Unbounded, everywhere, and hidden in the cave

Paricchinna is a term of art. Its root sense is cut around, circumscribed, and Vedāntic prose uses pariccheda for the delimitation that makes a thing this thing and not another. The standard analysis recognises three kinds: limitation by place, by time, and by the existence of other objects. The name mentions the first two and leaves the third to be supplied. Behind the formula lies the school's favourite image for individuality, the space enclosed in a pot: nothing happens to space when a pot is placed around some of it, and nothing happens when the pot breaks, but while the pot stands there is such a thing as the space inside it. Deśakālāparicchinnā denies that any pot is around her.

Sarvagā states the same thing from the other side. The negative formulation says what does not confine her; the positive says she reaches everywhere. Sanskrit theology habitually runs the two together, since negation alone can suggest an absence and affirmation alone something spread thin. Sarvaga is an old epithet of brahman and of space, and the feminine here is as simple as can be: sarva, all, plus ga, going, from √gam.

The third name breaks the sequence: sarvamohinī, she who bewilders everyone, moves from ontology to effect. Moha is delusion, and to call her its cause is to say that she is responsible not only for the world but for the world's failure to recognise her. Śaiva theology has a place for this: it counts five divine activities — emission, maintenance, withdrawal, concealment, grace — and concealment is the fourth, an act performed rather than a defect suffered. On that reading sarvamohinī is a technical designation rather than a complaint, and its position matters: it follows two names about her unlimited presence, which is precisely the fact she conceals. Mohinī is in addition a proper name — the enchantress Viṣṇu became at the churning of the ocean — and the vocabulary of bewitchment in this literature always carries some of that story.

Sarasvatī arrives with a long history. In the Ṛgveda she is first of all a river, the greatest of rivers, addressed as a mother; over later Vedic literature she draws to herself the functions of Vāc, speech, and by the classical period she is the goddess of language, learning, music and letters, her riverine origin surviving in her name, which means something like the one with pools. To name her here is not to introduce a different deity but to repeat an identification the hymn has already made: bhāṣārūpā, she whose form is language, appeared four verses earlier. She is also the second Vedic goddess named in as many verses, since sāvitrī stood in the same position in the previous one.

Śāstramayī extends the identification to the taught tradition. Śāstra is from √śās, to instruct or to rule, and it covers authoritative treatises of every kind, from ritual manuals to grammar to law. The suffix -maya means made of, feminine -mayī, so the name says the corpus of teaching is her substance. For a tradition that treats verbal testimony as a genuine means of knowledge, this is a stronger claim than it looks: it makes study a form of contact rather than a preparation for it.

The last two names belong to one root, √guh, to cover or conceal, and the hymn is enjoying the fact. Guha is a name of Skanda, the son of Śiva, glossed as the hidden one — appropriately, since every version of his birth involves concealment. The seed of Śiva was too fierce to be carried to term; it passed through Agni and the Gaṅgā and was deposited in a thicket of reeds, where six Kṛttikās nursed the child, who consequently has six heads. Guhāmbā, mother of Guha, is thus the hymn's acknowledgement of Lalitā's identity with Pārvatī; and in the South Indian world where this hymn has been most at home, Skanda under the name Murukaṉ is no minor deity.

But guhā, with a long ā, is also the cave, specifically the cave of the heart in which the Upaniṣads repeatedly say the self is deposited; guhāmbā can be read as the mother who dwells in that hidden place, and the reading is standard. Guhyarūpiṇī closes the verse with the gerundive of the same root: guhya, that which is to be concealed, hence secret, hence the esoteric teaching itself. The rhyme is deliberate, and the pairing stops the verse from resolving. Two names have just said that she is speech and scripture, fully available to anyone who will study; two more say that she is hidden, and that her hiddenness is not an accident of our dullness but a property of her form.

Seven names in thirty-two syllables makes this one of the more crowded verses in this part of the hymn, and the crowding is uneven: the first line is an eight-syllable name followed by a three and a five, the second four, four, three and five. The last two names should be taken together, since gu-hām-bā gu-hya-rū-pi-ṇī is effectively a single eight-syllable phrase and the repetition of gu- is the cue for both.

Deśakālāparicchinnā is long but entirely regular. Its pieces are deśa, kāla, and aparicchinnā, and the join in the middle is the commonest kind in Sanskrit: kāla ends in short a, aparicchinnā begins in short a, and the two merge into the long ā you hear. The difficulty is the cluster cchinnā, which contains a doubled palatal affricate followed by a doubled dental nasal. Both doublings must be held, and English speakers reliably shorten them: pa-ric-chin-nā, with the tongue lingering at the palate and then at the teeth.

Sarvagā is the shortest name in the verse and the easiest to swallow. Give it its full three syllables with a long final ā; reciters hurrying toward sarvamohinī tend to clip it into the preceding word.

Śāstramayī opens with the palatal ś and follows with a long ā and the cluster str, which is a dental s, a dental t and an r in that order without any vowel inserted. In the dative it produces a form worth knowing in advance: śāstramayyai, with a genuinely doubled y. Stems in -ī of this kind double the glide before the ending, and the doubling is audible.

Guhāmbā is guha plus ambā, two short a-sounds merging into one long ā. Guhyarūpiṇī has the cluster hy, an aspirate followed by the palatal glide, which should be one continuous release rather than h plus a separate ya; and the ṇ of rūpiṇī is retroflex, with the tongue-tip curled back. An ordinary dental n there is the most frequent error in the name.

For recitation as archanā, each name in the dative followed by namaḥ: deśakālāparicchinnāyai, sarvagāyai, sarvamohinyai, sarasvatyai, śāstramayyai, guhāmbāyai, guhyarūpiṇyai. Three ā-stems taking -āyai and four ī-stems contracting to -yai, distributed irregularly, with the doubled y of śāstramayyai as the one form that has to be learned rather than derived by ear.

What the verse asks is patience with its refusal to settle. It is easy to chant the first two names as reassurance and the last two as mystification, and to treat the middle three as a change of subject. Held together, they make a single point about the conditions under which anything here is known. She is unbounded and she is everywhere, which ought to mean she is obvious; she is the reason nothing is obvious; she is the speech and the scripture by which the obscurity is worked through; and her form remains, by its nature, something withheld. A hymn of a thousand names is an odd place to say that, and saying it here — two-thirds of the way through, with three hundred names still to come — is a deliberate check on the assumption that the naming is getting anywhere.