Sun in the heart, lamp in the triangle, Dakṣa's ruined rite

Hṛdayasthā continues the sequence of placements. The heart in Sanskrit anatomy is not primarily the organ of feeling that English usage makes it: hṛdaya is where the self is said to dwell in the Upaniṣads, the cavity described as smaller than a grain of rice and larger than the worlds, and the seat of knowing as much as of emotion. To place her there after the crown and the brow is to move from the top of the head, through the point between the eyes, to the traditional dwelling of the ātman. The light changes accordingly: raviprakhyā, looking like the sun, replaces the moon of two names earlier. The pairing of a lunar crown with a solar heart belongs to a widespread set of correlations in which the two luminaries are distributed through the body, the moon storing nectar above and the sun consuming it below.

Trikoṇāntaradīpikā leaves the body without announcing that it is doing so. The trikoṇa is the central triangle of the Śrīcakra, the innermost of the nine interlocking figures, and it is the enclosure in which the bindu, the single point at the centre, is set. Dīpikā is a small lamp, the ordinary oil lamp of a household shrine, and it is also the standard title for a commentary — the thing that illuminates a text. She is the flame inside the triangle: not the triangle, not the point, but what makes them visible. Set immediately after three placements in the body, the name asserts an identification that the tradition makes everywhere and argues for nowhere in particular — that the diagram drawn on metal and the interior of the practitioner are one place described twice.

The second line turns to the oldest and most consequential story in Śaiva mythology. Dakṣa was a patriarch, one of the progenitors of creatures, and his daughter Satī married Śiva against his wishes; Dakṣa regarded his son-in-law as an unwashed outsider with bad companions. He then performed a great sacrifice and invited every divinity except Śiva. Satī went uninvited, was insulted by her father, and destroyed herself — in most tellings by yogic fire generated within her own body, which is the origin of her name as it came to be used. Śiva, told of it, tore a lock of his hair and produced Vīrabhadra, who led the host that broke up the sacrifice, scattered the gods, and beheaded Dakṣa; the head was afterwards replaced with a goat's. Satī is then reborn as Pārvatī, daughter of the mountain, and marries Śiva again. In a further development, Śiva carries her corpse across the world in grief until it is cut apart, and the places where the pieces fall become the śākta pīṭhas, the seats of the goddess, which is how the story ends up underwriting the sacred geography of the entire tradition.

Dākṣāyaṇī is a patronymic, a feminine formed directly from Dakṣa, and it is not a compound; the module's note is right to flag this, since the surrounding names are almost all compounds and the ear expects one here. Dakṣayajñavināśinī then names the outcome. It is worth being clear about who does what. In the Purāṇic narratives the destruction of the sacrifice is carried out by Vīrabhadra and Śiva's host, not by the goddess directly, and the hymn's attribution of it to her is a deliberate shift of agency — the kind of shift Śākta texts make routinely when they take over material composed from a Śaiva point of view. Some traditions soften this by reading the name as she who is the cause of the destruction; others take it at face value. The reading is not settled, and the disagreement is itself part of the history of the name.

Daityahantrī, between the two, widens the frame. Daityas are the sons of Diti, the antigods of Purāṇic cosmology, and the epithet slayer of Daityas belongs to the goddess of the Devī Māhātmya more than to Satī. Its placement here folds the whole martial career of the goddess into the Dakṣa story, so that the ruin of the sacrifice appears as one instance of a general pattern rather than as a family quarrel. Note also the sound: dākṣāyaṇī, daityahantrī, dakṣayajñavināśinī, three names in a row on the same syllable, closing the line and the six hundredth name together.

The first line gives you the vocalic ṛ again, at the very start of hṛdayasthā, and immediately after an aspirated h. Say the h with breath, then the ṛ as a full short vowel with the tongue curled, then da and ya, then the sthā cluster with its dental s and aspirated dental th. Four distinct movements in four syllables.

Raviprakhyā ends in khyā, an aspirated guttural kh followed by the palatal glide y. It is a cluster that rewards slowing down, because the aspiration has to be audible before the y begins; kh-y-ā, not ky-ā. Trikoṇāntaradīpikā is eight syllables and holds the third quarter of the verse by itself. Its ṇ is retroflex, and it is retroflex because of the r in tri three syllables earlier — the same rule that gives sākṣiṇī and mṛṇāla their ṇ, operating here across an unusually long distance. The joint in the middle of the word is worth seeing: trikoṇa plus antara gives trikoṇāntara, because a short a followed by a short a yields a single long ā.

The second line is the easiest in this group to say and the easiest to garble, because all three names begin with d and two of them contain kṣ. Fix them by length: four syllables, four syllables, eight. Dākṣāyaṇī has a long ā in both of its first two syllables and a retroflex ṇ; dakṣa in the last name has short a. That contrast between dākṣā and dakṣa is the difference between the patronymic and the father's own name, and getting it wrong is a grammatical error, not merely a mispronunciation. Daityahantrī opens with the diphthong ai, a full long vowel, and closes with the ntrī cluster already met in niyantrī. In dakṣayajñavināśinī the jña conjunct appears again — follow whatever convention your teacher uses — and the ś is the palatal sibilant, distinct from the retroflex ṣ two syllables before it.

For the archanā: hṛdayasthāyai, raviprakhyāyai, trikoṇāntaradīpikāyai, dākṣāyaṇyai, daityahantryai, dakṣayajñavināśinyai. The first three are ā-stems and take -āyai; the last three are ī-stems and contract to -yai. The verse thus divides cleanly by declension along the same line where it divides by subject, which makes it easy to hold in the memory.

This is also the verse that completes the six hundredth name, and reciters who keep count will mark it. What it asks is a tolerance for two difficulties at once. The first line requires holding an interior image — a sun in the chest, a flame inside a triangle — and the discipline there is not to hurry, since eight syllables of name give ample time to see something. The second line requires something else. It is a story about a father who would not invite his daughter's husband, a daughter who died of it, and a sacrifice torn apart in revenge, and it is being recited as praise. The tradition does not offer a resolution of that, and it is better not to invent one. The plainest way to take the verse is that the deity being addressed is not on the side of ritual as such, that she has broken up a rite before and may do so again, and that the person performing one in front of her is not thereby in a position of safety.