Red, fixed in the flesh, and pleased by jaggery-rice

From the four hundred and seventy-fifth name onward the hymn does something it does nowhere else: it stops praising and starts cataloguing. Seven yoginīs are described in turn, one for each wheel of the yogic body, and each receives the same set of particulars in nearly the same order — the lotus she occupies, the number of her faces, her weapons, her retinue, her colour, the bodily tissue she is lodged in, the cooked food offered to her, sometimes a boon, and last her name. This verse supplies the final five items for the third of the seven. The verse before it has already placed her in the maṇipūra lotus at the navel, given her three faces, put the thunderbolt and other weapons in her hands, and set Ḍāmarī and the rest around her; what remains is colour, flesh, food, gift, and name.

The seven are Ḍākinī, Rākiṇī, Lākinī, Kākinī, Sākinī, Hākinī and Yākinī, and even a reader with no Sanskrit can see that they are a series rather than seven independently invented goddesses: one shape, seven initial consonants. The tradition holds the sequence of names fixed but not the wheels they are mapped onto. This hymn runs downward — the throat first, then the heart, then the navel, then the genitals, then the base of the spine — while the Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa, the late Bengali handbook on which most modern accounts of the cakras ultimately depend, runs upward from the base, and so lands each goddess on a different wheel. The two schemes coincide at the navel, and again at the brow and the crown where the sequences converge; through the lower five they are mirror images. Anyone reading around in the literature will meet both, and the disagreement is about the map, not about the order of the names.

niṣṭhā in māṃsaniṣṭhā is an ordinary noun from ni-√sthā, to stand down or stand firm: a standing-place, a foundation, and in philosophical prose the state in which something finally comes to rest. To call her established in flesh is to say that among the constituents of the body, flesh is where she is grounded. The medical tradition counts seven such constituents: the nutrient fluid, blood, flesh, fat, bone, marrow, and the generative essence, each refined out of the one before it. The hymn assigns one to each yoginī, and as the wheels descend the tissues advance along that list — skin for the first, where the physicians would have put rasa; blood for the second; flesh here for the third; fat for the fourth. Read whole, the section claims that the body is not merely where the goddess is worshipped but the material she is distributed through, layer by layer.

Red belongs to the navel by more than convention. Maṇipūra, a word that means something like the city filled with jewels, is where yogic physiology locates the body's fire — the heat that cooks food, and by extension the heat of transformation and appetite. The Bhagavad Gītā's line about the lord becoming the digestive fire in the bodies of living creatures is the classical statement of the idea, and it stands behind this whole cluster: a red goddess, seated at the fire, fixed in flesh, gladdened by a sweet.

Guḍa is cane juice boiled down and left unrefined — jaggery — and guḍānna is rice cooked with it, still made in South Indian kitchens and still offered in temples. Each of the seven receives a different rice: milk-sweetened for the first, rice with ghee for the second, this jaggery rice for the third, curd rice for the fourth, and so on down to the last, who is offered food of every kind. Nothing in the list is exotic. These are the dishes of an ordinary household, and the hymn's claim is that the powers holding the body together are fed by them. Prītamānasā, her mind gladdened, keeps the transaction personal: the offering is not consumed, it is enjoyed.

The boon is where the template loosens. Rākiṇī at the heart is called the giver of boons to great heroes, a phrase with a restriction built into it; Lākinī's title carries none. Samasta means combined, entire, all without remainder, and sukha is not liberation but ease, comfort, ordinary well-being — the flat opposite of duḥkha. Set where it is, between a dish of sweetened rice and the goddess's own name, it reads less as a soteriological promise than as a domestic one, which may be the point. The closing name then makes the identification explicit. Svarūpiṇī means bearing the very form, and whatever has been said of the goddess at the navel is thereby said of the one goddess the hymn has been naming for a thousand names.

The verse divides with unusual tidiness. Its four quarters of eight syllables are filled by whole names: two four-syllable names in the first quarter, then a single eight-syllable name in each of the remaining three. Nothing straddles a boundary. Once the first line is secure the rest can be taken a quarter at a time, and a reciter who loses the thread can pick it up at any quarter without reconstructing a compound from the middle.

Māṃsaniṣṭhā is the hard word. It opens with a long ā carrying anusvāra, and the anusvāra here assimilates to the sibilant that follows — a nasalised vowel running into the s, not an English m followed by an s. It closes with ṣṭh, a retroflex sibilant and then an aspirated retroflex stop: the tongue curls back for ṣ and stays back for ṭh, with the breath released after the stop rather than before it. Anyone who produces something like sh-th here has made two dental sounds where the Sanskrit wants two retroflex ones. The same cluster returns two verses later in medoniṣṭhā, so the drill pays twice.

In raktavarṇā, the r of rṇā is a single brief tap made behind the ridge, not the sustained American r, and the ṇ that follows it is retroflex because of it. Guḍānnaprītamānasā looks shapeless and is not: guḍa ends in a short a, anna begins with a short a, and two short a's fuse into one long ā, so the elements are guḍa, anna, prīta and mānasa. Knowing that, you will place the long vowel correctly every time. The doubled nn that follows has to be held — a genuinely long consonant, like the two n's held across the word boundary in English thin nail.

For the recitation performed as archanā, with an offering made at each name, the nominatives become datives. Four of the five here are feminine ā-stems and take -āyai: raktavarṇāyai namaḥ, māṃsaniṣṭhāyai namaḥ, guḍānnaprītamānasāyai namaḥ, samastabhaktasukhadāyai namaḥ. The fifth is not. Svarūpiṇī is an ī-stem, and its dative is -ṇyai — lākinyambāsvarūpiṇyai namaḥ. The closing names of the other yoginīs, which end in the same way, behave the same way, so this is worth fixing once rather than being caught by it repeatedly.

As for what the verse asks: it is the third instalment of a survey that refuses to leave the body out of the worship. A chanter who has spent the preceding stretch of the hymn on cosmology and titles of sovereignty now finds the goddess located in his own flesh, fed with a sweet made of boiled cane juice, and called mother. The traditional use of this section is in nyāsa, where the practitioner touches the successive stations of the body while naming who occupies them; done that way the verse is not a description of anatomy but an address to it. Even chanted straight through it pulls the attention downward, from the hymn's abstractions to the navel, where digestion is going on while one recites.