Two wombs, then the knowledge that has no edges

The two wombs at the head of the verse are not a repetition. Garbha in Sanskrit covers the womb, the embryo, and the interior of anything, and the two compounds are bahuvrīhis that use it in slightly different senses. Viśvagarbhā says that the whole world is inside her, which makes her the container. Svarṇagarbhā says that the gold is inside her, which makes her the mother of a container. The gold in question is the hiraṇyagarbha, the golden germ of Ṛgveda 10.121, one of the oldest cosmogonic images in Indian literature: a single embryo of gold that arises at the beginning, becomes the one lord of everything born, and holds heaven and earth in place. Later systems fix hiraṇyagarbha as a technical term for the first differentiated stage of the cosmos, the totality of subtle bodies, the collective mind before there are individual minds — the level that Brahmā personifies. To call her svarṇagarbhā is therefore to place her one step behind the oldest thing the tradition can name. Hiraṇyagarbha is the first-born; she is what he is born from.

The third name is the one to slow down at, and the printed line here is worth reading carefully. The text gives svarṇagarbhā'varadā, and the avagraha — the mark ऽ that stands for a swallowed short a — tells you that the name underneath the sandhi is avaradā, not varadā. Long ā plus short a produces long ā and leaves the mark behind as a receipt. This matters because varadā, giver of boons, is one of the commonest epithets in the entire literature, and a reciter working by ear alone will hear it here and be wrong. The commentators offer two ways of taking avaradā, and both are current. Read avara as low, inferior, hindmost, and the name means she who gives to the lowest, so that no petitioner is too far down the scale to be reached. Read the a- as the negative prefix attached to varadā and the name means she who is not a mere giver of boons, on the grounds that a boon is a small thing to want from her and that what she actually gives is named five syllables later as knowledge. The second reading is the more startling and fits the movement of the verse; the first is the more natural Sanskrit. Nothing requires choosing, and the tradition has generally been content to let the ambiguity stand.

Vāgadhīśvarī, overlord of speech, joins this hymn to the Vedic figure of Vāc, who in Ṛgveda 10.125 speaks in the first person and claims to move with all the gods, to bend the bow of Rudra, and to make whomever she loves into a sage. Śrīvidyā inherits that identification wholesale: speech is not something the goddess governs from outside but something she is, articulated through the levels that the tradition calls parā, paśyantī, madhyamā and vaikharī — speech at rest, speech seen, speech in the middle, speech that comes out of a mouth. The doubled superlative in the name is deliberate. Adhi means over and above; īśvarī is already a sovereign lady; adhīśvarī is the sovereign over sovereigns. Sarasvatī is the goddess of speech, and this name says who stands over her.

The second line moves into the vocabulary of Vedānta. Aparicchedyā is built on pariccheda, cutting around, which in that literature is the standard word for limitation, and the standard analysis names three kinds: limitation by place, by time, and by thing — deśa, kāla and vastu. A pot is here and not there, now and not then, a pot and not a cloth. The name denies all three of her at once, and it does so with a gerundive, aparicchedyā, not able to be delimited: the point is not that no one has yet drawn the line but that the line cannot be drawn. Set beside dhyānagamyā, to be approached by meditation, it produces the characteristic double motion of these hymns. She is unreachable by definition and reachable by absorption, and the two claims are not in tension because dhyāna is precisely the operation that stops producing definitions.

The verse closes by distinguishing the gift from the giver. Jñānadā makes knowledge something handed over rather than achieved, which is the position the Upaniṣads take when they say that the self is not obtained by exposition or by intelligence or by much hearing, but by the one whom it chooses. Jñānavigrahā then removes the last distance: vigraha is body, bodily form, the word used for the image in a temple, and the compound says that in her case the knowledge and the body are the same substance. What would be flesh in anyone else is, in her, knowing.

This verse contains the first serious tongue-twister of its neighbourhood, and it is the sandhi rather than the sound that catches people. The second and third names run together as svarṇagarbhā'varadā, a single unbroken stretch of seven syllables, and the reciter has to know that a name boundary falls inside it. Say svarṇagarbhā, then varadā, with no pause and no fresh breath but with the knowledge that you have just said two names. When the same verse is chanted as an archanā, name by name with namaḥ after each, the sandhi is undone and the hidden a comes back: svarṇagarbhāyai namaḥ, avaradāyai namaḥ. Hearing the a return is the best proof that it was there.

The conjunct ज्ञ in jñānadā and jñānavigrahā is pronounced in at least three different ways across India, and reciters are often surprised to learn this. Its analysed value is a palatal j followed by the palatal nasal ñ, which is what the transliteration jñā records and what most southern traditions approximate. Much of the north says gya, so that jñāna comes out as gyāna; Marathi speakers say dnya. None of these will get you thrown out of a recitation hall. What matters more for the metre is that the following ā is long in both names and that the two names are not identical: jñānadā has three syllables, jñānavigrahā has five, and the second one carries the weight of the pāda.

Aparicchedyā is the hardest single word here. It contains cch, which is not a long ch but an unaspirated palatal stop followed by an aspirated one — c then ch, two separate articulations, the second with a puff of breath. English has nothing that behaves this way, and the usual failure is to produce a single soft ch and lose a full beat of the line. Then comes dyā, dental d plus the palatal glide, again with no vowel between. Practise the word in three pieces at half speed, a-pari-cchedyā, and only then put it back together.

The metre is standard anuṣṭubh, eight syllables to the quarter, and the break falls after the sixteenth syllable, which here is the end of aparicchedyā. That places the caesura exactly where the sense breaks too: everything before it is about extent, everything after it is about knowing. Breathe there and nowhere else in the verse.

For the recitation done as offering, note that six of these eight names are feminine ā-stems and take the dative in -āyai — viśvagarbhāyai, svarṇagarbhāyai, avaradāyai, dhyānagamyāyai, aparicchedyāyai, jñānadāyai, jñānavigrahāyai — while vāgadhīśvarī, being an ī-stem, becomes vāgadhīśvaryai. That single irregularity in the middle of the verse is a useful place to notice that the endings are grammar and not decoration.

As for what to hold while saying it: the verse gives two wombs, a gift to the lowest, and the mastery of every word, and then says that none of it can be delimited and that the knowledge of it has to be given. It is a good verse for someone who has been working hard at study, and it is not flattering to that effort.