A seer with nothing to see, and five names from one root

The first line is Upaniṣadic in the most literal sense: it is a compressed restatement of a passage that anyone who has read the Bṛhadāraṇyaka will recognise at once. In the section on the inner controller, the text describes what dwells within all beings as the unseen seer, the unheard hearer, the unthought thinker, the unknown knower, and adds that there is no other seer, no other hearer, no other knower than this. The Sanskrit for that last term is vijñātā, and vijñātrī here is its feminine. So adṛśyā and vijñātrī are not two loose epithets but the two halves of a single old formula, and dṛśyarahitā and vedyavarjitā are the hymn's own additions, pressing the point further than the Upaniṣad does. The Upaniṣad says she is not seen; the hymn adds that there is nothing about her to see. The Upaniṣad says she is the knower; the hymn adds that she has no object of knowledge, which removes even the last asymmetry between her and what she knows.

That second move has a technical background. Indian philosophy generally analyses cognition as a three-term affair — a knower, an object, and the knowing that joins them — and calls the arrangement tripuṭī, the triad. Advaita treats the dissolution of the triad as the definition of liberating knowledge: as long as there is something over against the knower, there is duality, and as long as there is duality there is bondage. Sāṃkhya and classical yoga make the parallel distinction between the seer and the seen, dṛś and dṛśya, and hold that the seer is nothing but the power of seeing, with no content of its own. Vedyavarjitā takes the Advaitic route rather than the Sāṃkhya one. It does not say that she has withdrawn from her objects; it says there are none, because nothing stands outside her that could be one.

The five names of the second line all descend from the root yuj, and the Sanskrit grammarians in fact distinguish two roots spelled that way: yujir in the sense of joining, and yuj in the sense of concentration. Both senses are alive here. Yoginī is the feminine agent noun — the woman who practises yoga, and also, in tantric usage, a member of the class of powerful female beings whose circles of sixty-four or eighty-one are worshipped in their own temples and who in Śrīvidyā preside over the enclosures of the Śrīcakra. The hymn does not choose between the practitioner and the deity; she is called yoginī without qualification. Yogadā makes her the source of the attainment rather than the one who attains it. Yogyā, the gerundive, means fit, suitable, apt, and by itself is an ordinary adjective; placed in this sequence it means she is what one ought to be joined to, the only proper object of the discipline. Yogānandā names the joy that comes of the joining and assigns it to her rather than to the practitioner, which is a characteristic reversal of these hymns: the bliss that the meditator thinks he is having is described as hers.

The fifth name changes vowel and changes register. Yugandharā is built on yuga, which is the same root in its weak form and means, first, the yoke of a chariot or a plough — the crosspiece that joins two draught animals — and second, an age of the world, one of the four great periods that turn in succession. The compound is grammatically unusual: yugam keeps its accusative ending inside the word instead of losing it, which the grammarians call an aluk-samāsa and which happens in a small number of frozen formations. Both meanings are read. She bears the yoke, that is, she is the one who actually carries the discipline the previous four names have been describing; and she upholds the ages, holding the cosmic order steady as the eras revolve. The name also occurs in older literature as a place name and as a proper name, and some readers hear the epithet as covering that too, though the hymn gives no way to confirm it.

What the verse achieves by putting these two lines together is a definition of yoga that does not depend on any experience the practitioner can have. Everything a meditator might report — a vision, a piece of insight, a moment of certainty — falls under either dṛśya or vedya, and the first line has just abolished both. What is left is not a state but a relation, and the second line names the relation five times over, from her side each time.

The first line is a trap for the tongue and the second is a trap for the memory, and they need different remedies.

In the first line the danger is the pair adṛśyā and dṛśyarahitā, which share the sequence dṛśyā and follow each other immediately. Both contain vocalic ṛ, which is a full syllable in its own right, made with the tongue curled toward the roof of the mouth; it is not the ri that most transliterations suggest and most reciters produce. Both also contain śya, a palatal sibilant followed by a palatal glide, made with the body of the tongue against the hard palate rather than the tip against the teeth. The difference between the two names is only the initial a- and the tail -rahitā, and under speed the second name tends to collapse into a repetition of the first. Say the a of adṛśyā deliberately, and let dṛśyarahitā start clean.

Vijñātrī and vedyavarjitā balance them in the second half of the line, and vijñātrī deserves care. The jñ cluster is the palatal j with the palatal nasal ñ, though northern reciters will say gya and Marathi speakers dnya and neither is a fault. The ending -trī is a consonant cluster plus a long ī, three sounds in one syllable: t, r, ī, with no vowel intruding between t and r.

The second line is the easiest line in this part of the hymn to recite and the easiest to lose your place in. Four names in a row begin with yo-, and three of them are three or four syllables long. Reciters drop yogyā, which is the shortest, or repeat yogadā, and the ear does not catch it. The remedy is to hold the order by its logic rather than its sound. She is the one who is joined, then the one who grants the joining, then the one worth joining, then the joy of it, and finally the yoke itself. Practitioner, giver, object, joy, instrument. Once that order is understood it cannot be transposed.

The change from yo- to yu- in the last name is the signal that the run has ended, and it should be audible. Yugandharā has a short u where the four preceding names have a long o, and the nasal in -ndha- is dental, followed by an aspirated dental dh: the breath after the d is part of the letter, not an accident of speed.

For recitation as archanā, the endings divide. Yoginī and vijñātrī are ī-stems and take -yai — yoginyai namaḥ, vijñātryai namaḥ — while the remaining seven names are ā-stems in -āyai. Saying the nine names in that form is a good drill precisely because the two exceptions fall at the head of the second line and in the middle of the first, where they are easy to miss.

The verse also sets a limit on what the practice is allowed to expect. Adṛśyā and dṛśyarahitā together rule out visions; vedyavarjitā rules out arriving at a fact about her. A person who chants this verse honestly is agreeing in advance that nothing seen and nothing understood during meditation is the thing being sought, which is a considerable renunciation to make in sixteen syllables and is the reason the five yoga names that follow are needed.