The one who is alone, and the one who is three

Klīṃ is a bīja, a seed-syllable: a sound that is not a word, has no grammatical form, and is held to be the acoustic body of a deity rather than a description of one. Klīṃ specifically is the kāmabīja, the seed of desire, associated with Kāma, and it occurs across a wide range of mantras both Śākta and Vaiṣṇava; in this school it is the middle syllable of the three-syllable mantra of Bālā, the goddess in her form as a girl. The name is formed by the standard Sanskrit device for talking about a sound rather than using it, the suffix -kāra, by which the syllable om becomes the omkāra and the letter a becomes the a-kāra. Klīṅkārī is therefore she who is the making of klīṃ, and the spelling records a piece of phonetics: the nasal that ends the syllable, written as anusvāra when the syllable stands alone, assimilates to the velar ṅ before the k of kārī.

Kevala means alone, sole, unmixed, whole in itself. From it, by lengthening the first vowel and adding a suffix — the ordinary way Sanskrit builds an abstract noun, as śaiva is built from śiva — comes kaivalya, and kaivalya is a technical term with a settled address. It is the word Sāṃkhya and Yoga use for liberation, and their account of it is exact: bondage is the apparent conjunction of the conscious principle with unconscious nature, and freedom is not union with anything but the withdrawal of that conjunction, leaving consciousness standing in its own form. The Yogasūtra ends on the word. Jainism uses the same root for its own summit, the kevalin being the one who has attained kevala-jñāna, isolated and unobstructed knowing. The interesting thing about kaivalyapadadāyinī is that the tantric traditions do not generally describe the goal in these terms; they speak of recognition, or of identity with the deity, or of enjoyment and liberation together, and isolation is not their preferred picture. The hymn nevertheless makes her the giver of kaivalya, and the commentators generally take the word in the broad sense of final release rather than pressing the Sāṃkhya doctrine. It is worth noticing the strain rather than translating it away.

Guhyā comes from √guh, to cover or conceal — the same root that gave Guha his name four verses earlier, and that gives guhā, the cave. In tantric usage guhya is the standard designation for what is esoteric: the teaching that is transmitted from mouth to ear, the mantra that loses its efficacy if published, the practice that is not discussed outside the circle of the initiated. The convention is old enough that the Bhagavad Gītā already ranks its own teaching as more secret than the secret. The name placed here, in a hymn of a thousand names that has been printed, translated and broadcast, is a genuine tension in the tradition, and the way it is usually resolved is by distinguishing the stotra, which is open, from the vidyā, which is not: the names may be recited by anyone, and what they refer to is still received only by initiation.

Tripurā is the school's own name for its deity — the tradition of Tripurasundarī, the beautiful lady of the three cities, is what Śrīvidyā is — and it is a name that functions as a container for triads. Behind it stands the Purāṇic story of the three flying fortresses of gold, silver and iron built by the craftsman Maya for three asura brothers, invulnerable except in the single instant when the three aligned, which Śiva destroyed with one arrow and so became Tripurāntaka. Śākta retellings add that he could do it only by the goddess's power, which is how the demolisher's epithet turns into her name. But the tradition reads the three far more widely: the three states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep; the three guṇas; the three divisions of the fifteen-syllable mantra; the three powers of will, knowledge and action; the three fires; the three Vedas. Commentators also enjoy the fact that purā can mean before, so that Tripurā may be construed as she who precedes the three. Trijagat is the older Vedic triple world of earth, midspace and heaven, the three called out in the vyāhṛtis before the Gāyatrī. Trimūrti, taken as a bahuvrīhi, does not merely associate her with Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva but assigns their three functions to her as three shapes she wears; the trimūrti scheme itself is a relatively late systematisation, tidier in the Purāṇas than in earlier practice. And tridaśa, literally the three tens, is a conventional Sanskrit way of saying the gods, one of those numbers that has ceased to count anything.

This is the most acoustically organised verse in this stretch of the hymn. The first line stays at the velar position — klī, ke, gu, kai — and the second line begins each of its four names with tri. Learning the verse means learning two sounds well and then keeping count.

Klīṅkārī opens with a cluster English does not have at the beginning of a word: k released directly into l, with the ī long. What follows is harder. The ṅ is the velar nasal, the sound at the end of English sing, and here it stands at the end of one syllable with a k beginning the next: klīṅ-kā-rī. Do not let it become an n. The reason it is a ṅ at all is that the syllable klīṃ ends in a nasal that takes its position from whatever follows, and what follows is velar; understanding this saves you from treating the spelling as arbitrary.

Guhyā has hy, the voiced aspirate followed by the palatal glide, pronounced as one release and not as two syllables. Kaivalya has the diphthong ai, which is a long vowel in its own right and considerably more open than the English vowel in eye, followed by the cluster lya. Hold the pair kevalā and kaivalya together in the mind: they are the same stem at two vowel grades, e and ai, and hearing the relation is worth more than memorising both.

The second line requires four clean tr clusters, dental t into retroflex r, in eight beats. Between them come two of the densest conjuncts in the hymn. Trijagadvandyā has dv in the middle and then ndy, three consonants — dental n, dental d, palatal y — which must all be sounded. And trimūrtiḥ before tridaśeśvarī undergoes the regular change of visarga to s before an unvoiced dental, giving trimūrtis tridaśeśvarī; the name itself still ends in visarga when it is recited alone in the nāmāvalī, which is the sort of discrepancy that confuses learners who have met the name only in one of the two contexts.

The datives for archanā are klīṅkāryai, kevalāyai, guhyāyai, kaivalyapadadāyinyai, tripurāyai, trijagadvandyāyai, trimūrtyai and tridaśeśvaryai. Trimūrtyai is the one to watch: the i-stem contracts before the ending, so it is not trimūrtaye but trimūrtyai, since the word is being treated here as a feminine adjective describing her rather than as the masculine noun for the triad of gods.

Two things the verse asks. The first concerns guhyā, and it is a real question rather than a pious one. A hymn that is freely available contains a name declaring that she is to be kept hidden, and the traditional resolution — that the praise is public while the practice is not — is worth taking seriously by anyone reciting it. What it asks in practice is discretion about method rather than silence about devotion.

The second concerns the shape of the verse. Reciters often feel the first line as cold and the second as warm, and the feeling is accurate: aloneness, secrecy and isolation on one side, and on the other a goddess with three forms whom three worlds salute and thirty gods obey. The hymn does not tell you how to hold both. The most one can say is that the verse puts the gift of solitude in the same eight syllables as the crowded triple world, and that the practice of this school consists largely in declining to choose between them.