Needing nothing, reached by goodwill, watching the end

Nityatṛptā is built on √tṛp, to be satisfied, the root behind tṛpti and behind the tarpaṇa offerings of water by which the ancestors are refreshed. That background gives the name its edge. Much of Indian ritual assumes an economy in which the gods are fed and, being fed, give; against it the hymn says that this deity is satisfied nityam, with no supplier and no interruption, so that nothing offered to her improves her condition. The Bhagavad Gītā says the same of the liberated person in its third chapter, calling him ātmatṛpta, satisfied in the self, and concluding that no action remains for him to do. Applied to the goddess, the term takes the transaction out of worship without taking away worship, a difficulty the tradition leaves standing.

The next name supplies the other half of that difficulty. A nidhi is a hoard in the plain material sense: treasure buried in the ground, a deposit laid up against future need, of the kind Kubera is said to keep. Bhaktanidhiḥ is a genitive tatpuruṣa, and Sanskrit leaves the direction of a genitive undetermined: the treasure belonging to her devotees, which is the usual reading, or, with more strain, a treasury whose contents are devotees. What is unusual here is grammatical. Nidhi is masculine, and the hymn presses it into service as a feminine epithet without altering the stem; the recitation lists preserve this by giving the dative as bhaktanidhaye rather than the -yai expected elsewhere. The seam has not been sanded down.

Niyantrī comes from ni-√yam, to hold in, restrain, control. The unprefixed agent noun yantṛ means a driver or charioteer, one who holds reins; the same root with the instrument suffix gives yantra, a device that holds something in place. The chariot is not an accident of vocabulary: the Kaṭha Upaniṣad's celebrated image makes the body a chariot, the intellect its driver, the mind the reins and the senses the horses. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad supplies the theological version in its dialogue on the antaryāmin, the inner controller who dwells in earth, sun, mind and self alike, controls them from within, and is unknown to them. Niyantrī is the feminine of that office, and it sits between the treasury and the sovereignty: she is not only generous, she is also holding the reins.

Nikhileśvarī turns on a word worth taking apart. Khila in older usage means a gap, a piece of fallow ground, and by extension a supplement appended to a finished text. A-khila therefore means without gaps, entire; ni-khila is formed the same way. The word does not say large, it says without remainder, and placed immediately after niyantrī it extends the reins over the whole field rather than the well-behaved part of it.

The fifth name is the surprising one. Maitryādivāsanālabhyā points unmistakably at the thirty-third aphorism of the first chapter of Patañjali's Yoga Sūtra, which prescribes friendliness towards the happy, compassion towards the suffering, gladness towards the meritorious and indifference towards the wicked, and says the mind is thereby made clear. Those four attitudes, under the same names, are the four immeasurables of Buddhist meditation, and their presence in both traditions shows how much vocabulary the meditative schools of India held in common. The name changes one word: Patañjali says bhāvanā, deliberate cultivation, while the hymn says vāsanā, the settled residue that long habit leaves behind — which raises the requirement, since a vāsanā is what remains when the practice has stopped being a practice. And labhyā is strong — obtainable, to be got — not merely pleased or propitiated. A hymn otherwise occupied with diagrams and syllables here makes decency towards other people the condition of access.

Mahāpralayasākṣiṇī closes the verse at the end of time. Purāṇic cosmology distinguishes several orders of dissolution, and the mahāpralaya is the one at the end of Brahmā's own lifespan, when the elements collapse into their causes and, in the Sāṃkhya account the Purāṇas borrow, the whole hierarchy of evolved principles is withdrawn into unmanifest nature in the reverse of the order by which it emerged. Sākṣin is an old compound of sa and akṣi, with the eye: one who saw the thing himself, hence a legal witness, and in Vedānta the name for consciousness insofar as it observes without being implicated. The Devī Māhātmya opens on this scene: the ocean of dissolution, the sleeping Viṣṇu, and the goddess as the sleep itself. To call her witness of the great dissolution is to say that when there is nothing left to be conscious of, there is still someone conscious.

This is one of the easier verses in the hymn to recite and one of the easier ones to lose your place in, for the same reason: the first line gives you four names beginning with ni and almost nothing else to hold on to. Nitya, then the nidhi buried in the middle of the second name, then niyantrī, then nikhila. Fix the order by its sense rather than its sound — satisfied, treasury, restrainer, ruler — and the line stops sliding.

The second and third names are joined by a sandhi that the written form makes obvious and the spoken form can obscure. Bhaktanidhiḥ ends in visarga; before the voiced n of niyantrī the visarga becomes r, and the printed text accordingly reads bhaktanidhir niyantrī, run together without a break. Do not restore the ḥ because you know the dictionary form. Say the r lightly, as a single tap, and go straight on.

Niyantrī contains the cluster ntrī: dental n closed at the teeth, dental t released, then r, then the long ī. English has no sequence like it and will want to lose the t in the middle. Practise it at half speed. Maitryādi has the reverse problem, three consonants after the diphthong — t, r, y — and the diphthong is a full long vowel, mai, not the short glide of the English word my. In mahāpralayasākṣiṇī the conjunct kṣ is a single articulation, guttural k followed immediately by retroflex ṣ, and the ṇ after it is retroflex because of it: Sanskrit converts a dental n to ṇ after certain preceding sounds, which is why the word is sākṣiṇī and not sākṣinī. That rule operates all through the hymn, in rūpiṇī and its relatives.

Metrically the verse is a clean anuṣṭubh, four quarters of eight syllables, with the break after nikhileśvarī. Both names in the second line fill an entire half-line by themselves, so the pace has to slow there whether or not you intend it to. That is the natural place to breathe.

For the recitation performed as archanā, with a flower or a grain of rice set down at each name, the six become nityatṛptāyai, bhaktanidhaye, niyantryai, nikhileśvaryai, maitryādivāsanālabhyāyai and mahāpralayasākṣiṇyai. Note two things. The ī-stems contract before the ending, so niyantrī gives niyantryai and not niyantrīyai, and the same happens to nikhileśvarī and sākṣiṇī. And bhaktanidhaye breaks the pattern entirely, because the underlying noun is a masculine i-stem; this is the one name in the verse that will sound wrong to an ear trained on the rest of the thousand, and it is supposed to.

As for what the verse asks of the reciter: the fifth name is a plain statement that a particular kind of interior weather is the price of admission, and that no amount of technical accuracy substitutes for it. Friendliness towards those doing well, compassion towards those who are not, gladness at other people's good conduct and evenness towards those behaving badly are not advice appended to the practice. They are named as the means by which she is obtained, and they are tested outside the recitation rather than in it.