Perishable and imperishable, and a line built out of threes

Kṣara and akṣara are technical terms with a specific home, and any reader who knows the Bhagavad Gītā will hear the fifteenth chapter behind the first name. There the Gītā declares that there are two puruṣas in the world, the perishable and the imperishable: the perishable is all beings, and the imperishable is what stands unmoved at the summit. It then adds a third above both, the supreme puruṣa who is called the highest self. The sahasranāma does something different with the same pair. It does not put her above the two; the suffix -ātmikā says that she consists of them, has them for her substance. The name is read both ways, as a tatpuruṣa (she who is made of the perishable and the imperishable) and as a possessive compound (she whose self they are), and the difference is small in effect but real in emphasis. The Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad, which is the other great source for this vocabulary, keeps the terms apart and has the one god rule over both; the hymn refuses even that separation. Akṣara is also the ordinary word for a syllable, so that the word for what does not decay is the same one by which this school's fifteen-syllabled mantra is counted.

Loka, in the second name, is the general word for a world or sphere of existence, and the standard cosmology counts fourteen of them, seven above and seven below, from the earth up to the world of truth and down to Pātāla. Sarvalokeśī claims all of them without distinguishing. The feminine īśī is a plainer formation than the maheśvarī of the previous verse or the more usual īśānī, and reads as a flat statement rather than a title.

Viśvadhāriṇī rests on the root dhṛ, to hold or support, from which dharma also comes: dharma is, etymologically, what holds things together. The name therefore prepares the one that follows it, where dharma heads the list of gifts. What is asserted is not that she made the universe at some past moment but that she is bearing it now, and that if the holding stopped there would be nothing left standing. Purāṇic imagination gives this work to the serpent Śeṣa and to the elephants of the quarters; the name assigns it to her without machinery.

Trivarga is a term of the legal and political literature: the group of three, meaning dharma, artha and kāma — right conduct, the means of life, and pleasure. These are three of the four puruṣārthas, the ends a human being may properly pursue, and the classical texts argue at length about their ranking, Manu among them. The fourth end, liberation, is regularly set apart under the name apavarga. It is characteristic of this hymn that it says trivarga and means it, promising the goods of a lived life in the middle of a long passage about the removal of suffering.

Subhagā means simply one who has a fair portion. Bhaga is a share or allotment and also the Āditya who allots it, and the word runs deep in Sanskrit: bhagavat, the standard title for a god, means one who possesses bhaga, which the Purāṇic definition unpacks as sovereignty, righteousness, fame, beauty, knowledge and dispassion. The derived form saubhāgya is everywhere in this tradition — it names the school's own vidyā, and it names Bhāskararāya's commentary on this very hymn.

Tryambakā is the feminine of one of Śiva's oldest names, the one invoked in the Vedic verse that has become the Mahāmṛtyuñjaya mantra. The usual explanation takes ambaka as eye and gives three-eyed: the sun, the moon and fire, so that she sees by day, by night, and past both. Commentators also note that ambā means mother and offer three mothers as an alternative reading of the old name. Taking a name of Śiva into the feminine is a habit of this hymn — Maheśvarī two lines earlier does the same — and it is not grammatical politeness but the school's central claim.

The last name is Sāṃkhya. Guṇa means a strand of a rope before it means anything else, and the three strands are sattva, rajas and tamas: clarity, motion and inertia. In classical Sāṃkhya, prakṛti is nothing but these three, held in equilibrium until the equilibrium is disturbed and the world unfolds. Śākta theology takes prakṛti to be her, which makes triguṇātmikā an identification rather than a metaphor. The Devī Māhātmya's framing assigns one guṇa to each of its three presiding forms, with the dark form this hymn called Mahākālī one verse earlier standing for tamas. Read against the name of the school's deity, Tripurasundarī, the beautiful one of the three cities, the second half of the verse looks less like a list than a tour of a single number.

The two lines divide differently and this catches people out. In the first line the names run six, five and five syllables, so the caesura after the eighth syllable lands two syllables inside sarvalokeśī; do not breathe there, and carry the line whole. In the second line the first two names come to exactly eight, so the break falls cleanly after subhagā. One line resists the pause, the other invites it.

Kṣarākṣarātmikā looks forbidding and is mostly sandhi. The parts are kṣara, akṣara and ātmikā; a final a meeting an initial a gives a single long ā, and a final a meeting a long ā gives the same, so two joins disappear into two long vowels and the word contracts to what you see. The cluster kṣ occurs twice and is a single conjunct, k released directly into the retroflex ṣ. Regional practice varies in how far back that sibilant is made, but it should not become the palatal ś. The ending -ātmikā has t and m together, a combination English never puts inside a syllable; give the t a real closure before the m.

Viśvadhāriṇī offers a rule worth learning once and applying everywhere. The ṇ is retroflex because of the r earlier in the word, even though a long ī stands between them. The same rule produced aparṇā in the previous verse at close range, and it produces kāriṇī, dhāraṇā and a hundred other forms at a distance. Once you expect it, you will stop being surprised by retroflex nasals in words that seem to have nothing to trigger them.

Tryambakā is the hardest syllable in the verse. Trya is one syllable, not two: t, r and y released together and then the vowel, followed by mba with the labial nasal closing onto the aspirate-free b. Reciters who have learned the Mahāmṛtyuñjaya mantra will already have the shape in their mouths from tryambakaṃ yajāmahe, and it is worth saying that line once before attempting the name.

In archanā the verse mixes the two feminine datives again, and the ī-stems are the ones to watch: sarvalokeśyai namaḥ, viśvadhāriṇyai namaḥ, trivargadātryai namaḥ, where the long ī shortens to a glide before the ending. Dātrī is an agent noun in -tṛ turned feminine, the same formation as in dātā and kartā, and its dative dātryai is worth fixing separately because the pattern recurs. The others are regular: kṣarākṣarātmikāyai, subhagāyai, tryambakāyai, triguṇātmikāyai.

What the verse asks is chiefly a matter of not flinching at the first name. It is easy to say that the imperishable is her. The name says that the perishable is her too — that what is dissolving, including the reciter, is not outside her nature and does not need to be redeemed into something else before it can be. The second line then asks something almost opposite: to admit wanting the ordinary goods, since the reciter who says trivargadātrī is asking for conduct, means and pleasure by name, and subhagā simply describes good fortune as her condition. There is no embarrassment in the verse about any of this, and there is no reason for the reciter to supply any.