finally the generative essence at the crown. Readers who know Āyurveda will notice that this is not quite the classical list of seven dhātus, which begins with rasa, the nutrient fluid, rather than with skin. The substitution matters for what the hymn is doing. Beginning at the skin makes the sequence a movement inward through the body's layers, from the surface a hand can touch to the substance sealed inside the bones, and it matches the direction of the section as a whole, which starts at the throat and works down and in.

Paśu is the technical term that needs the most care. Its ordinary meaning is a domestic animal, especially one tethered for sacrifice, and it is built on the same root as pāśa, a rope or noose. Śaiva theology took the pair and made a system of it: pati, paśu and pāśa — the lord, the bound creature, and the bonds. The soul is not different in kind from the lord; it is the same thing with a rope on it, and the ropes are named as impurity, action and the deluding power of appearances. Everything the tradition means by liberation is contained in the image, since an animal that is untied does not become a different animal. Paśupati, the lord of the tethered, is one of Śiva's oldest names.

Kaula literature added a second use of the word. It sorts practitioners into three dispositions — the paśu, who keeps the conventional rules and needs them; the vīra, the hero, who is fit for the practices that break them; and the divya, the one for whom the distinction has stopped applying. In that usage paśu is not an insult but a diagnosis, and the practices reserved from the paśu are reserved because they would harm him. Paśulokabhayaṅkarī, terror to the world of the tethered, works on both senses at once, and the commentators generally take it in two ways that do not exclude each other. She frightens the conventionally bound because what she is and what her worship involves is genuinely alarming from inside the rules. And she is terrible to the bondage itself: what she destroys is the rope, so that fear is what her approach looks like from the animal's side of it.

The fourth name puts sixteen powers around her. The throat lotus is described with sixteen petals, matched to the sixteen vowels of the Sanskrit alphabet, and the śaktis seated on them are headed by Amṛtā, the deathless — the same word as the nectar the churning of the ocean was undertaken to obtain. Lists of the remaining fifteen circulate and do not agree from text to text, which is why the hymn names only the first and says and the rest. The number itself is doing the work: sixteen is the count of the lunar digits, of the vowels, and of the nityā goddesses, and its recurrence at this wheel ties the throat to the moon and to speech at once.

Ḍākinī is a word of uncertain origin, and the honest position is that nobody knows where it comes from. In the earlier Sanskrit sources a ḍākinī is a flesh-eating female spirit of the cremation ground in the train of Kālī, of the same family as the yoginīs and the śākinīs; in Buddhist tantra the term was raised to name a class of enlightened female figures and became central to the tradition. Here it has undergone a third transformation. The hymn makes the ḍākinī the presiding goddess of a wheel of the body and then makes her an aspect of Lalitā, so that īśvarī in ḍākinīśvarī does two things: it says she rules the ḍākinīs, and it says the ruler and the ruled are the same.

The first line is the phonetically demanding one. Tvaksthā packs five consonants around a single vowel: t, v, k, s, th, and then the long ā. Take it in two halves. Tvak is t and v pronounced together, the tongue at the teeth and the lower lip near them at almost the same moment, followed by k. Then sthā is s, then the aspirated dental th, then the vowel. The join is a k running straight into an s with no vowel between them, and the only way to get it is slowly first: tvak, pause, sthā, then close the gap without inserting anything. Do not let the th become the English th of thin; it is a t with breath after it.

Paśulokabhayaṅkarī has two sounds English speakers regularly miss. The ś in paśu is the palatal sibilant, made with the middle of the tongue against the hard palate, softer and further forward than the retroflex ṣ. And the ṅ in bhayaṅkarī is the nasal formed where k is formed — the sound in the middle of anchor. Say bha-yaṅ-ka-rī with the nasal fully closed before the k releases. The bh at the head of bhaya is one aspirated labial, not b followed by h.

The second line is a single enormous compound followed by a four-syllable name, and the compound has to be understood to be said: amṛta, ādi, mahā, śakti, saṃvṛta. Two of its syllables carry the vocalic ṛ, in mṛ and in vṛ. This is a vowel, not the sequence r plus i, and the tongue is curled toward the roof of the mouth for its whole duration. Southern recitation often gives it a following u-colour and northern recitation an i-colour; either is defensible, but keep whichever you choose consistent across the two syllables, since they sit ten syllables apart in the same word and an inconsistency is audible.

The saṃ of saṃvṛtā is an anusvāra before v, which in careful recitation is nasalised as a labial-ish hum rather than pronounced as a full m — the sound is closed into the nose while the lips prepare for the v. Making it a clean m is a common and forgivable simplification; leaving it out entirely is not, because the syllable is metrically long.

Ḍākinīśvarī opens with the retroflex ḍ, the tongue curled well back. It is the same articulation you have just used for the ṛ vowels, so the second line ends where its middle was: keep the tongue high and back and the word arrives on its own.

In the archanā, note that the two long compounds decline as single words: pāyasānnapriyāyai namaḥ, amṛtādimahāśaktisaṃvṛtāyai namaḥ. Only the last element takes the ending, however long the chain in front of it. And ḍākinīśvarī, being an ī-stem, gives ḍākinīśvaryai.

As for what is being asked here: the verse is where the section stops being iconography and becomes anatomy. The tissue named is the reciter's own skin. Whether or not one accepts the correspondences as physiology, taking them as intended means letting the attention rest at the surface of the body while the name is said, and noticing that the hymn has just fed a goddess a bowl of rice at the base of one's own throat.