Free of every adjunct, and the circle of teachers

Upādhi is the word to take apart first, because everything else in the verse is arranged around it. It is built from upa-ā-√dhā, to place near or set upon: something laid alongside a thing which lends that thing an appearance not its own. The illustration the Vedāntins use is a clear crystal set beside a red hibiscus flower. The crystal looks red. Nothing has happened to the crystal. Remove the flower and the redness goes with it, because the redness was never a property of the stone but of the arrangement. In that vocabulary a body is an upādhi, a name is an upādhi, a caste, an age, a set of circumstances, a role — everything, in short, by which one thing is told apart from another. The other standard image is spatial: the space inside a pot is not a piece of space, and when the pot breaks nothing is released, because nothing was ever confined. Note that the same word does entirely different work in logic, where a Naiyāyika's upādhi is the hidden extra condition that spoils an inference. The tantric and Vedāntic sense is the one operating here.

Vinirmuktā piles two prefixes of removal onto the participle of √muc, to loose. Vi and nis both mean away or out, so the word is emphatic in a way that plain muktā would not be: not merely free but let go of altogether, on every side. And sarva makes the sweep total. It is one of the strongest negations in the hymn, and the hymn immediately follows it by giving her a husband.

That is not carelessness. Sadāśiva, the ever-auspicious, is a technical figure: the fifth of the five whose corpses formed her couch fifty-odd verses earlier, and, in the thirty-six-tattva scheme the Śaiva schools work with, the level at which the undivided begins to distinguish itself into I and this. To call her his pativratā is to use a term with real weight. A vrata is a binding observance undertaken deliberately, and the pativratā is the woman for whom the husband is the observance. The stotra has used marital language before with a constitutional rather than a sentimental edge, and the same word will return nine verses on, when she is called priyavratā, fond of her vow. Placed immediately after sarvopādhivinirmuktā, the name says that a being under no constraint whatever can nevertheless bind herself, and that this is what a vow is.

Sampradāya rewards the same treatment. It is sam-pra-√dā, to hand over completely, and the noun means both the act of handing on and what is handed on. A Sanskrit tradition is therefore literally a gift passed hand to hand, and its two nearest synonyms carry the same freight: āgama is that which has come down, paramparā is one-after-another. In Indian intellectual life this is not decoration. A doctrine with no sampradāya has no standing, and the compliment paid to a scholar is that he is sampradāyavit, one who knows how the thing has been transmitted. To call her the mistress of the sampradāya is to say that the authority of the chain does not come from the chain.

Then the counting problem. As recited, the second line reads sādhvī — chaste, virtuous, a good woman — and one name is what the ear hears. The enumerations that must arrive at exactly one thousand generally split it into two, sādhu and ī, glossing the first as goodness and the second as the bare vowel, which the lexicons do record as a name of Lakṣmī. Lists differ, and this is one of several places in the thousand where the total is maintained by a decision of this kind. It is worth knowing about rather than being troubled by: a text recited as continuous verse and a text enumerated as a list of a thousand items are two different objects, and they do not always divide in the same places.

The last name is the practical one. Guru is an ordinary adjective meaning heavy — the grammarians use it of a long syllable — and the teacher is the one with weight. A popular etymology found in the later handbooks reads the two syllables separately, gu as darkness and ru as its removal; it is not a historical derivation but it tells you what the tradition thinks the word is for. What matters here is the plural. Maṇḍala is a circle, a ring, an assembled company. Śrīvidyā ritual worships the teachers as a body before it worships anything else, arranged in three streams: the divine, the perfected and the human, with the practitioner's own line at the near end of the third. To be embodied as that circle is to be reachable through any point on it.

Four of the six names begin with s, and the first line is nothing but sibilants and dentals: sarvopādhivinirmuktā sadāśivapativratā. Both quarters are eight syllables, both end in the long ā of the feminine nominative, and reciters who are going quickly tend to let the two run together into one sixteen-syllable smear. Set them apart by their opening vowels — sar with a short a, sa-dā with a short a and then a long one — and the line divides itself.

The first name hides the commonest vowel fusion in the hymn after e. Sarva ends in a short a, upādhi begins with a short u, and a followed by u gives o. So the o of sarvopādhi is a seam, exactly as the e of maheśvara is, and the word means all the adjuncts rather than anything to do with sarva-o. The second line has the e version of the same rule: sampradāya plus īśvarī, a plus ī, giving sampradāyeśvarī.

The clusters worth isolating are four. Mpr in sampradāya is three consonants — labial nasal, labial stop, then r — and English will want to insert a vowel; keep the lips closed through the m and open them once. Dhv in sādhvī is an aspirated dental followed by the v, which in Sanskrit is nearer an English w than a v. Vr in pativratā is the same v with a tapped r after it. And ṇḍ in maṇḍala is the retroflex pair, tongue-tip curled back for both, immediately followed by a dental l — the sharpest back-to-front movement in the verse, and the same shape as in candramaṇḍala earlier in the hymn.

There are exactly three retroflex sounds in the whole verse and they are all in the last name: the ṇ and ḍ of maṇḍala and the ṇ of rūpiṇī. Everything before that is dental or labial. Say the first line with the tongue-tip forward and let the last word be the only place it moves back, and the verse acquires a shape.

When the verse is used as archanā, with each name in the dative followed by namaḥ, this is one of the most instructive places in the whole nāmāvalī. The ā-stems take -āyai: sarvopādhivinirmuktāyai, sadāśivapativratāyai. The ī-stems take -yai with the ī turning into a glide: sampradāyeśvaryai, gurumaṇḍalarūpiṇyai. And then, if you are following the enumeration that splits the fourth name, you say sādhune — a masculine and neuter dative, the ending of a u-stem, dropped without warning into a sequence of feminine forms — followed by the single syllable yai for the vowel ī. Nothing else in the thousand sounds like that. Reciters who have never noticed the split hear it at once here, because the mouth has to do something it has not done for hundreds of names.

One long-vowel warning. Sadāśiva has a long ā in its second syllable and short vowels everywhere else, and it is easy to lengthen the i of śiva by analogy with the many names in this hymn that end in -īśa. It does not have one. Sadā means always; śiva is short, twice.

As for what the verse asks of the person saying it: the movement is from a being with no conditions to a company of human beings with names and dates. If the first name is taken as the whole content, the last one becomes sentimental, a gesture toward one's teachers. Taken in sequence they say something harder — that the unconditioned has no other address.