Yākinī closes the cakras; the hymn turns to fire and scripture

The six cakra stanzas each specify a dish. Between them they name milk-boiled rice, rice with ghee, rice with jaggery, rice with curds, rice with mung beans, and rice yellowed with turmeric — six preparations that would be recognisable in any South Indian kitchen and that are, in fact, what gets cooked and offered at a temple or a household rite. The common element in all six compounds is odana, boiled rice or porridge, the ordinary Vedic word for the staple. Sarvaudanaprītacittā gathers the whole set: at the crown no dish is singled out because all of them are hers. There is a plain liturgical point buried in this. Naivedya, the food offering, is the part of worship that a householder without initiation can still perform, and the seventh stanza's refusal to specify a dish is generally read as removing the last restriction on what may be brought.

Yākinī is the seventh of a series — Ḍākinī, Rākiṇī, Lākinī, Kākinī, Sākinī, Hākinī, Yākinī — whose members differ only in their opening consonant. They are the goddesses of the seven bodily constituents, one for each tissue in the sequence the previous verse ended with, and the tradition treats the phonetic patterning of their names as deliberate rather than as coincidence. Only the first of them has much independent life in Sanskrit literature: ḍākinī is an old word for a fierce female spirit in the retinue of the goddess, and it has an enormous career in Buddhist tantra. Yākinī, at the other end, is almost unattested outside this series and its ritual literature. The hymn's phrasing shifts across the seven stanzas in a way worth noticing. The first goddess is called ḍākinīśvarī, the sovereign of Ḍākinī, which is a relation between two beings; several of the middle stanzas say rūpa-dhāriṇī, bearing that form, or svarūpiṇī, having that as her own form. The last uses svarūpiṇī with ambā, mother, attached: not a form she assumes but what she is.

Svāhā and svadhā are not descriptions but utterances. Svāhā is spoken as the oblation is released into the fire for the gods; svadhā accompanies the offering made to the ancestors in the śrāddha rite. Together with vaṣaṭ they are the ritual exclamations that make an act of pouring into an act of giving, and to name her as both is to say that the efficacy of offering is hers, not the offerer's. Svadhā has a second and older life as an ordinary noun, built from sva, own, and the root dhā, to place: one's own position, one's own power, self-sustaining autonomy. The Nāsadīya hymn uses it of the One that breathed without breath before there was anything else. Both words are also personified in Purāṇic genealogy, Svāhā as the consort of Agni and Svadhā as the wife of the ancestors, and the hymn is content to let the name carry the exclamation, the abstract noun and the goddess at once.

The fifth name is a textual crux and should be treated as one. The printed reading here is svadhā'matiḥ, with the avagraha marking an elided initial a, so the name is amati: without thought, not to be reached by thinking. Other editions and recitation texts divide the same syllables as svadhā matiḥ and read the name as mati, thought itself — which fits neatly with medhā following it, and makes the sequence run thought, intelligence, revelation, tradition. The negative reading makes the sequence turn on a contrast instead: she is what thought cannot lay hold of, and she is the faculty of thought. The lexicon also records amati in an entirely different sense, splendour or lustre, which some take here. All three are defensible; the reading you chant will depend on the edition in your hands.

Śruti and smṛti are the two categories into which the tradition sorts its own authority. Śruti is what was heard by the seers and is held to be authorless, the Veda proper; smṛti is what was remembered and composed by human beings — the law books, the epics, the Purāṇas. Where they conflict, the rule is that śruti prevails. Naming her as both, in consecutive breaths, is a familiar move in stotra literature and a substantial claim: not that scripture speaks about her, but that it is her. Anuttamā closes the run. Taken with brute literalness the word says not-highest, and a certain kind of reader has always enjoyed pointing this out; the idiom is settled, and what the negation cancels is the comparison rather than the height. There is no one above.

The second line is the fastest-moving line in this stretch of the hymn and the easiest to fumble, because after several minutes of eight- and nine-syllable compounds it drops to seven separate names in sixteen syllables. Reciters who have built up momentum on the long compounds tend to run svāhā svadhā together into a single blurred word. They are two names, each ending in a long ā, and the pause between them has to be audible without becoming a break in the metre.

The junctions in that line repay a moment's study, because each of them hides a word-boundary. Svadhā'matiḥ is svadhā plus amatiḥ, with the initial a of amati swallowed by the preceding long ā and its disappearance marked by the avagraha, the small sign that looks like an S. Amatir medhā is amatiḥ with its final visarga turned to r before the voiced m. Smṛtir anuttamā is the same change again. So the line as chanted has fewer audible seams than it has words, and the only way not to lose a name is to know in advance how many there are.

For the sequential offering of names the datives fall into two groups. The ā-stems give sarvaudanaprītacittāyai, svāhāyai, svadhāyai, medhāyai, anuttamāyai. The i-stems contract before the ending and give amatyai, śrutyai, smṛtyai, and the ī-stem gives yākinyambāsvarūpiṇyai. Three short names in a row with -tyai is a good drill for an ending that otherwise appears rarely.

Svāhā has a further peculiarity in ritual use. When the thousand names are offered into fire rather than with flowers, the formula that closes each name is not namaḥ but svāhā, so a reciter performing homa will say svāhāyai svāhā, using the word as name and as the act of giving in the same breath. This is not a pun the tradition apologises for; it is taken as the plain sense of the name.

On the sounds: svā and sva begin with a dental s followed immediately by v, with no vowel between them, and the temptation is to insert one. Medhā and svadhā both carry the aspirated dental dh, breath released through the same tongue position as d, not d followed by a separate h. Śrutiḥ opens with the palatal ś against r, made further forward in the mouth than the English sh. Smṛtiḥ contains the vocalic ṛ, a syllable in its own right with the tongue curled back, closer to the ri of a lightly rolled Marathi pronunciation than to any English vowel. Anuttamā has a genuine double t, held before it is released.

What the verse asks is a change of attention rather than an effort of imagination. The ascent through the body has finished, and the practitioner who has been holding an interior image for seven stanzas is handed instead the vocabulary of the fire altar and the library: the cries that carry an offering, the faculty that understands, the texts that were heard and the texts that were remembered. Nothing here is to be visualised. The names are the ordinary machinery of a religious civilisation, and the hymn is claiming all of it at once.