Merit, the queen of heaven's worship, and the untying of bonds

Puṇya is one of the two great terms of the karmic economy, the other being pāpa. It means merit in the accounting sense — the fund of good consequence built up by ritual performance, gift, austerity and right conduct — and it also means holy or auspicious as a plain adjective, so that a river ford, a day of the calendar and a person's reputation can all be puṇya. Both senses are live in this verse. Puṇyakīrti says that her renown is itself sanctifying, kīrti being fame in the specific sense of what is said about someone; puṇyalabhyā says that she is what a fund of merit finally buys. The third name closes the circle: since hearing and reciting her produce merit, the merit by which she is obtained is generated by the very act of speaking about her.

Puṇyaśravaṇakīrtana is not this hymn's coinage. It is a stock epithet in Vaiṣṇava literature, applied to Kṛṣṇa in a celebrated verse of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and appearing among the thousand names of Viṣṇu, and the sahasranāma is deliberately transferring it. Behind it lies the standard analysis of devotion into nine limbs, which Prahlāda sets out in the Bhāgavata and which begins with exactly this pair: śravaṇa, hearing, and kīrtana, reciting or proclaiming, before it goes on to remembering, serving, worshipping and the rest. Hearing comes first because in a manuscript culture most people received scripture through the ear rather than the eye, and reciting comes second because the person who has heard becomes the next person who tells. The name asserts that merit attaches to both ends of that transaction, the listener's and the speaker's, which is also the traditional justification for public recitation of the sahasranāma before an audience that may not follow the Sanskrit.

Pulomajā, the daughter of Puloman, is Śacī, also called Paulomī and Indrāṇī, the consort of Indra. The Purāṇas make Puloman a demon whom Indra killed, so the queen of heaven is by birth of the other party — an ancestry the hymn presumably has in mind, since it could have used any of her other names. Śacī's most famous episode is told at length in the Mahābhārata: with Indra in hiding after an act of brahminicide, Nahuṣa is installed in his place, demands Śacī, and is finally destroyed when she stalls him into an act of arrogance. She is thus the standard figure of the woman of the highest possible station who is nonetheless helpless, and the tradition generally reads pulomajārcitā against that background — the queen of heaven, having no recourse among the gods, worshipping the goddess. Śacī is also one of the seven mothers, the Mātṛkās, who appear in the Devī Māhātmya as the powers of the male gods issuing forth in female form; Aindrī or Māhendrī is her share of that company. Names of the form worshipped by such-and-such recur throughout this hymn, and their function is consistent: to place a figure the audience already regards as exalted in the posture of a supplicant.

Bandhamocanī turns on the pair bandha and mokṣa, bondage and release, which is the frame within which nearly all Indian soteriology states its problem. In the Śaiva systems the terms are formalised as paśu, the bound soul, pāśa, the bond, and pati, the lord who releases. What makes the name pointed here is that this goddess is iconographically the holder of the noose. An early verse of this same hymn describes the noose in her upper left hand as being desire in visible form and the goad in her right as anger, so the implements that bind are her own. The one who ties is the one who unties, and the tradition does not treat this as a contradiction so much as the whole of its position: bondage is not imposed by an enemy.

The last name is a place where the editions part company, and this text preserves both sides of the disagreement. The verse line as printed here reads bandhurālakā, from bandhura, which means bent, graceful, charming — she of the lovely curls. The list of names that accompanies it reads barbarālakā, from barbara, which the lexicon gives as curly or crisped when used of hair, and which in another sense means a foreigner or barbarian. Both readings are current in printed editions and in recitation. Bandhurālakā has the advantage of chiming with bandhamocanī immediately before it, which may be why some copyists preferred it, or may be why others suspected it. Alaka in either case is the specific word for a curl falling on the forehead, a standing item in Sanskrit poetic description. The swerve from the untying of the bonds of rebirth to the arrangement of a woman's hair is abrupt to a modern ear and entirely ordinary in this literature, where the description of the body is not a relaxation of the theology but a continuation of it.

The first line is an exercise in a single cluster. Three names begin with puṇya, and puṇya has a retroflex ṇ followed immediately by y: the tongue curls back to the roof of the mouth for the nasal and then releases forward into the palatal glide. English has no equivalent movement, and the usual failure is to substitute a dental n, which turns puṇya into punya and loses the distinction the script is at pains to mark. Practise the three openings together — puṇya, puṇya, puṇya — before attempting the line at speed, and keep the u short in all three.

The metrical break in the first line falls after eight syllables, which lands exactly at the end of puṇyalabhyā, so the line divides cleanly between the second and third names. The second line is less obliging. Eight syllables into it puts the break inside bandhamocanī, between ban and dha, and a reciter who breathes mechanically at the halfway point will split a word. Take the second line in one movement instead, with the only real pause after pulomajārcitā.

Two junctions are worth seeing. Pulomajārcitā is pulomajā plus arcitā: a long ā meeting a short a, which merge into a single long ā, so the seam is inaudible and the name looks longer than its parts. Barbarālakā is barbarā plus alakā by the same rule, and bandhurālakā is bandhura plus alakā, a short a meeting a short a with the same result. In every case the joint is a long ā that belongs to both words at once.

For the offering of names one at a time, puṇyakīrtiḥ is an i-stem and gives puṇyakīrtyai, while puṇyalabhyā, puṇyaśravaṇakīrtanā and pulomajārcitā are ā-stems and give the ordinary -āyai. Bandhamocanī is an ī-stem and gives bandhamocanyai. Whether the last name is offered as barbarālakāyai or bandhurālakāyai depends on the text your teacher or your edition follows, and it is not worth disputing with a group mid-recitation; note which reading is in use and stay with it.

On individual sounds: kīrti and kīrtana both have a long ī followed by r plus t, and the r here is a brief tap, not the English retroflex approximant that swallows the vowel before it. Śravaṇa opens with the palatal ś against r and contains a second retroflex ṇ, which is triggered by the r earlier in the word. Bandha and bandhura carry the aspirated dental dh after a dental n; ndh is one continuous articulation with the tongue in a single position throughout.

What the verse asks is a certain wariness about its own promise. It says that reciting it earns merit, and a reciter who takes that as the reason for reciting has been answered in advance by the fourth name of the verse, which unties precisely the kind of accumulation the first three describe. The tradition holds both without embarrassment: merit is real, it is what brings a person to the point of being able to chant at all, and it is not the destination. Indra's queen, who had as much merit as any being in the hymn's cosmology, is here in the posture of someone who has run out of it.