Eight forms, the unborn defeated, and no second thing

Aṣṭamūrti is a borrowed epithet, and knowing whose it is changes how the name reads. In Śaiva usage it belongs to Śiva, and the eight embodiments are conventionally listed as the five elements — earth, water, fire, air and space — together with the sun, the moon, and the sacrificer, the human being who performs the rite. That last item is what makes the list interesting: seven of the eight are cosmic constituents, and the eighth is a person doing something. The classical poets knew the list well enough to build benedictory verses on it. When the sahasranāma applies the epithet to her, it is doing what it does repeatedly in this section: taking a formula that belongs to Śiva and stating it in the feminine. Commentators have offered other lists of eight for this name, but the elemental reading is the one the epithet carries elsewhere in the literature.

Ajājaitrī is the most technically loaded name in the verse, and it depends on a single word from the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad. Ajā means the unborn, in the feminine, and it is also the ordinary Sanskrit word for a she-goat; the Upaniṣad exploits the ambiguity in a famous verse describing an unborn female, red and white and black, who bears many offspring resembling herself and is attended by two unborn males, one who enjoys her and one who leaves her. The three colours were early identified with the three guṇas — the strands of passion, clarity and inertia out of which the Sāṃkhya systems build the whole material world — and ajā thereby became a standard designation of prakṛti, primordial nature, or in Vedāntic usage of māyā. She is called unborn because she has no origin: nature is beginningless, and that is what makes it inescapable for anything inside it. Jaitrī, from √ji, to conquer, makes her the victor over this. The claim is not that she destroys nature but that she is not subject to it — a statement of her position rather than a mythological event. Everything else is produced by ajā and bound by her; the goddess stands on the other side of that relation.

Which makes the third name a deliberate descent. Lokayātrā is composed of loka, the world in the sense of the inhabited space where people live, and yātrā, from √yā, to go: a journey, a procession, and by extension the ongoing course of something, the way life is carried on and supported. In older prose it covers livelihood, commerce, and the maintenance of the social order. Vidhāyinī, from vi-√dhā, means arranging, ordaining, laying down. So immediately after the announcement that she has defeated primordial nature, the hymn says that she is the one who arranges the traffic of the streets. The juxtaposition is the point, and it distinguishes this tradition's position from a straightforwardly renunciant one. The world's business is not left behind as beneath her notice; it is described as her arrangement.

The second line then runs four names of non-duality in a row, and each of the four does something slightly different. Ekākinī is the ordinary word for a person who is alone, and it carries in normal usage a faint domestic colouring — a woman by herself, unaccompanied. Placed here, that ordinary word has to bear the metaphysical claim that there is no second thing — a characteristic move of these hymns, in which the plainest available term carries the largest meaning. Bhūmarūpā rests on bhūman, plenitude, which the Chāndogya Upaniṣad makes technical in a teaching distinguishing the great from the small: the plenitude is where one sees, hears and knows nothing else, and it is the only happiness there is, since nothing small can be happy. So aloneness and fullness are the same condition described from two sides. Then nirdvaitā and dvaitavarjitā say the same thing twice, once with a prefix of privation and once with a past participle meaning excluded or deprived of. This doubling is a habit of this part of the hymn — the previous verses have paired adṛśyā with dṛśyarahitā and vijñātrī with vedyavarjitā in exactly the same way — and the commentators' rule that no name may be redundant obliges a reader to look for a distinction. The one usually drawn is between duality as a fact and duality as an experience: it is absent in her, and it has been removed for whoever reaches her.

One textual note. The nāmāvalī form given for the sixth name in the text used here reads nidvaitāyai, without the r of nirdvaitā. Printed nāmāvalīs vary in such details; the verse form is unambiguous, and the r belongs there.

The first thing to get right in this verse is a word boundary that the writing conceals. The line reads aṣṭamūrtirajājaitrī as one continuous stretch, but there are two names in it. Aṣṭamūrtiḥ ends in visarga, and a visarga before a vowel becomes r, so aṣṭamūrtiḥ plus ajājaitrī yields aṣṭamūrtir ajājaitrī. A reciter who does not know this divides the sound in the wrong place and produces something like aṣṭamūrti rajā jaitrī, which means nothing. Attach the r to the end of the first name and then say ajājaitrī.

That name has its own difficulty. Ajājaitrī contains three consecutive syllables beginning with the palatal j — jā, jai, trī comes after — and the vowel ai in the middle is a full-length diphthong, longer than the short glide of English "eye". The ending -trī is a cluster: dental t, then r, then long ī, with no vowel between the t and the r. The same ending will return in the verse's other feminine agent nouns, and it is worth fixing here.

Aṣṭa- opens the line with ṣṭ, retroflex sibilant plus retroflex stop, both made with the tongue tip curled back toward the roof of the mouth. English speakers produce a dental or alveolar sht by default, which is one of the commonest faults in the whole recitation. Lokayātrāvidhāyinī then gives an unbroken run of open syllables that most reciters find restful after the clusters, and it is a good place to steady the tempo.

The second line is built on the diphthong ai, which appears twice in near succession, in nirdvaitā and dvaitavarjitā, and both times inside the cluster dv. Nirdvaitā is the harder of the two because the r comes first: r, then dental d, then v, then the diphthong, four articulations in one syllable with no vowel until the end. Practise dvai on its own — a dental d with the lips already forming the v, released into a long ai — and then add the r in front of it.

For archanā the endings split evenly and instructively. Aṣṭamūrti is an i-stem and becomes aṣṭamūrtyai. Ajājaitrī, lokayātrāvidhāyinī and ekākinī are ī-stems and become ajājaitryai, lokayātrāvidhāyinyai, ekākinyai. Bhūmarūpā, nirdvaitā and dvaitavarjitā are ā-stems and become bhūmarūpāyai, nirdvaitāyai, dvaitavarjitāyai. Three different stem classes in a single verse make this a useful place to hear that the dative ending is being derived rather than pasted on.

The verse also poses a question to the person chanting it, and it is a practical one rather than a devotional flourish. Lokayātrāvidhāyinī says that the ordinary conduct of life is her arrangement; the four names that follow say that nothing exists apart from her. A practitioner who takes the second line seriously has no basis for treating the day's work as an interruption of practice, because there is nothing for it to be an interruption from. Traditional recitation of the thousand names is done at a fixed hour and then left, and the person goes back to the traffic. This verse is the reason that is not a compromise.