The silent teacher who faces south

Svatantra is not, in origin, a mystical word. It is sva, one's own, plus tantra in its plain sense of framework or governing arrangement, and Sanskrit legal and grammatical texts use it for a person or a term that stands on its own account rather than depending on another. The Kashmirian Śaiva philosophers built their entire system on the abstract noun made from it. Svātantrya, in Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, is the freedom of consciousness to appear as anything at all — to take the shape of a world, of a limited subject, of a stone — without ever ceasing to be consciousness. It is not freedom from constraint but freedom as a positive capacity, and it is what distinguishes a living awareness from a mirror. When this hymn calls her svatantrā it is using a word that had been given that much weight, and it is worth remembering that fifty verses earlier the hymn made the tantra hers; here the adjective has migrated from the system to the person.

Sarvatantreśī extends the claim past the boundary of the school. There is a real question underneath it. The tantric world was not one thing: Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Śākta and Buddhist tantras coexisted, argued, borrowed and denounced each other, and the standard way of managing this was to arrange the rival revelations in a hierarchy with one's own at the top. This name does something more economical. It does not rank the tantras; it says that all of them are under one authority, which is a way of claiming universality without having to adjudicate.

Then the verse gives her a male form, and not a minor one. Dakṣiṇāmūrti is Śiva as teacher, and in South India he is impossible to avoid: the niche on the south wall of the central shrine of a Śiva temple is his by convention, so that anyone who has walked clockwise round a Cōḻa sanctum has passed him. The iconography is fixed in outline. He is young. He sits under a banyan on a rock, one leg folded, the other foot pressed on the back of a dwarf usually identified as Apasmāra, forgetfulness. One hand is raised in the cinmudrā, the thumb and forefinger joined into a circle with the other three fingers extended, a gesture the commentators read as the joining of the individual and the absolute with the three strands of nature left outside. The remaining hands hold some combination of a rosary, a manuscript, a serpent and a flame. Around him, at his feet, sit sages who are visibly old.

The word dakṣiṇā admits more than one reading and the tradition uses several. The obvious sense is facing south, and the south is Yama's quarter, the direction of death, so that the teacher is turned toward the thing everyone else has arranged not to look at. Dakṣiṇa also means right-handed, skilful and favourable. And dakṣiṇā is the fee given to a teacher or a priest, which lets some commentators read the compound as the form that is itself the offering. There is a further reading, current among those who need to explain why a form of Śiva is being counted among a thousand names of the goddess: dakṣiṇā is a feminine word, and the mūrti can be taken as hers. What the name asserts, on any reading, is that the teaching function is not divided by gender.

Sanaka and the rest are the mind-born sons of Brahmā: Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanātana and Sanatkumāra. The story is that Brahmā produced them to populate the world and they declined, choosing celibacy and knowledge instead, and that they were fixed by that choice at the age of about five, so that they remain boys for the whole of cosmic time. This produces the paradox the tradition never tires of. Under the banyan the pupils are ancient and the teacher is young; and the pupils, in their own right, are old enough to have been present at the beginning. One of them, Sanatkumāra, is the teacher in the last book of the Chāndogya, where he takes Nārada through the whole ladder of knowledge from grammar to the infinite — so the audience of this silence includes a formidable lecturer.

Śivajñāna is a technical term rather than a description. In the Śaiva schools it names the knowledge that liberates, and the foundational treatise of Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta is called the Śivajñānabodham, the awakening to the knowledge of Śiva. The genitive can be read two ways — knowledge of Śiva and the knowledge that Śiva is — and the tradition means both. What the name adds is pradāyinī: she gives it. The whole three-verse block has been about a chain of teachers and an institution, and it ends by saying that what the institution exists to convey cannot be got by working through the institution. It has to be handed over.

The first line divides three, five, eight: svatantrā, sarvatantreśī, dakṣiṇāmūrtirūpiṇī. The caesura therefore falls after the second name, not in the middle of the third, which is a mercy. The second line is two eight-syllable names, evenly split.

The first two names are a deliberate near-repetition and they are the trap. Both contain the cluster ntr — dental n, dental t, and r, three separate articulations with no vowel anywhere among them — and both put it in the same place. Do not let the t vanish. Say sva-tan-trā and sar-va-tan-tre-śī with the n fully closed at the teeth, the t released, and the r as its own tap. This is the same cluster as in mahātantrā and mahāmantrā earlier in the hymn, and it is worth drilling here because the two names come back to back and the difference between them is carried entirely by what surrounds the cluster.

Sarvatantreśī is a fusion: sarvatantra plus īśī, a plus ī giving e. The initial cluster sv in svatantrā is a dental s straight into a v that in Sanskrit is nearer to w than to the English v; there is no vowel between them.

Dakṣiṇāmūrtirūpiṇī is the hardest word in the verse and it is worth taking in pieces. Kṣ is a single conjunct of k and the retroflex ṣ, never the sound of an English x. The ṇ that follows is retroflex too. Then rt, an r followed by a dental t. Then a long ū, and the ending -piṇī with another retroflex ṇ. Three retroflex consonants and a conjunct in eight syllables, and the tongue-tip goes back, forward, back again.

That sets up the single most useful contrast in the verse. The first line ends in -rūpiṇī with a retroflex ṇ; the second line ends in -pradāyinī with a plain dental n. They rhyme to an English ear and they are different sounds. Say the two line-endings one after the other, listening for the tongue-tip: back for rūpiṇī, forward for pradāyinī. If you can hear the difference reliably you have solved most of the retroflex problem in this hymn, because the -inī and -iṇī endings occur in the hundreds.

Sanakādisamārādhyā is three joins, all of them a plus ā giving ā: sanaka and ādi, then sam-ā-rādhyā with its prefix. The word has no conjunct at all until the final dhy, which makes it the one place in the verse where the mouth can rest.

Jñ, in śivajñāna, is pronounced very differently across India — gy in the north, dny in Maharashtra, ny in much of the south — and none of these is wrong in its own region. The value the grammarians describe is a palatal j followed by the palatal nasal ñ, both made with the tongue-body flat against the hard palate.

In archanā: svatantrāyai, sarvatantreśyai, dakṣiṇāmūrtirūpiṇyai, sanakādisamārādhyāyai, śivajñānapradāyinyai. The last two are among the longest datives in the nāmāvalī, and saying them at the ordinary pace of archanā without slurring the -ṇyai and -nyai endings is a good test of whether the retroflex distinction has actually been learned or merely understood.

What to hold while chanting it: the verse describes a teaching situation in which nothing is said, delivered by a hymn that consists of nothing but words. Reciters who find that contradictory are hearing it correctly.