Lākinī at the navel, three-faced and armed with the thunderbolt

Maṇipūra is maṇi, a jewel, and pūra, which is both a city and a filling — the word is from the root that means to fill, and the same element makes the word for a flood. The wheel at the navel is therefore the jewel-city, or the place packed with jewels, and the explanation usually offered is that the fire located there makes the region shine like a heap of gems. Its element is fire, its lotus is described with ten petals, and its resident in this hymn is Lākinī, whose name the following verse supplies.

Fire at the navel is not a symbol in this literature but a physiological doctrine. The digestive fire, jāṭharāgni, is what cooks food into a body, and the Bhagavad Gītā states plainly that the lord becomes this fire, takes up residence in the bodies of living beings, joins himself to the breath, and digests. The four grades of food it names are the classical division into what is chewed, drunk, licked and sucked. When a tantric text puts a wheel of fire at the navel it is drawing on that, and when the ritual offers cooked food to the deity at that wheel it is doing something the physiology supports: the fire that is being fed is the one that does the cooking.

The navel is also, in Indian cosmogony, where the world comes from. The Puruṣa hymn of the Ṛgveda derives the midspace from the navel of the primordial person, and the Purāṇic image that grew from that line — Viṣṇu asleep on the serpent with a lotus rising out of his navel and Brahmā seated on it, beginning to create — is one of the two or three most reproduced images in Indian art. To seat a goddess on a lotus at the navel is to place her at the point that iconography has already established as the origin of worlds. It also puts her, more prosaically, at the middle of the body, and it is a curiosity of the hymn's arithmetic that the five-hundredth of the thousand names falls a line or two after this one, in the same wheel. Whether that is design or accident cannot be determined, but the reader who is counting will notice it.

The vajra returns here from earlier in the hymn. As the hard thing that cuts and is not cut, and as the weapon the Purāṇas say was forged from the bones of a sage who gave up his body for the purpose, it is the natural emblem for a wheel whose element is fire and whose business is the transformation of one substance into another. The compound ends, as the weapons-compound did at the throat wheel, in a word meaning and the rest, and the same caution applies: the manuals do not agree on the full inventory, and the text is honest about it.

Ḍāmarī is the head of the retinue. The name belongs to a family of words built on ḍāmara, which in Sanskrit means tumult, uproar, a disturbance, and which also names a class of tantric scriptures — the Ḍāmara texts, associated with fierce and rapid rites. The name is of a piece with the wheel: fire, weapons, and a circle of powers whose leader is named for noise. Set beside the throat wheel, whose retinue was led by Amṛtā, the deathless, and the heart wheel, whose retinue was led by Kālarātri, the night of dissolution, the three leaders make a series that gets progressively less serene as the hymn descends.

The last name is grammatically the strangest thing in this stretch of the text. Ḍāmaryādibhirāvṛtā is not a compound in the ordinary sense; it is a phrase, containing a fully inflected instrumental plural, ḍāmaryādibhiḥ, by those beginning with Ḍāmarī, followed by āvṛtā, surrounded. Sanskrit normally reduces such a phrase to a compound by stripping the case ending, which is exactly what the throat-wheel name amṛtādimahāśaktisaṃvṛtā does. Here the ending survives inside the name, and it survives into the ritual form as well, where the whole phrase takes a dative on the end. The metre is the likely reason — the composer needed the syllables — but the effect is that one of the thousand names is a small sentence.

The first line is metrically and phonetically the gentlest in this part of the hymn, and it can be taken at a steady pace. Maṇipūrābjanilayā has one join to understand: maṇipūra ends in short a, abja begins in short a, and the two combine into a single long ā, so what you say is maṇipūrābja with no break. Watch the ṇ in maṇi, which is retroflex, and the long ū in pūra. Both are easy to flatten.

Vadanatrayasaṃyutā should be compared directly with vadanadvayā from the heart wheel and vadanaikasamanvitā from the throat. All three are built on vadana, face, and the whole difference between them is the number word and the participle. Saying the three in sequence — ekasamanvitā, dvayā, trayasaṃyutā — is the single most useful drill for this section, because it fixes both the count and the position in the descent. The anusvāra in saṃyutā precedes y and is nasalised rather than closed into a full m.

The second line is the demanding one. Vajrādikāyudhopetā has three vowel fusions in eight syllables: vajra plus ādika, then ādika plus āyudha, both giving long ā; then āyudha plus upetā, where a plus u gives o. None of the three is audible as a break, so the word is one continuous flow of long vowels with the jrā cluster at the front and nothing else in the way. Reciters who do not know the seams insert a pause somewhere in the middle out of sheer need for a landmark; the remedy is to learn the four pieces — vajra, ādika, āyudha, upetā — so that the landmark is understood rather than breathed.

Ḍāmaryādibhirāvṛtā opens on the retroflex ḍ, the same sound that opened ḍākinīśvarī two wheels above. The ryā that follows is r running into the palatal glide y, and then the word settles into light syllables until the vocalic ṛ of vṛtā at the end. A small sandhi within it explains a stray consonant: ḍāmaryādibhiḥ ends in visarga, and before the vowel of āvṛtā that visarga becomes r. Once the rule is recognised the r stops looking like an intrusion.

In the archanā all four names are ā-stems and take -āyai. Printed namāvalis differ over the third name, some giving vajrādika and some vajrādhika — a one-consonant variant that changes and the rest into and more. Either is defensible, but it is worth knowing which your text has before chanting with a group.

The attention moves down again, from the middle of the chest to just above the navel, and stops there. This is the wheel where the doctrine sits closest to ordinary bodily experience, and the tradition means the heat literally. The verse also asks the reciter to hold an incomplete picture: nothing here says what colour she is or what she governs. The portrait finishes in the following verse, closing as the two before it did, by naming the yoginī and identifying her as the goddess's own form.