Self-aware light, the mother of the elements, and the warding off of death

Vimarśa is one half of a pair, and the pair is the central doctrine of the nondual Śaiva philosophy of Kashmir, which Śrīvidyā inherited. Prakāśa is light, luminosity, the sheer fact of manifest being; vimarśa is the reflexive movement by which that light knows itself as light. The argument for needing both is a familiar one in these texts: a crystal or a mirror shines, but it does not know that it shines, and a consciousness that were pure luminosity without self-reference would be indistinguishable from an inert thing. What makes awareness awareness is that it turns on itself. In the theological vocabulary Śiva is prakāśa and Śakti is vimarśa, and the relation between them is not that of a substance and its attribute but of a light and its own self-knowing, which cannot be separated even in thought. Utpaladeva's Recognition verses and Abhinavagupta's commentaries on them are where this is worked out most rigorously. The word itself is ordinary enough: vi plus the root mṛś, to touch or handle, hence to examine, consider, deliberate. Sanskrit dramaturgy uses vimarśa as the name of the fourth juncture of a play, the point at which the action is reconsidered before its resolution. The philosophical sense is that sense raised to the level of consciousness itself.

Vidyā beside it is not a synonym but a step. In its widest use vidyā is knowledge or a branch of learning, and it is the term Vedānta opposes to avidyā, the ignorance that sustains bondage. In tantric usage it narrows sharply: a vidyā is a mantra, specifically the mantra of a goddess, as distinct from the masculine mantra. The fifteen-syllable formula at the centre of this tradition is called simply the vidyā, and the tradition takes its name from it — Śrīvidyā, the auspicious vidyā. Placed immediately after vimarśarūpiṇī, the name marks the transition the school insists on: self-aware consciousness does not remain silent but articulates itself as sound, and the sound in question is a mantra rather than a proposition.

Viyadādijagatprasūḥ then takes the third step. Viyat is space or ether, the subtlest of the five gross elements, and the phrase beginning with ether invokes an order of emanation that is fixed across the schools: from ether comes air, from air fire, from fire water, from water earth. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad gives the sequence in its best known form, running it down past earth to plants, food and the human being. Sāṃkhya arranges the same materials into its twenty-five principles, and the tantric systems extend the count to thirty-six by adding the levels above. Prasū is a plain and old word for mother — one who brings forth — and the compound is careful about what it claims: not that she made the world, as a potter makes a pot, but that she bore it, which in this literature is the difference between an efficient cause standing outside its product and a material cause that remains present in it.

The second line changes register completely. Vyādhi is illness in the ordinary medical sense, and the tradition also knows it as the first item in Patañjali's list of the obstacles that scatter the mind, where sickness heads a series that runs through apathy, doubt and carelessness. So sarvavyādhipraśamanī can be read as a promise about the body or about the conditions of practice, and the commentators generally allow both. Praśamanī is from śam, to become quiet: not a name for a cure that fights disease but for one that lets it subside.

Sarvamṛtyunivāriṇī is the more striking claim, and the tradition qualifies it in a specific way. The texts distinguish death at the appointed time from apamṛtyu, untimely or violent death, and it is usually the second that ritual is understood to avert; the sarva of this name, taken strictly, refuses that distinction. Behind the name stands the whole Indian literature of the conquest of death, above all the Ṛgvedic verse to Tryambaka that later tradition made into the Mahāmṛtyuñjaya mantra, still the formula recited over the seriously ill. Its image is worth holding beside this verse: release from death as a ripe cucumber comes away from its stem — not a rescue from outside but a natural loosening at the point when the fruit is ready. Nivāriṇī, she who wards off, is a less philosophical word than any other in the verse, and its bluntness is deliberate. The stanza has come the whole way from self-aware consciousness to a mother standing between her child and what is coming for it.

Both lines are built on repeated initials — three names on vi in the first, two on sarva in the second — and the alliteration is a help to memory and a trap for accuracy. The vi of vimarśa, vidyā and viyat is short in all three, and the temptation under speed is to lengthen it in the second, where the following conjunct dyā makes the syllable heavy in the metre without making the vowel long. Vidyā is two syllables, vid-yā, with the d and y pronounced as a single release.

Vimarśarūpiṇī contains a sequence that repays slow practice: rśa, a tapped r followed by the palatal ś, then rū with the same r before a long ū, and finally the retroflex ṇī. The ṇ is retroflex because of the r earlier in the word, an automatic change in Sanskrit that also produces the ṇī of nivāriṇī later in the verse; noticing that the two have the same cause is the easiest way to stop treating retroflexion as arbitrary.

Viyadādijagatprasūḥ is the hardest word here. Its seams are viyat plus ādi, where the final t of viyat voices to d before the vowel and gives viyadādi, and then jagat plus prasūḥ, where the t stays unvoiced before p and produces the cluster tpra — three consonants, dental t, labial p, and r, in one articulation. Say ja-gat-pra-sūḥ with the t audibly closed before the p opens. The final visarga is a light echo of the preceding vowel, closer to sūhu whispered than to a hard h.

This name also has an ending worth flagging for anyone using the thousand names in the sequential form. Almost every name in this stretch is an ā-stem taking -āyai or an ī-stem taking -yai, and the datives run vimarśarūpiṇyai, vidyāyai, sarvavyādhipraśamanyai, sarvamṛtyunivāriṇyai. But prasūḥ is a ū-stem, and its dative is prasuve, so the offering is viyadādijagatprasuve. Reciters who have settled into the rhythm of -yai will produce a wrong form here almost automatically unless they have looked at it in advance.

In the second line, vyādhi has the cluster vy at the head of a heavy syllable, and mṛtyu contains the vocalic ṛ followed by ty. Sarvamṛtyunivāriṇī is five light syllables after that cluster and tends to accelerate; hold the long ā of vāri.

As to use, this is one of the verses that people chant for a particular purpose, and the tradition is not embarrassed about it. The hymn's own concluding section promises relief from illness among the fruits of recitation, and these two names are what that promise attaches to; they are recited at sickbeds and repeated for the absent. The verse itself, however, has arranged matters so that the petition cannot be made in isolation. To ask her to hold off death is, in the same breath and the same stanza, to have called her self-aware consciousness and the mother from whom the elements came. Whatever is being asked for is being asked of that.