The highest power, the honeyed drink, and the letters

Parā śaktiḥ and parā niṣṭhā are printed here as two words each and read as two names, and the recitation lists give them as compounds, parāśaktyai and parāniṣṭhāyai. Both readings are in circulation and the difference does not change the sense, but it is worth knowing that the division into a thousand names is itself an editorial act performed on a continuous metrical text, and that this verse is one of the places where editions and reciting traditions differ slightly in where they put the joins.

Śakti is the central term of the whole tradition and the most abused in English. Its root is √śak, to be able, the same root that gives śakya, possible, and śakta, competent. A śakti is therefore not an energy in the physics sense but a capacity — the capacity of a thing to do what it does, of fire to burn and a word to mean. The Śākta schools make this capacity not a property of the absolute but its living aspect, and hold that the absolute considered apart from it is inert. Parā marks the top of a hierarchy the schools work out in detail: her powers of will, knowledge and action are subordinate to her, and she to nothing. Parā is also, in the theory of speech, the technical name for the highest and unspoken level of the word, and a reader who has that sense in view will hear the first line and the last name of this verse converging.

Niṣṭhā comes from ni-√sthā, to stand firmly in something. It means the state of being established, and by extension both the firm ground one stands on and the final condition at which a process arrives. The Bhagavad Gītā uses the word in this second sense when it speaks of the two established ways of life it lays out, and the Upaniṣads use it for the terminus of the seeking. Parā niṣṭhā therefore says two things at once: she is what one finally stands on, and she is the place past which there is nowhere to go.

Prajñānaghana is not the hymn's coinage. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad uses the phrase in Yājñavalkya's account of the self in deep sleep, where the self is said to become a single mass of awareness with no inside and no outside, and the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad takes it up in describing the third state. Ghana in ordinary Sanskrit means compact, solid, a lump — the word for a cloud, and for the way sugar is thickened. The image is of consciousness as a homogeneous substance rather than a relation between a knower and things known. The ending rūpiṇī makes the whole a possessive: having that mass for her form. Whether the compound behind it is best analysed as a tatpuruṣa or as a bahuvrīhi outright is disputed, and nothing hangs on it.

Mādhvī is a sweet liquor, related to madhu, honey, which in the oldest Sanskrit means both honey and the intoxicating drink made from it. The vocabulary here is that of the Śākta liturgy, in which wine is one of the five substances offered in the left-hand rite, and also that of the descriptive poetry of the goddess, who is often shown with reddened eyes and a cup. The tradition has never been of one mind about which is meant. The reading most often given to lay reciters is that mādhvī stands for the nectar produced in the body by yogic practice, the ānandarasa that the Śrīvidyā texts locate above the palate, and that her intoxication is bliss and not alcohol. Others read the names as they stand and take the ritual sense to be primary. Both readings have long histories and it would be a misrepresentation to present either as the settled meaning. What can be said with confidence is that the hymn does not blush: mattā, intoxicated, is left standing on its own as a name, with no qualifier attached.

Mātṛkāvarṇarūpiṇī is a term of art. Mātṛkā means little mother, and in this literature it denotes the set of speech-sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet, ordinarily counted as fifty from a to kṣa, considered as the matrices from which every mantra is generated. The doctrine behind the name is that sound is not a label attached to reality but the material reality is made of, so that the alphabet is a genuine inventory of the world rather than a writing system. In practice the mātṛkās are installed on the body of the practitioner in the rite called mātṛkānyāsa, each letter assigned to a specific point, and they are arranged around the outer enclosures of the Śrīcakra. Placing this name immediately after mattā gives the verse its shape: the undivided mass of awareness in the first line has become, by the end, fifty distinct sounds, and the intoxication sits at the hinge.

The first line is a test of vowel length and of the difference between two similar-looking retroflex clusters. Parā has a short a and a long ā; the two syllables must be audibly unequal, and since the word occurs twice within six syllables the fault is doubled if you get it wrong. Niṣṭhā contains ṣṭh, a retroflex sibilant followed by an aspirated retroflex stop: tongue curled back for both, and a distinct puff of breath on the ṭh. Do not let it collapse into the English cluster in fisting. The following name has jñ, which is written as a single conjunct and is nothing like its spelling suggests — in the recitation traditions of the south it is commonly said as gya or jña with a nasal, in the north often as gy, and teachers differ. Ask whoever taught you the rest of your pronunciation and follow that, but be consistent within a sitting.

Prajñānaghanarūpiṇī is eight syllables and fills half a line by itself; mātṛkāvarṇarūpiṇī does the same at the end. Both end in rūpiṇī, with a retroflex ṇ caused by the r earlier in the word, and both are easy to rush because the ending is familiar. Slow the last three syllables of each. In mātṛkā the vocalic ṛ is a vowel in its own right, held for one short beat, not the sequence ri; and the ṛ is what triggers the retroflex ṇ of varṇa two syllables later, so the word is an audible demonstration of the rule.

The second line has a run of long ā vowels — mā-dhvī-pā-nā-la-sā — which gives it a slow, weighted quality quite unlike the crisp first line. That is not accidental, and there is no reason to fight it. The dhv of mādhvī is an aspirated dental followed immediately by v, and the tt of mattā is a genuine double consonant: the tongue stays at the teeth and the stop is held, so that mattā takes noticeably longer than a single t would allow.

In the archanā the six become parāśaktyai, parāniṣṭhāyai, prajñānaghanarūpiṇyai, mādhvīpānālasāyai, mattāyai and mātṛkāvarṇarūpiṇyai. Mattāyai is one of the shortest offerings in the entire thousand and comes immediately after one of the longest, which makes the pair a useful marker for keeping count.

The difficulty this verse presents is not phonetic. Reciters who are comfortable with parā śaktiḥ often find that mattā catches in the throat, and the impulse is to reach for the allegorical reading before the name has been allowed to mean what it says. It is better to let the sequence stand as the composer arranged it. The verse has just called her a solid mass of pure awareness; it now calls her drunk; it then says she is the alphabet. Whatever else the middle term is doing, it is preventing the first from being mistaken for an abstraction, and a recitation that hurries past it loses the one thing the verse was built to do.