Truth, knowledge and bliss, and then the same thing with hair and a cow

Satyajñānānandarūpā is a quotation with one word changed. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad opens its second chapter by defining brahman as satyaṃ jñānam anantam — real, knowing, without limit — and that sentence is the closest thing classical Vedānta has to a formal definition. The name keeps satya and jñāna and puts ānanda where ananta stood. The substitution is not arbitrary: the same chapter of the Taittirīya spends the rest of its length ascending through the sheaths of the person to the one made of bliss, and the later shorthand that everyone knows, saccidānanda, is the settled result of that ascent. What the sahasranāma preserves by writing jñāna rather than cit is the older wording, which is why the name sounds like the Upaniṣad and not like a Vedāntic textbook. The compound is a bahuvrīhi — she whose form is these three — and the three are a dvandva, listed rather than ranked, because the doctrinal claim is precisely that they are one item under three descriptions.

Sāmarasya is built on rasa, and rasa is one of the great overworked words of Sanskrit. Its root sense is sap or juice, then taste, then by extension the taste of a thing, its savour, and finally, in the hands of the literary theorists, the emotional flavour a poem or a play produces in a competent audience. Samarasa is the adjective for two things having the same savour; sāmarasya is the abstract noun for that condition. In Kaula and Nātha literature it is the standard term for the state in which Śiva and Śakti are no longer distinguishable, and by extension for the state in which practitioner and deity are no longer distinguishable, and it is preferred over blunter words for union because flavour is a quality that cannot be halved. Two liquids of one taste are not two liquids adjacent to each other. Parāyaṇa, the second element, literally means the going-to-the-highest, and is used for a person's final resort or governing aim, so the name says that fusion is not something that happens to her but the thing she is directed at. The Taittirīya again supplies the link the hymn is relying on, since it identifies brahman with rasa and says that a person becomes blissful by getting the rasa — which puts ānanda in the preceding name and rasa in this one on the same footing.

Kaparda is properly a cowrie shell, and by transfer the ascetic's hair coiled and knotted into a shape that resembles one. Kapardin, the one who wears it, is an epithet of Rudra from the Ṛgveda onward and appears among the salutations of the Śatarudrīya, the litany of names of Rudra embedded in the Yajurveda that is still recited daily in temples. Applied to her the name is doing something more pointed than describing a hairstyle. The standing iconography of Lalitā is royal — ornaments, silks, flowers, a jewelled throne — and matted hair belongs to the other pole of Śaiva imagery entirely, to the cremation ground and the ash-smeared body. Kapardinī places Rudra's own mark on her head, and it does so immediately after the name that declared sameness of flavour her whole object. The sequence is an argument in two steps: the principle, then the sign of it worn visibly.

Kalā is a word with three careers. In the calendar and in astronomy it is a sixteenth part, and specifically a digit of the moon, so that the waxing month is a count from one kalā to sixteen. In cultural usage it is an art or a skill, the sixty-four accomplishments a cultivated person was supposed to possess. In Śaiva metaphysics it is one of the five contractions that reduce the universal power of action to the limited capacity of an individual. The ritual texts of this school commonly assign fixed numbers of kalās to the three lights — ten to fire, twelve to the sun, sixteen to the moon — and the sixteen lunar digits are the ones that matter most here, because the fifteen goddesses called Nityās are distributed over the fifteen lunar days with the goddess herself as the sixteenth, the digit that never wanes. Kalāmālā, garland of digits, can therefore be read as an ornament, as the fifteen Nityās strung together with her as the thread, and as the arts. Mālā is also the ordinary word for a rosary, which puts the person counting beads while reciting inside the name.

Kāmadhuk is grammatically the most interesting word in the verse: a root noun in -duh, milking, with the aspiration surfacing at the end as -dhuk in the nominative singular. She who milks out desires. Behind it stands the cow of plenty, Kāmadhenu or Surabhi, produced at the churning of the ocean, and the epic story of the sage's cow who supplies a king's entire army with provisions and then, when he tries to seize her, produces an army of her own. The Bhagavad Gītā uses the word of sacrifice itself, telling the creatures to multiply by means of the rite which will be their wish-yielding cow. The name promises without limit and the tradition has always answered the obvious question about it in the same way: what is milked out is what is asked for, and the asking is the part that belongs to the person.

Kāmarūpiṇī closes the verse on the same word. It can be read as taking the form she desires, which is what the module's gloss gives, and as having desire for her form, which the commentators also allow — desire is one of her shapes, not something outside her that she permits. There is a third resonance that no reader of this hymn in eastern India would miss: Kāmarūpa is a place, the region in Assam where the goddess's yoni is said to have fallen and where Kāmākhyā is worshipped, one of the most important seats of the Śākta world. The name does not assert the identification, but it does not have to.

Three verses running now have been built the same way, and this is the point at which the pattern is worth naming. In the verse two back, the first half-line was four names beginning in vi- and the second four beginning in p-; here the second half-line is four names all beginning in k. In the verse between them, and again in the first half-line here, a different shape appears: two names only, each occupying a full half-line, each of them a compressed sentence rather than an epithet. The composer alternates between definition at full length and runs of short names bound by their opening consonant, and once you hear the alternation, the hymn becomes far easier to hold, because you are memorising two shapes rather than a thousand words.

Satyajñānānandarūpā contains jñā, which is the single most mispronounced cluster in Sanskrit. It is written j plus ñ, and the regional realisations vary widely — gya in the north, nya in the west, jña with both consonants sounded in the south. Any of these is defensible in its own tradition; what is not defensible is treating it as a plain j. Note also that the long ā between jñāna and ānanda is a join: jñāna ends in a, ānanda begins in ā, and the two make one long ā. Say the name in its four blocks — satya, jñāna, ānanda, rūpā — before running them together.

Sāmarasyaparāyaṇā has no hard clusters and is therefore the place where speed does its damage. It has eight syllables and four of them are long, and the long ones are not adjacent: sā, then three short, then rā, then ya, then ṇā. The retroflex ṇ at the end is retroflex because of the r two syllables earlier, which is a rule worth knowing generally, since it governs a great many names in this hymn.

The second line rewards being drilled as a unit, because all four names begin with the same guttural k and the ear will happily lose one. Kapardinī has the cluster rd, dental d after r. Kalāmālā is four open syllables and the trap in it is the pattern of lengths, short-long-long-long, which speakers tend to level out. Kāmadhuk is the only name in the verse ending in a consonant, and that consonant is a hard k with no vowel after it — it must be stopped cleanly, not released into an audible schwa. The dh before it is a single aspirated dental.

For individual salutation the datives here are worth checking rather than assuming, since kāmadhuk is a consonant stem and the form is kāmadughe namaḥ, with the aspiration migrating back to the g. The other three take the endings their stems predict: kapardinyai, kalāmālāyai, kāmarūpiṇyai.

What the verse asks is a willingness to hold its two halves at the same value. Reciters trained in a Vedāntic idiom tend to dwell on the first line and hurry the second, treating the cow and the hair as poetic residue attached to the real doctrine. Reciters trained devotionally do the reverse. The verse itself does neither, and the name that sits between the two halves, sāmarasyaparāyaṇā, is the instruction: the abstraction and the image are meant to arrive with a single flavour, and if one of them is going down easier than the other, the verse is not yet being said properly.