Hard to approach, and fond of two particular flowers

The prefix that opens the first two names is dus, which appears as dur before a vowel, and it means with difficulty rather than not at all. Durārādhyā is built on the gerundive ārādhyā, from ā-rādh, to conciliate or bring round, the same verb that gives ārādhitā and the ārādhyā of the great rite elsewhere in the hymn. So the name does not say she cannot be won; it says the winning is hard. The Śrīvidyā tradition means this institutionally as well as poetically. The vidyā is not to be had from a book, initiation from a living teacher is required before the mantra may be used, and the literature returns constantly to how few are qualified and how long the qualification takes, with the commonplace that a person arrives at this worship only after many lives. Whatever else durārādhyā is, it is an accurate description of the tradition's own entry requirements.

Durādharṣā comes from a-dhṛṣ, to dare against, to assail or violate, the root behind dhṛṣṭa, bold, and dharṣaṇa, violation. Durādharṣa is standard epic vocabulary for a warrior who cannot be taken on and for a fortress that cannot be stormed, so the name arrives from military language rather than devotional language. Applied to her, it is a one-word summary of the plot of the Devī Māhātmya, where a succession of demons attempt exactly this. Mahiṣa fights her and loses; Śumbha, informed that a woman of impossible beauty is on the mountain, sends first a messenger and then armies, and the terms she sets are that she will marry whoever defeats her in battle. Every one of them breaks against her. Set beside durārādhyā, the pair makes a precise distinction: she is difficult to win by worship and impossible to take by force, and the two difficulties are not the same kind of difficulty.

The pāṭalī is the trumpet-flower tree, and pāṭala as a colour word means pale red, the shade between white and red that Sanskrit poets use for dawn skies and for a certain kind of blush. The tree flowers in the hot months before the rains and is prized for its scent; the ancient capital of Magadha, Pāṭaliputra, was named for it. The mandāra is a different order of plant. It is the coral tree, whose flowers are a strong red, and in Purāṇic geography it is one of the five trees of Indra's heaven, listed in the old lexicons alongside the pārijāta, the santāna, the kalpavṛkṣa and the haricandana. Mandāra blossoms are what the gods rain down when something momentous has happened. Between them, the two names cover the whole range of what can be offered: the flower a householder can reach up and pick, and the flower that only heaven produces. It is also worth noticing that these two, together with the japā of the previous verse, are all in the red range, which is the colour this goddess is described in from her meditation verse onward.

Mahatī is the feminine of mahat, and at the simplest level it is the flattest possible statement — she is the great one, with no second element in the compound and nothing to specify the greatness. A reader who has just come through triguṇātmikā two verses earlier may hear something more technical in it, since mahat is also the Sāṃkhya name for the first thing that emerges when the equilibrium of the three-stranded material principle is disturbed, the great one from which the individuated ego and then the whole apparatus of mind and matter unfold. I would not press that reading as the primary sense; but the hymn has just called her the three strands, and mahat is what the three strands produce first.

Meru is the golden mountain at the centre of the world, around which the sun and the planets are said to turn, with the cities of the gods on its summit. Her own city has a place in this geography: the Lalitopākhyāna of the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, the narrative in which this hymn is embedded, describes Śrīnagara, her city of enclosures and gardens, in these terms. There is a second and more technical sense that anyone who has handled the ritual objects will know at once. The Śrīcakra, when it is built up in three dimensions instead of being drawn flat, is called Meru or Mahāmeru — a stepped pyramid of nine levels, with the central point at the summit. To call her merunilayā in a Śrīvidyā text is to say both that she lives on the world-mountain and that she lives in the object on the altar, and the tradition does not treat these as two claims.

This is one of the easiest verses in the neighbourhood to place in the mouth, because both lines break cleanly at the caesura. In the first line, durārādhyā and durādharṣā are four syllables each and bring you exactly to the eighth; in the second, mahatī and merunilayā are three and five. Each line then closes with an eight-syllable flower name. Breathe at the halves and the verse almost recites itself.

The difficulty is elsewhere: the two halves are so nearly parallel that reciters cross them. Both flower names are eight syllables ending in -kusumapriyā, and the only difference is which tree. The mnemonic that works is the one the verse itself supplies — the earthly flower belongs to the line that begins in difficulty, and the flower of paradise to the line that begins in greatness. Durārādhyā and durādharṣā are the other crossing risk: they share their first two syllables and under speed blend into something that is neither.

On sound: both of the dur- names show the same sandhi, the prefix dus becoming dur before a vowel, which is why they do not look like the dus you may have met elsewhere. The dhy of durārādhyā is an aspirated dental released into the palatal glide with no gap, and the ṣ of durādharṣā is retroflex because of the r in front of it, the same rule that produced aparṇā and viśvadhāriṇī in the preceding verses. Pāṭalī has a retroflex ṭ, distinct from the dental t of the syllables after it, and priyā ends both long names with pr as a single onset, not pa-ri.

In archanā the forms are regular apart from one: durārādhyāyai namaḥ, durādharṣāyai namaḥ, pāṭalīkusumapriyāyai namaḥ, merunilayāyai namaḥ, mandārakusumapriyāyai namaḥ, and then mahatyai namaḥ, where the ī-stem mahatī shortens to a glide before the ending, as maheśvaryai did three verses ago.

The flower names are the practical part of this verse, and they are among the few places in the hymn where the goddess states a preference in offerings that a worshipper could actually act on. Neither tree is available to most people, and where a specified flower cannot be had the rule is to offer what is in season and locally grown, red for preference. Anyone troubled by the substitution should read the Gītā's line about the leaf and the flower and the water, which settles the question in one verse.

There is a smaller resonance in merunilayā: the bead at the head of a japa rosary, the one that closes the circle, is called the meru, and when a round of counting ends the reciter turns back at it rather than passing over it. A name that says she dwells on the summit lands differently in the hand of someone holding one.

What the verse asks is that the two halves not be reconciled prematurely. Fifteen verses of rescue imagery have made her sound infinitely available, and the first two names here are a corrective: this is a tradition with a door on it, and the door is not opened by wanting. Both things are true at once, and the verse arranges them so that the difficulty comes first and the flower has the last word in each line.