Rain on the fire of becoming, fire in the forest of sin

Look first at how the names are put together, because all four share one piece of machinery. Each is a tatpuruṣa compound whose first half is itself a karmadhāraya of the form "X, precisely, is Y": bhava eva dāvaḥ, becoming itself is the forest fire; pāpam eva araṇyam, sin itself is the wilderness. Sanskrit poetics calls this rūpaka, and distinguishes it sharply from upamā, comparison. Nothing here says that worldly life is like a burning forest. The compound asserts the identification outright and then builds the second half of the name on top of it, so that the remedy is named in the same breath as the disease and in the same register of image. This is why the run reads as poetry rather than litany: a list of epithets has been converted into a series of small landscapes.

Bhava, from the root bhū, to become, is the ordinary word for coming-into-being and by extension for the whole condition of embodied existence, what other texts call saṃsāra. It is also, and from very early, a name of Rudra — Bhava and Śarva stand together in the Vedic litanies to the fierce god — so the word arrives already charged, though the compound here uses only its plainer sense. Against this burning stands sudhā, nectar, the amṛta drawn up when gods and demons churned the ocean. The substitution is the point. A fire is put out with water; the poet reaches instead for the drink of deathlessness, whose very name, a-mṛta, means not-dying. Nectar is also lunar in this literature — the moon is its cup, drained and refilled — and the yogic texts describe amṛta as dripping from a moon at the crown of the head. To quench the fire of becoming with that particular liquid is to say that what ends the burning is not relief but immortality.

The second name reverses the elements without apology, and the reversal is instructive about how these images work. Sin, pāpa, is imagined as araṇya, wilderness — dense, tangled, self-seeding, impossible to clear by hand. Vedāntic manuals sort accumulated action into three heaps: sañcita, the store built up over past lives; prārabdha, the portion already released and now being lived through; and āgāmin, what present action is adding. Fire is the standard image for what disposes of the store, and the locus classicus is the Bhagavad Gītā's comparison of knowledge to a kindled fire that turns all actions to ash. The hymn takes the image and makes her the fire. The phalaśruti appended to the stotra in the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, where the thousand names are given by Hayagrīva to the sage Agastya, promises exactly this result to the reciter, and this verse is the poetry of that promise.

Daurbhāgya, in the third name, repays a moment's attention. It is a vṛddhi derivative of durbhaga, badly portioned, and behind it stands bhaga: a share, a lot, and also the Āditya who apportions shares. So the word means, quite literally, having been given a poor allotment. In classical usage it narrows to social misery — a woman unloved, a person without charm or favour — and it is the exact negative of saubhāgya, which this tradition uses constantly. Bhāskararāya's commentary on the stotra is called the Saubhāgyabhāskara; the school's own vidyā is a saubhāgya-vidyā; and the verse immediately following opens with an ocean of bhāgya. Set against so weighty a word, the image is deliberately weightless: tūla is the fluff of cotton or reed-down, and vātūla is a gale. What looked like a fate turns out to weigh nothing.

The fourth name reaches for jarā, old age, first of the sufferings that the Gītā lists in its thirteenth chapter as the thing steady insight keeps in view — birth, death, old age, sickness, pain (the verse is numbered 13.8 or 13.9 depending on whether an edition counts Arjuna's opening question). Between them, this verse and the next supply that whole list: age here, disease and death in the verse to come. Age is figured as dhvānta, the gloom of nightfall, and she as raviprabhā, the light of the sun — which sets up the contrast the next verse will exploit, where the light that answers is the moon's.

Metrically this is one of the tidiest verses in the hymn. Each of the four names occupies exactly one quarter of the anuṣṭubh, eight syllables, with no name spilling across a boundary. That is unusual in this part of the stotra, where compounds often straddle the caesura, and it means the reciter can take the verse in four even breaths without doing violence to the sense. Use it, because the vocabulary is difficult enough without also having to manage the joins.

The first name ends in vṛṣṭiḥ, which contains two things English speakers reliably mishandle. The vowel of vṛ is short and syllabic — a retroflex r held long enough to carry a syllable, not the sequence "vree" and not "vri". The cluster ṣṭ that follows is retroflex twice over: the tongue curls back for ṣ and stays back for ṭ, with no dental contact anywhere in the sequence. Then a visarga, which is a light breath colored by the preceding vowel and not an extra syllable, and which here runs straight into the p of pāpāraṇya.

In the second name, araṇya has ṇy, a retroflex nasal followed immediately by the palatal glide, so the tongue travels from the roof of the mouth forward to the hard palate inside one syllable. The third name is the tongue-twister of the verse: daurbhāgyatūlavātūlā, where tū-la-vā-tū-lā offers two long ūs separated by a long ā and invites the reciter to transpose them. The remedy is to hear it as two words, tūla and vātūla, the cotton and the wind, rather than as one run of syllables. The opening dau is a full-length diphthong, and rbh is a single r followed by an aspirated b, not by b plus a separate h. In the fourth name, dhvā is likewise one aspirated dental with the v released immediately after the breath.

When the verse is used for archanā, each name is turned into the dative and followed by namaḥ, and this verse happens to illustrate two different endings. The first name is an i-stem and gives bhavadāvasudhāvṛṣṭyai namaḥ; the other three are ā-stems and give pāpāraṇyadavānalāyai, daurbhāgyatūlavātūlāyai, jarādhvāntaraviprabhāyai. Reciters who have learned -āyai as the automatic ending will produce it here too, and the first name is a useful place to notice that the ending follows the stem.

As for what the verse asks: it asks first that the troubles be named. Three of the four are perfectly ordinary — bad luck, the loss of favour, growing old — and only the first is metaphysical. Nobody chanting this is invited to rise above these things or to reinterpret them as illusions. They are granted their full weight, given landscapes of their own, and then answered. Note also that in every one of the four names the agent is she and the reciter is the terrain. It is not surprising that this stretch of the hymn is what people quote when someone is in trouble.