From the base of the spine to the brow in half a verse

Mudga is the mung bean, the small green pulse that is still the staple legume of the subcontinent, and odana is boiled grain — a word old enough to carry real weight, since the odana cooked for a brahmin is the subject of whole hymns in the Atharvaveda. Rice boiled together with mung is the dish that later Indian languages call khichaṛī, and it is the plainest cooked food in the culture: what is given to the sick, to the very young, to those keeping a fast, and to anyone whose digestion or whose ritual condition requires that nothing be complicated. Of the seven dishes distributed among these goddesses, this is the one with the least in it.

The word for what is fastened onto it repays attention. The third panel said her mānasa, her mind, was gladdened; the fourth said her hṛdaya, her heart, was stuck fast; this one says her citta. The three are not interchangeable. Citta is the technical term of the Yoga school, the mind understood as a field of movements, and the second aphorism of Patañjali's collection defines yoga itself as the stilling of exactly those movements. To say that the goddess's citta is fastened on a bowl of rice and lentils is therefore to use, of her, the precise word that the contemplative tradition spends its whole discipline emptying. This is the same reversal the section performed two panels earlier with pride, and it is done here with a lighter hand.

The fifth panel then closes with her name, Sākinī, in the formula the hymn uses for most of these goddesses: mother, and having that as her own form. It is worth repeating that her station here is the mūlādhāra, established by the opening of the previous verse, and that readers who go looking for Sākinī elsewhere will often find her at the throat instead. The two schemes run the same seven names in the same order but in opposite directions through the wheels, and the disagreement is old and unresolved.

Ājñā means command, order, authority — a noun from ā-√jñā, and the ordinary word for what a king or a father or a teacher issues. Two explanations of the wheel's name circulate and neither has displaced the other. On one, it is the place where the command of the teacher is received, the point at which instruction is taken in; on the other, it is where command is exercised, the seat of the governing faculty. The handbooks describe it as a two-petalled lotus between the eyebrows, and it is the last station before the crown. That the wheel of command should follow immediately on the root support, with the whole trunk skipped, gives the second half of this verse an abruptness the reciter can feel.

A small textual matter belongs here. The metrical text reads nilayā, from nilaya, a dwelling place, which is the word used for the wheels of the earlier panels as well. Many printed nāmāvalīs, the versions arranged for offering worship name by name, read nilā instead, which requires a different derivation and yields much the same sense. Discrepancies of this kind between the chanted verse and the litany are common in the transmission of this hymn, since the two were copied and corrected by different hands for different uses; where they differ this slightly, nothing of substance turns on it, but a reader comparing two books should know why they do not match.

White is the colour, and here for once the hymn agrees with the yogic handbooks, which also give this wheel the whiteness of the moon. Six faces continue the arithmetic that has been running since the first yoginī — one, two, three, four, five, and now six, with the seventh and last to be called simply all-facing. Ṣaḍānana is not a neutral word, though. It is the standing epithet of Skanda, the war god born to destroy the demon Tāraka, whose six heads are explained by the six Kṛttikās who nursed him and are also read as the six directions of space, the four quarters together with the zenith and the nadir. Applying a famous masculine epithet to a goddess in feminine form is the sort of thing this hymn does without comment, and it means that the figure installed between the eyebrows carries, faintly, the aspect of a commander. Placed under a name that means command, that is unlikely to be accidental.

The verse divides where the sense divides, which makes it easier to chant than it looks. The fifth yoginī ends at the halfway point and the sixth begins after it, and that is exactly where the anuṣṭubh wants a breath. Take it there and nowhere else.

Mudgaudanāsaktacittā opens with a vowel change worth knowing on its own account. Mudga ends in a short a and odana begins with o; a short a followed by o gives au, so the compound is mudgaudana and the second syllable carries a full diphthong. This is the same strengthening that turns deva into daiva, and it accounts for a great many otherwise inexplicable au's in Sanskrit. The cluster before it, dg, is two voiced stops made in different places, dental then velar, and both must be heard. Later in the word the doubled tt of cittā has to be held long, and the join anna-length ā in -nāsakta is the fusion of odana with āsakta.

Ājñācakrābjanilayā contains the most argued-over cluster in the language. Jña is historically j followed by the palatal nasal, and that is how it is said in the south; north Indian recitation says something close to gya, and Maharashtrian usage says dnya. All three are current among people who have chanted this hymn all their lives, and a learner should adopt whichever their teacher uses rather than trying to arbitrate. The rest of the word is a chain of clusters — kr, then bj, a labial stop followed by a palatal — with the long ā of cakra plus abja marking the join.

Śuklavarṇā has kl, which is uncommon and tends to acquire an intrusive vowel; keep the k and the l flush against each other. Ṣaḍānanā is a small exercise in the retroflex series followed by the dental: ṣ and ḍ are both made with the tongue curled back, and the two n's that follow are both made at the teeth, so the tongue has to travel forward in the middle of a four-syllable word.

For archanā, four of the five names are ā-stems and take the expected ending: mudgaudanāsaktacittāyai, ājñācakrābjanilayāyai, śuklavarṇāyai, ṣaḍānanāyai. The exception is the name of the goddess herself. Svarūpiṇī is an ī-stem, so the offering is made to sākinyambāsvarūpiṇyai, with -ṇyai and not -ṇāyai, which is the same irregularity met in the third panel and will be met again in the last.

What the verse asks of the person chanting it is a single long movement of attention. In the space of two quarters of a verse he leaves the base of the spine and arrives between his eyebrows, and if the section is being used as nyāsa his hand makes the same journey. There is no transition and no explanation offered for the jump. The other thing it asks is a certain willingness not to smooth the goddess out. The verse says her citta clings to a plate of rice and mung beans, using the technical term for the mind that yoga exists to quiet, and then in the same breath seats her between the brows under the name of command. Both statements are meant, and the recitation is not improved by deciding in advance which of them is the figurative one.