Beyond the kula, and made of honey

Kula means a herd, a family, a house, a lineage. The tantric schools took the ordinary word and made it carry a great deal: the body, the assembly of practitioners, the whole field of what is manifest and female and embodied, set against akula, the unmanifest ground identified with Śiva. The Kaula traditions take their name from it, and Śrīvidyā inherits both the vocabulary and a long internal argument about how far the older Kaula practices should be followed literally. Kulottīrṇa is a term of art in that argument. Uttīrṇa is the past participle of ud-√tṝ, to cross up and out — the word used of coming up out of a river onto the bank. What has crossed out of the kula is past the distinctions the kula is built on. Commentators gloss the name in several ways and do not agree: kula as the body, so that she is not embodied; kula as the triad of knower, known and knowing, so that she is past the structure of experience itself; kula as the Kaula order, so that she stands above the very school that specialises in her. The tradition is comfortable with the third reading, which is a piece of self-limitation worth noticing in a text that is otherwise happy to advertise.

Bhaga is one of the richest words in the verse. Its root sense is a share or portion, from √bhaj, to divide and to allot, and it gives bhāgya, one's allotted fortune, and bhagavat, the one who possesses the portions. In the Ṛgveda Bhaga is a god, one of the Ādityas, the apportioner who distributes what each is to get. The purāṇic definition, quoted whenever the word bhagavat needs justifying, counts six of these portions: sovereignty, righteousness, fame, beauty, knowledge and detachment. Bhaga is also, in ordinary Sanskrit and in the Kaula ritual vocabulary, the female generative organ, and the school has a goddess Bhagamālinī, garlanded with bhagas, who is one of the fifteen Nityās and presides over one of the enclosures of the Śrīcakra. The commentators divide here, and it is not useful to pretend otherwise: some take bhagārādhyā as worship offered by way of the six excellences, some by way of the bhaga rites of the left-hand path. The name will bear both, and its position in a verse that begins by saying she is above the kula is probably not innocent.

Māyā comes from √mā, to measure, and its Vedic sense is the uncanny craft by which a god produces a form — closer to artistry than to deceit. The pejorative reading arrives later, with the Vedāntic use of the word for the power that makes a single reality appear as many. This school keeps both and adds a third: hrīṃ, the seed-syllable at the heart of her mantra, is called the māyā-bīja, so that saying māyā names a sound as well as a metaphysical function. What the stotra will not do is let the word stay negative. Three names later she is Mahī, the ground everything stands on.

Madhumatī is honey with the possessive suffix -mat: she in whom there is honey. Two traditions stand behind it. The first is the Madhu-vidyā of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, where each thing in the world is declared to be the honey of all beings and all beings the honey of it, a doctrine of reciprocal sweetness that ends by identifying the honey with the self. The second is the yogic use: the literature on absorption gives the name madhumatī to a stage of concentration, associated with the truth-bearing insight of the Yoga Sūtra, and Vyāsa's commentary speaks of the madhubhūmika, the yogin who has reached the honey ground. Mahī, immediately after, is the wide one — an old Vedic name for the earth, and one of the three goddesses invoked side by side in the Āprī hymns along with Iḷā and Sarasvatī. Placing it after māyā is a small argument: what appears is not thereby unreal, and the world she projects is also the floor she is.

The second line changes company. The gaṇas are Śiva's troops, an ill-assorted crowd of attendants under Gaṇeśa's captaincy, and ambā is the nursery word for mother that also stands behind Ambikā. To be their mother is to be responsible for a rabble rather than a court. The Guhyakas take their name from guhya, hidden, from √guh, to cover: they belong to Kubera's household in the northern mountains and keep the buried hoards, and they shade into the yakṣas of the same court, one of whom Kālidāsa exiled and made into the most famous lover in Sanskrit poetry. The name is thus about concealed wealth and, by a pun the tradition enjoys, about secret worship. Then komalāṅgī, soft-limbed, drops the whole apparatus and describes a body. Then gurupriyā, which is grammatically ambiguous in the way the hymn likes: she to whom the teacher is dear, and she who is dear to the teacher, are the same words.

Count the syllables before anything else and the verse stops looking crowded. First line: kulottīrṇā four, bhagārādhyā four, māyā two, madhumatī four, mahī two. Second line: gaṇāmbā three, guhyakārādhyā five, komalāṅgī four, gurupriyā four. Nine names in thirty-two syllables is dense even for this hymn, and the two-syllable names in the middle of the first line are where reciters lose their footing, because the ear expects four.

Kulottīrṇā is built on a vowel fusion and on a sandhi rule that governs a great deal of Sanskrit. Kula ends in a short a, uttīrṇa begins with a short u, and a plus u gives o — the same rule you have just met in sarvopādhi. Then the ending: -rṇā, not -rnā. Sanskrit turns a dental n into the retroflex ṇ when an r has preceded it in the same word, which is why the participle is uttīrṇa and not uttīrna. Once you know the rule you will stop being surprised by karṇa, varṇa, pūrṇa and a hundred others.

The two ārādhyā names are the pillars of the verse, one at the end of the first quarter and one in the middle of the second line. Both are joins of a short a with a long ā, giving a single long ā, and both end in the cluster dhy: an aspirated dental with the palatal glide immediately after, released as one gesture and not as d-h-y. Say bhagārādhyā and guhyakārādhyā one after the other as a drill.

Guhyaka also gives the cluster hy. The Sanskrit h is voiced, closer to the h in behind than to the h in house, and the y follows it without a vowel. Do not let it become gu-hi-ya.

The three m-names in the first line are a lesson in vowel quantity and nothing else. Māyā is long and long. Madhumatī is short, short, short, long. Mahī is short, long. Say them in sequence at half speed listening only for length, and the anuṣṭubh will hold itself up. The dh of madhumatī is a genuine aspirate — breath after the stop, not before it — and the h of mahī is a full consonant, not a glide.

In the second line, gaṇāmbā has the retroflex ṇ followed four syllables later by the labial cluster mb, and komalāṅgī has ṅg, where the nasal is guttural, made at the same place as the g it precedes. The tongue does not move between them. That is the same relationship as ñc in pañca, and hearing the two as one family is more useful than memorising the nasal series as a chart.

The datives, if you are using the verse as archanā, include one that catches people out. Kulottīrṇāyai, bhagārādhyāyai, māyāyai, gaṇāmbāyai, guhyakārādhyāyai and gurupriyāyai are all straightforward ā-stems. Madhumatī gives madhumatyai and komalāṅgī gives komalāṅgyai, both with the ī turning into a glide. Mahī gives mahyai, which is only two syllables and sounds so unlike the name it comes from that reciters often reach for something longer.

What to hold while chanting it: the verse begins by putting her outside the system and ends by putting her inside a personal relationship. Nothing between those two points is offered as a reconciliation, and the reciter is not asked to supply one.