What the Upaniṣads are for, and who worshipped her first

Vedānta means the end of the Veda, and in the plural, as here, vedāntāḥ are the Upaniṣads — the texts that stand at the close of each Vedic corpus and turn from ritual to enquiry. Saṃvedyā is a gerundive with the prefix sam-, to be thoroughly known, and the compound therefore says that the Upaniṣads are not merely compatible with her but are the instrument by which she is known. This is a substantial claim, and it marks the register in which this stretch of the hymn is operating. The sahasranāma comes to us embedded in the Lalitopākhyāna of the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, and for long passages it speaks the language of Śrīvidyā ritual; but here, and for several verses on either side, it speaks the language of the Upaniṣadic schools, and it does so in order to claim their conclusion for the goddess. The Bhagavad Gītā makes the identical move on Kṛṣṇa's behalf when it has him say that he is what all the Vedas are for. Reading the two side by side is the quickest way to see that this is a standard theological gesture with a standard shape, and that the shape is an argument, not a compliment.

Satyānandasvarūpiṇī puts two of the three great Vedāntic predicates together and leaves the third to be inferred. The familiar formula is sat, cit, ānanda — being, consciousness, bliss. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad gives a slightly different triad, satyaṃ jñānam anantam, real, knowing, without end. Here satya and ānanda are named and consciousness is not, which may be metrical convenience and may be deliberate: the preceding verse has just called her jñānavigrahā, whose very body is knowledge, so the missing term has already been supplied. Svarūpiṇī, with the possessive suffix, means she who has this as her own form, and the grammar of the word is worth a moment. Svarūpa is one's own form, and in Vedānta it means what a thing is when nothing has been added to it. To say that truth-and-bliss is her svarūpa is to say that these are not qualities she possesses but the material she is.

Lopāmudrā is one of the very few historical or quasi-historical persons named in the hymn, and her presence here is a piece of lineage documentation. In the Ṛgveda she appears as the wife of the sage Agastya in a dialogue hymn in which she reproaches him for years spent in austerity while she has aged; the exchange is frank about desire and about the claims a wife has, and it is one of the earliest passages in Indian literature in which a woman argues and wins. Śrīvidyā takes her up as a teacher. The tradition names twelve original transmitters of the vidyā — a list including Manu, Candra, Kubera, Manmatha, Agastya, Nandin, Sūrya, Viṣṇu, Skanda, Śiva, Durvāsas and Lopāmudrā herself — and two of those lineages became dominant, distinguished by the opening syllable of the fifteen-syllabled mantra and by small differences in its arrangement. The school that begins with ka is called kādi and is traced to Manmatha or Kāmarāja; the school that begins with ha is called hādi and is traced to Lopāmudrā. To name her here is thus to acknowledge a particular line of practice inside the hymn, and it is a mark of how seriously this tradition took the transmission by women that the hādi lineage carries her name rather than her husband's.

The last name gathers the whole of creation into a single word and disposes of it. Brahmāṇḍa is the world-egg, literally the egg of Brahmā, the standard purāṇic term for one universe; maṇḍala is a circle or an assembled company, and in the plural sense it turns the single egg into a multitude. Kḷpta, from √kḷp, means arranged, put in order, brought into being. Līlā is play, the word used for a child's game and for a divine act performed for no reason outside itself. The Brahmasūtras use it to answer a genuine objection: if the absolute wants nothing, why does it make anything? The answer is that making, at that level, is not motivated behaviour at all but is like the play of people in the world, done because it is in the nature of the player. The name puts that entire argument into one compound and attaches it to her.

One small textual matter. The line as printed here reads līlākḷpta-, with the vocalic ḷ written as a single vowel sign; the corresponding entry in the nāmāvali writes it līlāklṛpta-, with the consonant l followed by vocalic ṛ. Editions differ, and both spellings are found in print. The sound intended is the same, and the vowel is a curiosity in its own right: vocalic ḷ occurs in Sanskrit essentially only in forms of this one root.

The metre of this verse does something worth noticing before you chant it. An anuṣṭubh has eight syllables to the quarter, and the first line divides exactly as it should, eight for sarvavedāntasaṃvedyā and eight for satyānandasvarūpiṇī, one name to each quarter. The second line will not cooperate. Lopāmudrārcitā is six syllables and līlākḷptabrahmāṇḍamaṇḍalā is ten, so the quarter-break falls two syllables into the last name, immediately after līlā. You therefore cannot breathe at the halfway point of the second line without cutting a word in half. Breathe at the end of the first line and carry the second through in one span.

The vocalic ḷ in kḷpta is the rarest vowel in the language and most reciters have met it nowhere else. It is a syllable whose nucleus is the l itself, the way the second syllable of English "little" or "bottle" is carried by its l with no real vowel in it. Say k, then let the tongue go straight to the l position at the teeth and hold it briefly as the syllable, then release into pta. If you have learned the spelling klṛpta instead, you will be saying k, l, and a vocalic ṛ, which comes out close to kli-pta; that is the reading many printed nāmāvalīs give and no one will correct you for it.

Retroflexion is the other technical demand. Brahmāṇḍamaṇḍalā contains ṇḍ twice, and both times the tongue must be curled back to the roof of the mouth for the whole cluster, nasal and stop together. Dental n followed by d, which is what an English speaker will produce by default, makes a different and wrong word. The same word also opens with brahmā-, where the h is a genuine aspiration inside the cluster hm, not a silent letter: bra-hmā, with the breath audible between the h and the m.

Lopāmudrārcitā hides a join. Lopāmudrā ends in long ā and arcitā begins in short a, and the two collapse into a single long ā, so the name is pronounced lo-pā-mu-drār-ci-tā with the r of arcitā attaching backwards to the syllable before it. If you are chanting the nāmāvali form, the name separates out again as lopāmudrārcitāyai namaḥ, and all four names in this verse take the same dative ending -āyai except satyānandasvarūpiṇī, which is an ī-stem and becomes satyānandasvarūpiṇyai.

There is also a question of attitude that this verse raises more sharply than most. Three of its four names are about what she is; the third is about what somebody else did. Lopāmudrārcitā places a person in the middle of the hymn, and what the reciter is doing when saying it is repeating a fact about a transmission he or she now stands inside. Traditional practice makes this explicit at the start of any Śrīvidyā recitation with a guru-paramparā verse naming the line of teachers. Whether or not one chants that verse, the name asks to be said with the awareness that the words in one's mouth were placed there by other people, and that at least one of them was a woman who argued with her husband in the Ṛgveda about how a life should be spent.