Heaven and release, and the red of the hibiscus

Svarga and apavarga are not two words for the same thing, and the compound holds them apart deliberately. Svarga is the bright world won by correct performance of the Vedic sacrifice, and the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā made desire for it the standard qualification of the person entitled to sacrifice at all: the school's paradigm injunction is that one who desires heaven should perform the rite. What that literature also knew, and what the Bhagavad Gītā says outright, is that svarga is a place one falls out of when the merit that bought the stay is used up. Apavarga is formed from apa and the root vṛj, to cast off or strip away, and means completion in the sense of having done with the whole business — the term the legal and philosophical texts use for the fourth human end, set apart from the three of the previous verse. To name both in a single compound and a single act of giving is to decline the usual hierarchy. She gives the temporary destination and the final one, and the hymn does not tell the reciter which to ask for.

Śuddhā is the past participle of śudh, and its force is closer to unmixed than to clean. The distinction matters because ritual purity, śauca, is a matter of removing contamination that has arrived from outside, whereas this name says there is nothing in her that came from outside to begin with. Śaiva and Śākta metaphysics gave the word a technical use as well: the tattvas above māyā constitute the śuddhādhvan, the pure course, in contrast to the impure course below it, and śuddhavidyā is the name of one of those upper levels. A single word therefore does duty in two registers, the household sense of clean and the systematic sense of belonging to the unmixed order of reality.

The japā is the China rose, the hibiscus, whose blossom is a saturated red and which is among the flowers most commonly offered in goddess worship. Red is this goddess's colour without exception. The meditation verse recited before the sahasranāma itself describes her as aruṇā, the red of daybreak, with waves of compassion in her eyes and the noose, goad, flower-arrows and sugarcane bow in her four hands, and everything from the silk she wears to the light around her is of that colour. There is also a coincidence of sound that no reciter can miss and that the tradition has always enjoyed: japā, the flower, and japa, the muttered repetition of a mantra, are unrelated words that happen to fall together, so that the name for her appearance contains the name of the practice by which she is approached.

Ojas is a Vedic word for might, and specifically for the kind of power Indra is said to have. Later medicine turned it into a technical term: in Āyurveda ojas is the final refinement of the bodily tissues, the subtle substance in which vitality is stored, and its depletion is the medical description of dying. Ojovatī therefore says something stronger than that she is energetic. It says that the reservoir from which living things are supplied is hers. Dyutidharā, next to it, uses the root dhṛ that produced viśvadhāriṇī in the previous verse: she does not receive light, she holds it, as she holds the world.

Yajñarūpā takes the hymn into the Veda's own territory. The Brāhmaṇa literature is full of equations of exactly this form — the sacrifice is Viṣṇu, the sacrifice is the year, the sacrifice is the man — and the Puruṣasūkta ends with the gods sacrificing the sacrifice by means of the sacrifice, a formula whose circularity is the point. For a Śākta text to make the identification with her is a claim about legitimacy as much as about metaphysics. The Śrīvidyā tradition has argued internally for centuries about how far its practice conforms to Vedic norms, with the samaya school insisting on internal worship consistent with the Veda and the kaula school defending the external rite; a name like yajñarūpā belongs to the side of that argument that wants the goddess and the śrauta fire understood as one thing.

Vrata, in the last name, began in the Veda as an ordinance, the fixed law by which Varuṇa governs, and only later settled into the sense of a vow undertaken voluntarily. The compound is a bahuvrīhi and can be read in either direction — she to whom her own observance is dear, or she to whom the observances of others are dear. Both readings are current, and the first has a story behind it in this hymn, since two verses earlier she was called Aparṇā, which is a name for the keeping of a vow past the point of reason.

The verse divides neatly. In the first line the caesura at the eighth syllable falls exactly at the end of śuddhā, so the natural breath and the metrical break coincide. The second line is four names of four syllables each, the same flat drumbeat as the first line of verse 145, and the same danger applies: the evenness invites the reciter to speed up and lose one.

Two sandhi lessons are worth taking from this verse because both recur constantly. The first name is svarga plus apavarga plus dā, and the a of svarga meeting the a of apavarga gives the long ā you hear in the middle. The fourth is ojas plus the possessive suffix -vat in its feminine form; a word-final -aḥ before a voiced sound becomes -o, which is why the s of ojas is nowhere to be heard and the word is ojovatī. The same rule gives manojava, tejomaya and a hundred other compounds, and once it is learned these words stop looking irregular.

For articulation: śuddhā has a geminate stop where only the second element is aspirated, so hold the d closed and release it with breath — not two separate syllables and not a single soft d. In japāpuṣpanibhākṛtiḥ the cluster ṣp puts the retroflex sibilant before the labial stop, and kṛ has the short syllabic ṛ that has now appeared in three consecutive verses. Dyuti opens with dy as a single onset, not di-yu. The jñ of yajña is the one conjunct on which regional practice genuinely diverges, pronounced roughly gya across much of the north and closer to a palatal jña or nya in the south; analytically it is palatal j followed by palatal ñ, and a learner should simply adopt whichever pronunciation the community he recites with uses.

The archanā forms hold one instructive irregularity. Six of the seven are straightforward: svargāpavargadāyai, śuddhāyai, dyutidharāyai, yajñarūpāyai, priyavratāyai, and ojovatyai for the ī-stem. The third name is an i-stem, and Sanskrit allows feminine i-stems two datives, one in -aye and one in -yai. The namāvalī printed here takes the first option and gives japāpuṣpanibhākṛtaye namaḥ. Reciters who have been supplying -āyai by reflex for hundreds of names will want to check this one against whatever printed namāvalī their tradition uses, since editions do differ on which of the two permitted forms they print.

What the verse asks is largely a matter of what it declines to ask. It offers heaven and it offers the end of rebirth from one hand, in one compound, and it does not require the reciter to have sorted out which of these he actually wants before he is allowed to say the name. Purity is described as her condition rather than as an entrance requirement. And the last two names quietly describe what is happening while the verse is being said: if she is the sacrifice, then the recitation is not an offering made to her from outside but a form she is taking; and if the vow is what she loves, then the fact of having sat down again today, at the same hour, to say the same thousand names, is itself the thing being praised.