From the immeasurable to the body it wears

Śakti is a plain noun from √śak, to be able: capacity, the power to do something. Its promotion into a metaphysical first principle is the defining move of Śākta theology, and ādiśakti, the power that is first, states the position in two words. The difficulty it addresses is old. Every school agrees that the absolute must be one and that the world is many; the question is what accounts for the transition. Śaiva systems generally place Śiva first and treat śakti as his capacity to act; the Śākta traditions reverse the priority, or better, refuse it, arguing that a capacity that comes second would be a capacity acquired, and a power that can be acquired is not the power in question. The Saundaryalaharī states the consequence in its opening verse with deliberate provocation: without her, Śiva cannot so much as stir.

Ameyā is the negative of meya, measurable, from √mā, to measure, and the negation is more technical than it looks. In the logical vocabulary, prameya is the knowable, the object correlative to a means of knowledge, and to say that she is not meya is to say that no instrument of knowledge takes her as its object. The same root supplies māyā, which at its base means a measuring out, a marking of limits — so the immeasurable one and the name of the world-appearance come from the same three sounds, a coincidence the commentators enjoy and which is not, etymologically, a coincidence at all.

Ātmā is the theological centre of the verse and the point at which its grammar becomes interesting. Ātman, the self, is a masculine noun of the an-declension, and Sanskrit provides no feminine form; where the rest of the hymn adjusts every epithet into the feminine, here it simply does not, and the nāmāvalī consequently gives the dative as ātmane rather than the -āyai that governs almost everything around it. The break is worth noticing rather than smoothing over, because it is a break in favour of doctrine. The claim being made is the Upaniṣadic one: that what the hymn has been addressing in the second person throughout is the same as what the reciter refers to in the first. Placing this name between ameyā and paramā, immeasurable and supreme, gives it the Vedāntic company it belongs to, and this short stretch of the stotra is as close as the text comes to speaking the language of the Upaniṣads without adaptation.

Paramā is the feminine of parama, itself a superlative built on para, further or beyond. It should not be confused with parā, the technically loaded feminine of para that names the highest level of speech in the philosophy of language and the first of the three goddesses of the Trika. Paramā is the ordinary word, and its ordinariness is the point: after the negation of ameyā, the hymn wants a positive superlative that any listener will understand.

Pāvanākṛtiḥ turns the verse. Pāvana, from √pū, to purify, belongs to the oldest layer of ritual vocabulary — the ninth book of the Ṛgveda is given over almost entirely to Soma pavamāna, the clarifying stream — and ākṛti is shape, outward figure, the thing a form is recognised by. In Mīmāṃsā it is further a term of art, figuring in the old dispute over whether a word denotes the individual or the ākṛti, the generic form. Read against the four abstractions preceding it, the name asserts that she has an outline at all, and then makes that outline the agent: it is the shape, not merely the deity behind it, that cleans whoever holds it in mind. This is the theology of the image and of visualisation stated in a single compound.

Brahmāṇḍa is the cosmic egg. The image descends from the Ṛgvedic hymn to Hiraṇyagarbha, the golden germ that arose in the beginning, and the Purāṇas develop it into a cosmology: an egg forming in the primordial waters, splitting into the halves that become heaven and earth and enclosing the ordered world within its shell. Koṭi is ten million, and aneka is more than one, so the compound multiplies universes by tens of millions and then refuses to give a total. This plurality of worlds is one of the striking commitments of the Purāṇic imagination, and the hymn is transmitted inside the Purāṇa named after the egg — a coincidence worth registering when a verse of the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa calls her the mother of innumerable brahmāṇḍas. Jananī, from √jan, is the mother in the specific sense of the one who gives birth, not the one who nurtures.

Divyavigrahā closes the verse where the tantric traditions want it closed. Vigraha is body, bodily form — the same word grammarians use for the analytical paraphrase that unpacks a compound, so that a vigraha is in general what shows you the parts of a thing. Divya means belonging to the sky, heavenly, and the compound is a bahuvrīhi: she whose body is of divine make. After immeasurability, selfhood and supremacy, the last word of the verse is body. That reversal is not carelessness; it is the position, held against the more austere Vedānta, that the highest reality is not formless but has a form which is itself uncomposed.

Seven names in thirty-two syllables makes this the most crowded verse in this part of the hymn, and the crowding creates two specific hazards.

The first is in the opening line, where the boundary between two names is completely inaudible. Ameyā ends in long ā and ātmā begins with long ā, and two long ās merge into one, so what is recited is ameyātmā with no seam of any kind. The printed text here marks the merger with a double avagraha, ऽऽ, an editorial device rather than a sound — nothing in it is pronounced. Editions differ in how they handle this: some print two avagrahas, some one, some none at all, and a reciter working from an unpointed text has no way to hear where the sixteenth name of the group ends and the seventeenth begins. This is the clearest demonstration in the stotra that the division into a thousand names is carried by the nāmāvalī tradition and not recoverable from the continuous verse.

The second hazard is that the third and fourth feet are joined by a single word. Anekakoṭibrahmāṇḍajananī is eleven syllables, and the eight-syllable boundary falls inside it, after -ṇḍa. The usual mid-line breath is therefore unavailable, and the whole second line has to be taken as one span. Plan the breath at the end of the first line accordingly.

The clusters deserve individual attention. Śakti has kti, three articulations in sequence — palatal ś, then velar k, then dental t — and the k must be released, not swallowed. Ātmā has tm, dental into labial, with no vowel between. In pāvanākṛtiḥ, the ṛ of ākṛti is a vowel in its own right, made with the tongue in the retroflex position; it is not the syllable ri, though the two are close enough that most modern reciters merge them. Koṭi has a retroflex ṭ. And brahmāṇḍa contains the single most awkward sequence in the verse: br, then the conjunct hm, then ṇḍ. The hm is a voiced aspirate h followed directly by m, and in practice the breath of the h is carried through the nasal, which is why the word is often heard as though the m were doubled. Both consonants of ṇḍ are retroflex.

For archanā the datives are ādiśaktaye, ameyāyai, paramāyai, pāvanākṛtaye, anekakoṭibrahmāṇḍajananyai, and divyavigrahāyai — and, breaking the pattern, ātmane. That single masculine dative is the thing to fix in the memory, because the surrounding rhythm of -āyai endings will pull it toward a form the language does not have.

As for what the verse asks: it is a verse to be taken in order and not sampled. Its first half withdraws every handhold — no measure applies, nothing is above her, and the self she is said to be is the reciter's own, which is not an object that can be faced. Its second half gives the handholds back one at a time, and gives them back as a purifying shape, a birth, and a body. Reciters who find the abstractions of the first line cold are not misreading them; the coldness is what the second line is answering. The traditional instruction at this point in the hymn is simply to keep going, and to let divyavigrahā, the last word, be the one the attention settles on.