The cosmic body, the inward self, and the breath between them

A vīra is a hero, and in ordinary Sanskrit that is the whole of the word. In the Kaula traditions out of which Śrīvidyā grew it took on a technical sense as the middle term of a threefold classification of practitioners: the paśu, the beast or bound soul, who worships inside the ordinary rules of purity; the vīra, the hero, who is qualified for the rites that use precisely what those rules exclude, and who handles them without either revulsion or appetite; and the divya, the divine, for whom the distinction has stopped operating. It is a classification of people rather than of ceremonies, and the tradition is consistent that the middle term is the dangerous one, since the vīra deals with materials that will damage anyone not steady enough for them. Vīrārādhyā is therefore less a compliment to her devotees than a statement about what kind of worship is under discussion. The gerundive ārādhyā, to-be-propitiated, from ā-√rādh, recurs throughout the stotra, and it will return six names from here in a form where the worshipper named is a god.

Virāj is among the oldest cosmological terms in the language, built from vi-√rāj, to shine out or rule far and wide. In the Puruṣa hymn of the tenth book of the Ṛgveda, Virāj is born from the cosmic Puruṣa and the Puruṣa is then born again from Virāj — a circularity the hymn states without apology, since the point is that the cosmic body and the person whose body it is generate one another. Later Vedāntic handbooks fix Virāj as the first term of a cosmic triad: the totality of all gross bodies, correlated with waking experience, with Hiraṇyagarbha as the corresponding subtle totality and Īśvara as the causal. To call the goddess virāḍrūpā is to hand her a masculine term of Vedic cosmology intact, and this is one of the operations the sahasranāma performs most often and most quietly.

The printed line reads virajā, but the name is virajāḥ, and the visarga has simply been absorbed by ordinary sandhi before the v of the following word. That is worth noticing rather than smoothing over, because the underlying stem is virajas-, an s-stem used adjectivally, and not the ā-stem that almost every other name in this part of the hymn turns out to be. The consequence is practical: in the litany of individual salutations the form is virajase namaḥ, not virajāyai namaḥ. Rajas itself carries three senses that are all live here — dust or pollen, the middle strand of prakṛti which agitates and drives, and, in medical and ritual usage, menstrual blood. The name is also positioned as an answer to the one before it. If she is the entire gross body of the world, is she not then made of the same restless material as everything inside it? The reply is that she takes the form without contracting the property.

Viśvatomukha is a Vedic formula and an old one, used of Viśvakarman, the maker of all, and taken over in the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad for Rudra. The bahuvrīhi is stronger than the usual translation suggests: not that she looks in all directions, which would imply turning, but that every direction is a direction she faces, so that there is no position from which one could approach her unseen. Later iconography will realise this literally in multi-faced images, but the grammar of the name is prior to the iconography and does not need it.

With pratyagrūpā the verse turns. Pratyañc, from prati plus √añc, is the ordinary direction-word for what faces backward or inward; its opposite is parāñc, facing away, outward. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad builds its most quoted verse out of exactly this pair, saying that the self-existent pierced the openings of the senses outward, which is why a person looks out and not into the self within. The self reached by reversing that direction is the pratyagātman, and the whole of Advaita's exegetical labour consists in establishing that this inward self and brahman are not two. Setting pratyagrūpā directly after three names for the outermost cosmos is the hymn's compressed way of asserting the same identity, without argument, by juxtaposition.

Ākāśa is the first and subtlest of the five elements and the one from which the other four are derived, and by itself it would be an unremarkable name. Para in front of it changes the claim: the ether beyond ether, not a member of the series. The Chāndogya Upaniṣad's teaching on the small space inside the heart makes the same move by paradox, finding within the lotus of the heart a cavity that is declared to be as large as the space outside it; Śaiva and Śākta writers use cidākāśa, the ether of consciousness, for the same thing. The name sits at the hinge of the verse for good reason. Space is the one element that contains everything while being itself nothing, which makes it the natural term for what was the cosmos in the first line and the inward self in the second.

The last two names are not a repetition. Prāṇadā gives the breath; prāṇarūpiṇī is the breath. The upaniṣads argue hard for the primacy of prāṇa, most memorably in the contest among the faculties told in both the Chāndogya and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, where speech, sight, hearing and mind each leave the body in turn and the body goes on living, dumb or blind or deaf or witless, until breath begins to pull free and drags the others up after it like tethered horses, at which point they concede. Prāṇa in that argument is not the air in the lungs but the entire vital process of which breathing is the audible sign, and the yogic literature divides it five ways by function. For a practitioner of this school the pair also has a technical edge, since the breath is treated as a recitation nobody has to perform, going out as haṃ and returning as saḥ, so that prāṇadā and prāṇarūpiṇī describe a mantra the body is already saying.

The first line is the most slippery in this stretch of the hymn, because four names in a row begin with the same two letters and the differences are carried by short unstressed syllables in the middle. Fix the vowel lengths first. Vīrārādhyā opens on a long vī; the other three — virāḍrūpā, virajāḥ, viśvatomukhī — all open on a short vi. Get that one contrast secure and the line stops collapsing.

Virāḍrūpā contains a conjunct that English will not offer any help with: ḍr, a retroflex ḍ followed by r. The tongue-tip curls back to the roof of the mouth for the ḍ and then releases directly into the r without an intervening vowel. Do not let it soften into the dental d of "drum". The underlying word is virāj, and the final j hardens to ḍ before the r of rūpa, which is why the name looks stranger than its parts.

Virajāḥ deserves a deliberate pause in study even though it takes none in recitation. As chanted in the verse the visarga disappears and you say virajā, but as an individual salutation the name is virajase namaḥ. Anyone using this verse for archanā and applying the -āyai ending mechanically will get it wrong here, and this is one of the few places in the thousand where that happens.

In viśvatomukhī the cluster śv is a palatal sibilant followed by v, both fully sounded; the ś is made with the tongue toward the hard palate, further back than English "sh". The final ī is long, and the caesura of the anuṣṭubh falls immediately after it, which makes this the one place in the verse to breathe.

The second line asks for control of the labial p and its cluster pr, which appears three times. In pratyagrūpā, work the name in its four written syllables — pra, tya, grū, pā — and notice that the g is not arbitrary: it is what the final c of pratyañc becomes before the r. Prāṇadā and prāṇarūpiṇī both carry a long ā under the pr and then a retroflex ṇ, retroflex because the preceding r pulls it back; the tongue should already be curled when it arrives. Keep the final ī of prāṇarūpiṇī long, since it closes the verse and the metre will sag if it is clipped.

As for what the verse asks of the person saying it: the last two names name the breath that is being used to say them. There is nothing to visualise there and nothing to add. The verse has spent its first line placing her at the outermost limit of what exists and its second line bringing that same identity inward through the self and through space, and it terminates in the one process the reciter cannot stop performing while reciting. Chanted attentively, the arrival at prāṇarūpiṇī tends to slow the breathing on its own, and there is no need to help it along.