Fat, sweetness, curd-rice, and the name at last: Kākinī

This verse finishes the fourth of seven panels, each devoted to a yoginī of one wheel of the body. It supplies what the opening verse left out: the tissue she occupies, her food, her retinue, and her name. The order of these items is not quite fixed across the seven — the previous yoginī's retinue was named in her first verse and this one's in her second — but the inventory is, and by the fourth panel a reader can hear the small departures.

Medas is the fourth of the seven bodily constituents that Sanskrit medicine strings in a sequence of refinements: the nutrient fluid, blood, flesh, fat, bone, marrow, and the generative essence, each cooked out of the one before it. It is usually translated fat, and in English that carries a slight or a joke, which is wrong here. In the medical texts medas is a stage of successful nourishment, the tissue that lubricates and holds moisture; snigdha, oily, is a term of approval there, applied to a good complexion as readily as to food. The hymn proceeds down the wheels and up the list of tissues at once, so the fourth goddess takes the fourth constituent, and the arrangement, once noticed, does more to explain this section than any single name in it.

Madhu is a word with a long reach. Its first sense is honey; it extends to any sweet liquid, to the sap of flowers, and to sweetness in general; and in the older language it also names a fermented drink, the sense preserved in the English cognate mead. In Vedic ritual madhu is one of the great words of blessing, and a reader who knows the madhumatī verses will hear them behind madhuprītā. Commentators generally take the name to mean that she is pleased by honey or by a sweet offering, in keeping with the other food-names of the section. Because this is a tantric text, and because madhu can mean liquor, some readers hear an allusion to the offerings of the left-hand rite; the word itself will support that and does not require it.

Bandhinī is formed from √bandh, to bind, with the feminine agent suffix: she who binds. She heads the six goddesses who occupy the six petals of the svādhiṣṭhāna lotus, and the hymn names the first and covers the rest with ādi, and so on, as it did with Ḍāmarī in the previous panel. The printed texts are not unanimous here. Some read bandhinī and some bandinī, with an unaspirated d, which is a different word altogether — bandin is a herald or panegyrist, and the reading would make her the singer of praises rather than the binder. Recitation lineages preserve one or the other, and where two readings give equally good sense there is no principled way to choose between them; the honest thing is to know that both are chanted.

Dadhi is milk that has been curdled — yoghurt, in effect — and dadhyanna is the rice mixed with it that ends a South Indian meal, cooling after what has come before and often carried on a journey or offered at a shrine. Of the seven dishes given to the yoginīs none is elaborate; this is the plainest. What is not plain is the word attached to it. Āsakta, from ā-√sañj, means stuck to, fastened on, intent upon, and its abstract noun āsakti is the standard term for the attachment that contemplative traditions exist to loosen. To say that the goddess's heart is stuck to a bowl of curd rice is, in the vocabulary of those traditions, to say something faintly scandalous. It belongs with the atigarvitā of the previous verse, and the pairing looks deliberate: the same theology that lets pride be a divine attribute lets appetite be one, on the same grounds. What binds a creature does not bind the one from whom the creature borrows its existence.

The last name identifies her. The hymn does not use one formula for all seven closings — one is called the sovereign lady of her own name, several are called mother and said to have that form as their own being, and this one, like the yoginī of the brow, is said to bear or wear it. Whether much should be read into the variation is doubtful; the metre needs different shapes in different places. What matters more is that Kākinī is not always stationed here. In the yogic handbook that stands behind most modern descriptions of the cakras, the seven goddesses run upward from the base of the spine rather than downward from the throat, and Kākinī accordingly belongs to the heart. Guides repeat one scheme or the other without noting that there are two. Within this hymn the matter is not in doubt: the panel opened at the svādhiṣṭhāna and closes with her name.

Three of the five names in this verse are built on the same sandhi rule, and learning it once solves all three. A short i or a long ī, when a dissimilar vowel follows, turns into the consonant y. So dadhi plus anna gives dadhyanna, and bandhinī plus ādi gives bandhinyādi. The rule is the reason these words look impenetrable and the reason they are not: hear dadhy-anna and bandhiny-ādi and the components separate at once. The third case is different but just as regular — medas plus niṣṭhā gives medoniṣṭhā, because a final s after a short a becomes o before a voiced sound. That is the same rule that produced manohara in the previous verse, and it accounts for a large fraction of the stray o's in the middle of Sanskrit compounds.

Dadhyannāsaktahṛdayā is the mouthful of the verse and rewards being taken apart: dadhi, anna, āsakta, hṛdaya. The long ā in the middle is the join of anna and āsakta, two short a's fusing, and the doubled nn before it has to be held long. The vowel ṛ in hṛdaya is a syllabic r, a vowel in its own right, made with the tongue curled back; the conventional South Indian pronunciation gives it a light i-colour and the northern one a u-colour, and either is better than dropping it into an English er.

Medoniṣṭhā brings back the retroflex cluster ṣṭh from two verses earlier, and the drill is the same: curl the tongue back for the sibilant and leave it back for the aspirated stop. Madhuprītā is easier but has its own trap in the dh, a single aspirated voiced dental rather than a d with an h stuck to it, and a long ī in prī that carries the beat.

Kākinīrūpadhāriṇī needs care in two places. The first two syllables are kā and ki, long then short, and running them together into a pair of equal vowels is the commonest fault in the whole yoginī section, where four of the seven names have this shape. The ṇ in dhāriṇī is retroflex because of the r earlier in the word, a regular assimilation that also produces the ṇ in svarūpiṇī. And for archanā, note that this name does not take the ending the others in this verse take: medoniṣṭhāyai, madhuprītāyai, bandhinyādisamanvitāyai and dadhyannāsaktahṛdayāyai are all ā-stems, but dhāriṇī is an ī-stem and gives kākinīrūpadhāriṇyai namaḥ.

What the verse asks is what the whole section asks, put more bluntly than elsewhere. The practitioner installing these goddesses in his own body is being told that the fourth of them lives in his fat, likes honey, keeps six companions, and is fond of curd rice. There is no interior meaning offered as a substitute for the plain one, and the tradition that transmits the hymn also cooks the dishes and sets them out. If the verse has a discipline in it, it is the discipline of not flinching at that — of chanting a name that says the goddess's heart is attached to something, in a tradition that spends most of its energy on detaching hearts, and letting the contradiction stand rather than resolving it into metaphor.