The ground of a false world, and a woman dancing

Mithyā and adhiṣṭhāna are not loose words: they belong to the analysis Advaita Vedānta gives of error. When a rope in dim light is taken for a snake, three things are true at once: the snake is not simply nonexistent, since it is seen and produces fear; it is not real either, since it vanishes on inspection; and it could not have appeared without something actually there for it to appear on. Mithyā names the peculiar status of the snake, neither real nor unreal, and adhiṣṭhāna names the rope — the substratum on which a superimposition is laid. Śaṅkara opens his commentary on the Brahmasūtras with an extended treatment of exactly this, since the world is held to stand to brahman as the snake stands to the rope.

The name puts the goddess in the position of the rope, and the consequence is the opposite of nihilism: an illusion requires a reality to borrow from, and the more thoroughly the world is called false the more weight is thrown onto whatever underlies it. The name thus makes a claim about her substantiality by way of a claim about the world's insubstantiality. It is also, for a Śākta hymn, a considerable doctrinal borrowing: Śrīvidyā in its later South Indian forms was carried largely by brahmins who were also Advaitins, and names like this one are the seam where the two vocabularies were joined.

Muktidā and muktirūpiṇī work as a pair, and the second corrects the first. Mukti, from √muc, to loose or release, is liberation from the round of births; a giver of liberation is an agent producing an effect, and any effect, in the standard argument, is a made thing and therefore perishable. If liberation were handed over it could in principle be lost. Saying that she is liberation removes it from the category of things given and received.

With the second line the register changes completely. Lāsya is a dance. In later and popular usage it is the gentle, lyrical dance of women, set against the tāṇḍava, the violent dance of Śiva, the two taken as a matched pair belonging to the goddess and the god. This neat opposition is a crystallisation: in Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra the terms are more technical and less tidily gendered, and the familiar picture owes as much to later poetry and iconography as to the treatise. The picture is nonetheless the one the hymn assumes, and the Saundaryalaharī has a celebrated verse in which the two dance together at the base of the spine.

Layakarī follows, and the word laya is doing double duty. Cosmologically it is dissolution, the reabsorption of the manifest world at the end of a cycle, the sense it has in pralaya; later yoga literature also names a layayoga among its divisions. But laya is equally the ordinary term for tempo in Indian music, and a name meaning she who makes the laya, standing immediately after a name about dancing, cannot help carrying it. The pun is not frivolous. It states in one word what the image of the dancing deity exists to state: what looks like the end of the world from inside it is, from her side, the beat.

Lajjā is a bare abstract noun standing alone as a name, which is unusual in this hymn and has a specific precedent. The Devī Māhātmya's litany in its fifth chapter salutes the goddess as abiding in all beings in the form of one quality after another — consciousness, sleep, hunger, patience, error — and modesty is among them. Behind the name there is probably also a mantra. The syllable hrīṃ, which closes each of the three segments of the fifteen-syllabled Śrīvidyā mantra, is known in mantra literature as the lajjā-bīja, the seed-syllable of modesty, from hrī, shame or bashfulness. A hymn that elsewhere describes the mantra's syllables is very likely doing so here. Read either way, the name has a point beyond decorum: modesty keeps a thing covered, which is what a mystery requires, and the hymn has already said that her form is guhya, to be kept hidden.

Rambhādivanditā closes the verse and returns it to the dance. Rambhā is the foremost of the apsarases, the celestial nymphs who came out of the churned ocean and dance in Indra's court; her name stands for the class, and ādi, and the rest, does the rest of the work. The compound is passive — she is the one saluted by them — and the choice is pointed, because the apsarases are the professionals. Having called her fond of the lāsya, the hymn has the best dancers in the three worlds bow to her, a compliment paid in the currency of the previous name rather than a generic statement that everyone worships her.

The verse falls into eight, three, five in the first line and four, four, two, six in the second, and the alliteration makes it easy to hold: three names on m, then three on l, then one on r. Reciters who lose the thread usually do so in the second line, where lāsyapriyā and layakarī are metrically identical four-syllable words beginning with la-. Fix the order by sense — the dance first, then the tempo it is danced to — and the transposition stops.

Mithyājagadadhiṣṭhānā is the hardest word in the verse and is best learned as three pieces. Mithyā opens with the cluster thy, an aspirated dental followed by the palatal glide, with the aspiration genuinely released. Jagat, the moving world, is a t-stem, and before the vowel that follows its final t voices to d, which is why the name reads jagad-adhiṣṭhānā. Adhiṣṭhāna is adhi plus sthāna, standing-place, and the s of sthāna has become the retroflex ṣ under a regular rule of internal sandhi; the ṭh that follows has been drawn back to match it. So the cluster ṣṭh is two retroflexes in a row, tongue-tip curled back for both, with a puff of breath on the second.

Muktidā and muktirūpiṇī share the cluster kt, a velar stop closing directly onto a dental with no vowel between. The ṇ of rūpiṇī is retroflex; a dental n there is the usual error.

In lāsyapriyā the sy is a dental sibilant plus the palatal glide, and the pr of priyā is not the English pr but a labial stop followed by a distinct trilled or tapped r. Lajjā has a genuinely doubled j and must be held: laj-jā, with the closure sustained across the join. Rambhādivanditā begins with the labial nasal before the aspirated bh, and hides a small sandhi in the middle: rambhā plus ādi, a long ā meeting a long ā, giving the single long ā of rambhādi.

For recitation as archanā, with each name in the dative followed by namaḥ: mithyājagadadhiṣṭhānāyai, muktidāyai, muktirūpiṇyai, lāsyapriyāyai, layakaryai, lajjāyai, rambhādivanditāyai. Five ā-stems taking -āyai and two ī-stems contracting to -yai, and the two contracted forms are not adjacent, so the pattern has to be learned rather than felt.

The demand this verse makes is that its two halves be chanted in the same voice. There is a temptation to give the first line the gravity of philosophy and the second line the lightness of ornament, as though the dancing and the modesty and the applauding nymphs were a relaxation after the hard part. The verse is constructed against that reading. It places laya between the dance and the modesty precisely so that the dissolution of the worlds sits inside the description of a performance, and it places the giver of liberation next to the ground of an unreal world so that the metaphysics is not left to stand on its own either. Someone chanting this at speed passes through the whole of Advaita Vedānta and the whole of the celestial court in eight seconds. The verse is not asking for that to be resolved into a single tone. It is asking for both to be said.