Rākiṇī at the heart: unstruck sound, fangs, a rosary

Anāhata is a past participle with a negative prefix: a-nā-hata, not struck, from the root han, to strike or kill. The word belongs to a technical distinction in Indian thinking about sound. Ordinary sound is āhata, struck — produced when two things meet, a stick on a drumhead, breath against the vocal folds, one object against another. Every sound anyone has ever heard is of this kind, and every such sound begins and ends. Set against it the tradition posits anāhata sound, which is not produced by contact and therefore does not begin or end. It is the sound that is always sounding, and the yogin is said to become able to hear it when the noise made by striking dies down. The wheel at the heart is named for it, and to call her seat the unstruck lotus is to place her at the point in the body where that sound is located.

This is not an isolated piece of mysticism. It is continuous with a very old and very technical argument in Indian philosophy about the status of the Veda. The orthodox position is that scripture is apauruṣeya, not made by any person, and that it is śruti — what was heard, not what was composed. If the words are eternal and uncreated, they cannot have been struck out of anything, and something like the distinction between struck and unstruck sound is required to make the claim coherent. The tantric traditions took the same distinction and internalised it, mapping the levels of speech onto the body: an unmanifest level, then a level of the merely audible, with graded stages between. The lotus at the heart marks the transition. Below it sound is a movement of breath; at it and above it, sound is something else.

The heart as an interior room is one of the oldest images in Indian religious literature. The Chāndogya Upaniṣad speaks of a small lotus dwelling in the city of brahman with a space inside it, and instructs the student to look for what is contained in that space. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad puts a person the size of a thumb there. This hymn's heart lotus has twelve petals and the element of air, and it is inhabited by a goddess named Rākiṇī, whose name the verse withholds until the following one.

Śyāmā is the word for the dark colours that Sanskrit does not distinguish as English does: black, dark blue, dark green, the blue-black of a raincloud, the colour of Kṛṣṇa and of Kālī. Ābhā is a sheen or a splendour, so the compound says her sheen itself is dark, which is a paradox in the same family as unstruck sound — a radiance that darkens rather than lights. It is a standing description of powerful goddesses in this literature and is never a description of gloom.

Daṃṣṭrā is the large projecting tooth, the tusk of a boar or the fang of a snake, and daṃṣṭrā-ujjvalā says she blazes with them: they catch light. Fangs are the standard mark of the fearsome form in Indian iconography, and Arjuna's terror in the eleventh chapter of the Gītā is caused specifically by seeing them. That the heart-goddess of this hymn has them is a corrective worth taking seriously. The heart in this scheme is not the seat of sentiment; it is the seat of the sound that never stops, and what guards it has teeth.

Akṣamālā is the string of beads used for counting repetitions of a mantra, ordinarily made from rudrākṣa seeds or from the seeds of certain other trees. But akṣa also means a syllable — it is the word behind akṣara, the imperishable, which is the standard term for a written or spoken letter — and the tradition regularly reads the goddess's rosary as the garland of letters, the whole Sanskrit alphabet from a to kṣa strung in order. Under that reading what she holds is not a counting device but the phonetic material of the universe, which is a claim this hymn makes about her elsewhere in plainer terms. The two readings are complementary rather than rival, and the placement here is apt: at the wheel of unstruck sound she carries sound in its beaded, countable, struck form.

Rudhira is blood, the second of the bodily constituents in the sequence the hymn is descending. The word is related to the ordinary adjective for red, and its choice over the more clinical śoṇita gives the line its weight.

Two sandhi joins in this verse have to be understood before it can be said correctly, and they are of different kinds, which makes the verse an unusually good lesson.

In the first line, anāhata plus abja gives anāhatābja: a short a at the end of the first word and a short a at the start of the second combine into a single long ā. Two short vowels have become one long one, and nothing is lost in speech — there is no pause, and the syllable is long.

In the second line, ujjvalā plus akṣamālā is printed with an avagraha: ujjvalā'kṣamālā. Here a long ā has swallowed a following short a, and the mark records the disappearance of that short a. The result sounds identical to the first case — one long ā — but the arithmetic is different, and it matters because the mark is telling you that a name boundary falls inside the vowel. Daṃṣṭrojjvalā and akṣamālādidharā are two separate names of the thousand, and in the archanā they come apart cleanly again.

A third join, within a single name, produces the o of daṃṣṭrojjvalā: daṃṣṭrā ends in ā, ujjvala begins in u, and ā plus u gives o. Sanskrit o is always long. There is no short o in the language, and reciters who clip it damage the metre.

The consonant clusters here are among the hardest in the hymn. Ṣṭra in daṃṣṭrā stacks a retroflex sibilant, a retroflex stop and an r, all three with the tongue curled back: hold the curl through the whole cluster rather than resetting between the sounds. Jjva in ujjvalā is a doubled palatal j followed by v — a genuinely long consonant, and the length is what the metre depends on. Say uj-jva-lā with the closure held. Kṣa in akṣamālā is k followed by the retroflex ṣ, pronounced as a sequence and not as the English x; in some regional recitation styles it approaches a cha-like sound, but the analytic pronunciation is the safer one to learn.

The first line, by contrast, is almost all open syllables and moves fast: only two clusters in sixteen syllables, the bja and the dva. Let it run, and save the effort for the second line. The contrast is worth hearing — the wheel of unstruck sound gets a line that flows, and the goddess with the tusks gets a line you have to bite through.

Śyāmābhā begins with the palatal śa followed immediately by ya, both made at the same place in the mouth. Do not insert a vowel between them. The bh of ābhā is one aspirated labial.

In the archanā, all six names are ā-stems and all six take -āyai, from anāhatābjanilayāyai through rudhirasaṃsthitāyai. After the trap in the throat-wheel verses this uniformity is a relief.

What the verse asks is that the attention move down from the throat to the middle of the chest and stay there while the six names are said. The traditional instruction for this section is simply to be at the named place. Here the place is the one where, according to the name of the wheel itself, something can be heard when the reciting stops.