Food and wealth, the identity of self and absolute, and a portion set aside

Annadā places her in a very old line of thought about food. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad narrates a sequence in which a student asks his father what the absolute is and is sent away repeatedly to find out; his first answer, and the one the text does not simply discard, is that food is the absolute, since beings are born from food, live by food, and enter into food when they go. Later Indian devotion made the identification concrete in the figure of Annapūrṇā, the goddess full of food, whose iconography gives her a ladle and a vessel and whose most recited hymn has Śiva himself begging from her. To open a verse with annadā and close it with balipriyā is to work inside that whole tradition. Vasudā beside it widens the gift from food to goods generally; vasu is an ordinary word for anything of value, property, riches, and it is also the name of a class of eight Vedic deities, so the name carries a faint echo of divine wealth alongside the plain sense.

Vṛddhā means grown, increased, and by extension old — the ordinary Sanskrit word for an elderly person is built on it. The name is usually read as saying that she is ancient beyond reckoning, senior to everything. It is worth noticing that the root here is vṛdh, to grow, and that the second line will open with bṛhatī, from bṛh, which also means to grow or swell. The verse is quietly built on two synonymous roots of increase, one at the end of the first half-line and one at the beginning of the second.

Brahmātmaikyasvarūpiṇī is the doctrinal centre of the verse and one of the most explicitly Advaitic names in the thousand. Its elements are brahman, the absolute; ātman, the self; aikya, oneness or identity, an abstract noun formed from eka; and svarūpiṇī, having as one's own form. The identity of brahman and ātman is the single proposition that Advaita Vedānta exists to establish, and the Upaniṣads state it in a handful of short sentences that the tradition calls the great utterances: that you are, I am the absolute, this self is the absolute, consciousness is the absolute. What the sahasranāma does here is unusual and worth pausing over. It does not say that she is brahman, or that she is the self, or even that she teaches their identity. It says that the identity itself is her form — that what she is made of is a relation of sameness between two terms. The claim is stronger than saying she is the absolute, because it takes in the human side of the equation as well: the reciter's own self is inside the name being recited.

The second line is an alliterative cascade and also an etymological one. Brahman is traditionally derived from the root bṛh, to grow great, to swell, to expand, and the four names bṛhatī, brāhmaṇī, brāhmī and brahmānandā all belong to that family. Bṛhatī means the vast or lofty one and is also the name of one of the principal Vedic metres. Brāhmaṇī is the feminine of brāhmaṇa and carries several senses at once: a woman of the priestly class, the wife of such a man, and the feminine of the sacred formula itself. Brāhmī is more specific. In the purāṇic and tantric literature Brāhmī is the power of Brahmā the creator, and she stands first in the group of mother-goddesses, the mātṛkās, who emerge from the male gods in the Devī Māhātmya to fight alongside the goddess, each carrying her originating god's weapon and riding his mount; Brāhmī comes on the swan with rosary and water-pot. The name also means speech, and in another sense entirely it is the name of the ancient script from which most Indian writing systems descend. Brahmānandā then names the joy of the absolute, which the Taittirīya Upaniṣad approaches by a famous calculation, multiplying human happiness by a hundred at each stage through a hierarchy of beings until it arrives at a single unit of the bliss of brahman.

Balipriyā breaks the run. It begins with b but not with br, and its subject is not the absolute but a rite. A bali is a portion of food set apart and offered — to household deities, to spirits, to beings in general, and in temple practice at the boundaries and directions of a sanctuary. Domestic law prescribes it as one of the five daily sacrifices that a householder owes, the one directed at all beings, and it is performed by putting food down rather than into a fire. The name says she is fond of it. After eight names of increase, absoluteness and identity, the ninth says that what pleases her is a handful of rice set outside the door, which is a deliberate and characteristic descent.

The second line of this verse is the reason people remember it, and it is also where recitation goes wrong. Five names in a row begin with b, and four of them with the cluster br: bṛhatī, brāhmaṇī, brāhmī, brahmānandā, balipriyā. Under speed the middle three are nearly indistinguishable, and the standard errors are to drop brāhmī, which is the shortest, or to run brāhmaṇī and brāhmī together into one word. Fix the order by what the names mean rather than by their sound. First the vast; then the woman of the sacred word; then the specific goddess Brāhmī; then the bliss; then the offering. Vastness, class, person, joy, rite — moving steadily from the largest to the most particular.

The cluster hm in brāhmaṇī, brāhmī and brahmānandā is the technical difficulty. It is a voiced aspirate h followed by m, and the breath belongs between them: brā-hmī, not brām-ī and not brā-mī. English has no comparable sequence and will want to drop the h entirely. Practise the syllable hmā on its own, feeling the breath start at the throat and close at the lips, before assembling the words.

Two vocalic ṛ vowels stand near the front of each line and they are not the same as the ri that transliteration suggests. Vṛddhā has one, followed immediately by the cluster ddhā, which is a dental d and a dental aspirated dh in succession — two stops, the second with breath, and not a single long d. Bṛhatī has the other, followed by h and then a light dental t. Getting these two right sets the tone for the whole verse, because they occur early and are heard clearly.

Brahmātmaikyasvarūpiṇī is eight syllables and fills half a line by itself, and its interior contains a join worth seeing. The elements are brahmātman, aikya and svarūpiṇī; brahmātma ends in short a, aikya begins with the diphthong ai, and a plus ai yields ai, which is why the compound has -tmaikya- where one might expect -tma-aikya-. Knowing this is the difference between reciting a long word and reciting three words that have grown together.

For archanā, five of the nine names are ā-stems taking -āyai: annadāyai, vasudāyai, vṛddhāyai, brahmānandāyai, balipriyāyai. The other four are ī-stems taking -yai: brahmātmaikyasvarūpiṇyai, bṛhatyai, brāhmaṇyai, brāhmyai. Note that brāhmī becomes brāhmyai, an awkward mouthful of br, h, m and y in succession and the hardest single form in the verse.

What the verse asks of the person chanting it is contained in its two ends. It opens by calling her the giver of food and closes by calling her fond of the offered portion, and between the two it says that the absolute and one's own self are the same thing and that this sameness is what she is. A practitioner who chants only the middle of the verse has an abstraction. The traditional practice keeps the frame: many households that recite the thousand names also set aside a portion before eating, and the two acts are meant to belong together. The doctrine is at the centre of the verse, but the food is on both sides of it.