Will, knowledge and action, and the ground they stand on

Icchā, jñāna and kriyā are a technical triad, not a poetic grouping, and they belong to the philosophical grammar shared by the Śaiva and Śākta traditions of the north and their southern inheritors. The scriptural anchor is a verse of the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad which says of the supreme that it has no body and no instrument, that nothing equals or exceeds it, and that its power is heard of as manifold and innate — as knowing, as force, as doing. That verse gives jñāna and kriyā by name and puts bala, strength, where later systems put icchā, will. The Kashmirian schools made the triad canonical, and their analysis is worth stating carefully because it is more interesting than a list of three faculties. Consciousness, on this account, is not passive awareness but an activity, and the activity has an internal order: first an undifferentiated stirring toward something, then that stirring taking on definite shape as a knowledge of what is wanted, then the shape being externalised as an act. Every ordinary intention in a human life has this structure, and the doctrine says that the structure is not human but cosmic.

The three powers are also mapped onto things one can point at. In the geometry of the Śrīcakra the primary downward triangle is standardly read as the three śaktis, one to each corner, with the point where they meet as the undivided power from which they separate. The fifteen-syllabled mantra of this school falls into three segments, and the tradition commonly aligns them with the same triad, so that the sequence of the mantra is also the sequence of an act of will becoming an act. Older Śaiva material distributes them among three goddesses, Vāmā, Jyeṣṭhā and Raudrī, who appear in the scriptures of that tradition as the personified forms of the powers. What the sahasranāma does with all this is characteristic: it does not say she possesses the three or presides over them, it says they are her svarūpa, her own form. There is no residue of her behind the powers that could be described separately.

The second line changes vocabulary from energy to architecture. Ādhāra is a support, a prop, the thing a load rests on, and the word is thoroughly ordinary — used of a shelf, a stand, the base of a lamp. Pratiṣṭhā is stronger. Built from prati and √sthā, to stand firm, it means a standing-place, a foundation, and by extension the establishment of anything in its proper position. It is also the standard term for the consecration of an image: the rite by which carved stone becomes a residence for a deity is a pratiṣṭhā, and the word is still used that way every day. The Gītā uses it in the largest sense available when Kṛṣṇa calls himself the foundation of the absolute itself. The prefix su- in supratiṣṭhā adds not intensity but quality: a good foundation, a sound one, the sort you can build on. Read against the first line, the two names answer a genuine question. The doctrine of the three powers makes the world a matter of ceaseless activity, and activity by itself has nowhere to happen. Sarvādhārā and supratiṣṭhā say that the same one who is the activity is also the place where it occurs.

Sadasadrūpadhāriṇī then takes up the oldest pair of terms in the language. Sat and asat are the participles of √as, to be, and their opposition runs from the creation hymn of the Ṛgveda — which begins by saying that in the beginning there was neither the non-existent nor the existent — through the whole subsequent history of Indian philosophy. Sat came to mean the real, what abides; asat, the unreal, what does not. Vedānta uses the pair to sort the world: the absolute alone is sat, and what appears and passes is neither exactly sat nor exactly asat but something the tradition had to invent a third category for. Sāṃkhya uses the pair to argue about causation, holding that an effect exists in its cause before it is produced. Dhāriṇī is she who bears or wears, from √dhṛ, the same root as dharma, and rūpa is form or appearance. The name therefore says that she puts on both forms — that being and non-being are costumes rather than facts about her. The point is not that she is half real and half unreal but that the distinction is one she operates rather than one she falls under. The Gītā makes the same claim in the first person when Kṛṣṇa says he is immortality and death, the existent and the non-existent, and it is in that register that the name should be heard: not as paradox for its own sake, but as the refusal of a final classification.

The first line is a single word of sixteen syllables and there is no legitimate place to breathe inside it. Reciters who have not planned for this run out of air around kriyāśakti and snatch a breath in the middle of a name, which is exactly the fault the practice is meant to train out. Fill the lungs before beginning, take the whole line in one measured span at a speed you can sustain, and breathe at the end of it. If the line cannot be managed in one breath at your current pace, slow the pace rather than divide the word.

The internal structure makes the memorisation easy once seen. Three units of the same shape — icchāśakti, jñānaśakti, kriyāśakti — followed by svarūpiṇī. The word śakti appears three times, always as the second element and always with the same cluster kti: a guttural k with no vowel, then a dental t, then i. English speakers tend to insert a small vowel between the k and the t; do not. The three first elements differ in their initial sounds and give the line its variety: icchā opens with a short i and the cluster cch, which is two consonants, an unaspirated palatal followed by an aspirated one, and not a single long ch. Jñā is the palatal cluster that this hymn uses often and that reciters pronounce as jña, gya or dnya according to where they learned. Kri has the r as a full consonant between k and i, not the vocalic ṛ that looks similar in transliteration.

The second line offers a different kind of difficulty. Supratiṣṭhā contains ṣṭh, a retroflex sibilant followed by an aspirated retroflex stop, which requires the tongue tip to be curled back for both sounds in succession and the breath to be released audibly after the ṭ. The nearest English approximation, a plain sht, is made in the wrong part of the mouth. Sadasadrūpadhāriṇī then gives a long stretch of dentals — sa, da, sa, da — where the tongue must touch the teeth rather than the ridge behind them. The final ṇī is retroflex, as is the ṇī of svarūpiṇī at the end of the first line, which makes the two lines end on the same sound and is worth using as a memory hook.

For recitation as archanā, the two long names are ī-stems and take -yai: icchāśaktijñānaśaktikriyāśaktisvarūpiṇyai namaḥ, and sadasadrūpadhāriṇyai namaḥ. The two short ones are ā-stems and take -āyai: sarvādhārāyai namaḥ, supratiṣṭhāyai namaḥ. In the archanā form the first name runs to eighteen syllables, and it is the standard place where a group recitation slows down.

There is one thing worth holding while saying this verse, and it comes from the order of the three powers. Will comes first and action last, with knowledge between them, and the sequence describes what the reciter is doing at that moment: a wish to chant, an understanding of what is being chanted, and the physical act of producing sound. The name does not describe a remote cosmic process. It describes the anatomy of the act being performed while it is performed, and then the second line says that the whole of it is resting on her.