Speech, an army, and then the refusal of both categories

Bhāṣā is not a grand word. It is the ordinary Sanskrit noun for a spoken tongue, from √bhāṣ, to speak, and in the grammatical literature it has a precise and rather deflationary sense: Pāṇini uses bhāṣāyām to mark forms current in ordinary educated speech as against chandasi, forms belonging to the Vedic hymns. Bhāṣā is the language people actually use. To call her bhāṣārūpā is therefore not to say that she is the language of revelation but that she is the form taken by speech as such — the vernacular in the mouth of anyone, in any of the tongues of the subcontinent or outside it. Later devotional writing spells this out by counting eighteen principal languages, a gesture at completeness rather than a closed list.

Behind the name stands the oldest strand of goddess doctrine in India, the identification of the supreme with Vāc, Speech. In the tantric schools this becomes a full theory in which sound is the substance from which the world is precipitated, descending through levels from an undifferentiated resonance to articulate utterance. The fifty phonemes of the Sanskrit alphabet are the mātṛkā, the little mothers, and the sahasranāma has already called her mātṛkāvarṇarūpiṇī, she whose form is the letters of the mātṛkā. Bhāṣārūpā is the same doctrine stated at the far end of the descent: not the seed-syllables of the ritual, but the sentences of the marketplace.

Bṛhatsenā, she whose army is vast, points to the narrative frame of the whole hymn. The Lalitāsahasranāma is embedded in the Lalitopākhyāna, the long account of the goddess's campaign against the demon Bhaṇḍa preserved in the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, and that account is unusually interested in military organisation. She fights with a general staff of goddesses: Daṇḍanāthā, identified with Vārāhī, commands the forces; Mantriṇī, the dark Śyāmalā, is her minister; the divisions ride out on named war-chariots that the hymn's opening verses have already saluted. Bṛhatsenā compresses that whole apparatus into one word. Read alongside the ritual rather than the story, the army is the population of the Śrīcakra: the goddesses stationed in the nine enclosures, each rank with its own duties, which is why the name sits comfortably in a hymn whose battles are also diagrams. And since bṛhatsenā follows immediately on bhāṣārūpā, and the mātṛkā letters are themselves called śaktis and stationed on the body in nyāsa exactly as troops are stationed, the sequence invites a third reading in which her forces are made of words. Bṛhat, in any case, is a deliberately Vedic adjective, the word behind Bṛhaspati, meaning what has expanded rather than what is merely large.

Then bhāvābhāvavivarjitā cancels the ground under both names. Bhāva and abhāva, being and non-being, are technical terms: in the Vaiśeṣika analysis of reality the enumerated categories are all positive, and abhāva, absence, was admitted only later as a further category. The pair is thus the widest exhaustive division the classical schools possessed: a thing either is or is not. The name says she stands outside the pair, which is to say outside the reach of any statement built from it — and it is doing this in the middle of a hymn made of a thousand statements. The formulation is old. The Nāsadīya hymn opens the same way, refusing both terms of the alternative for the state before the world. Buddhist dialectic developed the manoeuvre into the four-cornered negation, and Vedāntic prose habitually reaches the absolute by stripping predicates rather than assigning them. What is distinctive here is the neighbourhood: the negation is set between a name about ordinary speech and a name about how easy she is to please.

That is what the second line does. Sukhārādhyā uses the same gerundive, ārādhyā, that the hymn used much earlier in mahāyāgakramārādhyā, where being propitiated required the entire sequenced liturgy of the great rite; here the only instrument named is sukha, ease. Śubhakarī is a straightforward agent noun, she who makes what is auspicious. The verse closes with śobhanā sulabhā gatiḥ, which the nāmāvalī followed in this edition treats as one name — beautiful, easy to reach, a goal — and inflects as a single unit, śobhanāsulabhāgatyai. Other printed lists divide the three words into separate names and make up the difference elsewhere, since the total is fixed at a thousand. The composite reading is the more interesting one, because it makes gatiḥ the noun the whole verse has been travelling toward.

The verse is a clean anuṣṭubh, eight syllables to the quarter, and it divides with unusual neatness: three names in the first line, three in the second, with the caesura falling after vivarjitā. Breathe there. The two halves also differ in sound in a way that is audible once pointed out. The first line is built on the aspirated labial bh — bhāṣārūpā, bṛhatsenā, bhāvābhāvavivarjitā — and the second on the sibilants and s: sukhārādhyā, śubhakarī, śobhanā sulabhā. The heavy, breathy opening and the lighter, hissing close are not decoration; they follow the sense, which moves from mass to ease.

Three places will trip an unpractised tongue. In bhāṣārūpā the ṣ is retroflex, made with the tongue-tip curled back to the roof of the mouth, and it is followed by a long ā; keep it distinct from the palatal ś that will arrive in the next line. In bṛhatsenā the vowel of the first syllable is the vocalic ṛ, a syllable in its own right and not the sequence r plus i, and the third syllable is the conjunct tse, a dental t released directly into a dental s. English wants to insert a vowel between them. Do not. In bhāvābhāvavivarjitā the difficulty is not any single sound but stamina: eight syllables of alternating labials before the rji conjunct, where a retroflex r closes onto a palatal j. Let the four long ās of bhāvābhāva be genuinely long, because the metre depends on them.

Sukhārādhyā contains two of the commonest errors in Sanskrit recitation. The kh of sukha is one sound, an aspirated velar, not k followed by a separate h; and the dhy of ārādhyā is an aspirated dental followed immediately by the palatal glide, without a break. The joint in the middle of the word is worth seeing: sukha ends in short a, ārādhyā begins in long ā, and the two combine into the single long ā you hear.

This verse is an unusually good one for learning the dative endings used when the names are chanted as archanā, each followed by namaḥ, because it contains three different stem types in six names. The ā-stems take -āyai: bhāṣārūpāyai, bṛhatsenāyai, bhāvābhāvavivarjitāyai, sukhārādhyāyai. But śubhakarī is an ī-stem and gives śubhakaryai, the long ī contracting to y before the ending. And the final name ends in the i-stem gati, giving śobhanāsulabhāgatyai. Anyone who has been mechanically adding -āyai to everything will hear the correction here.

As for what the verse asks: it asks for a particular kind of attention in the middle. It is easy to chant bhāvābhāvavivarjitā as one more long compound and not notice that it has just denied that she can be located by any predicate whatever, including the ones on either side of it. Having said that she cannot be caught in a statement, it says she can be reached without difficulty — and the two claims are not in tension, because reaching is not the same as stating. The practical instruction implicit in the second line is against elaborateness. Whatever else the tradition builds, the hymn here insists that the price of admission is low.