Two senses of para: what lies beyond, and what comes from outside

The printed line here writes parañjyotiḥ and parandhāma as single words, with the nasal assimilated to whatever follows it — ñ before the palatal j, n before the dental dh. Other editions print paraṃ jyotiḥ and paraṃ dhāma with the anusvāra and a word break, and the two practices are equivalent in sound. It is worth saying that this is what is happening, because the word break is not merely cosmetic. Unlike almost every other name in the hymn, these two are not compounds but phrases: a neuter noun with a neuter adjective agreeing with it. That is why, in the litany of individual salutations, they appear as two dative words each, parasmai jyotiṣe namaḥ and parasmai dhāmne namaḥ, and not as a single dative in -āyai.

Jyotis is light in the widest sense — the light of fire, of the sun, of the stars, and, in the Upaniṣadic use that matters here, the light by which anything at all is known. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka works the point out as a dialogue: by what light does a person act? By the sun; and when the sun has set, by the moon; and when both are gone, by fire; and when the fire is out, by speech; and when speech is silent, the self is his light. The name is the last term in that regress. Paraṃ jyotiḥ is not a brighter light than the others but the one that is not illuminated by anything else, and the Gītā puts the same idea by calling it the light of lights, said to be beyond darkness — beyond, not opposed to.

Dhāman comes from √dhā, to place or establish, and it accumulated an unusually wide set of senses: a place where something is set down, hence a dwelling or a domain; the power or law that holds in that domain; and, by a slide that is entirely characteristic of Vedic vocabulary, splendour or radiance. All three are live in paraṃ dhāma. It is the highest place, the place from which nothing returns, and it is the glory of that place, which is why the name follows the name for light rather than preceding it.

Paramāṇu drops the register abruptly, and the abruptness is the point. It is a technical term of the Vaiśeṣika school, whose atomism is worked out with more rigour than any other in the classical literature: matter is analysed downward until one reaches a particle that has no parts, since an infinite regress of divisions would make a mountain and a mustard seed equally infinite. That partless particle is the paramāṇu, and it combines in pairs and then in triads to build up perceptible things. Setting it directly after the supreme light and the supreme abode is a move the Upaniṣads make constantly and that the sahasranāma is repeating: what is largest is also what is smallest, and the two superlatives are the same statement. Note that paramāṇu is a masculine noun and remains masculine, so its salutation is paramāṇave namaḥ.

Parātparā closes the line by refusing to let it close. The construction is an ablative of comparison — parā, higher, than what is para, the highest — and the formula is old and widespread in the Upaniṣads and Purāṇas, used whenever a text wants to prevent a superlative from being taken as a destination. Placed after three names that each identify her with something ultimate, it says that identification with the ultimate is still an identification, and she is not exhausted by it.

The second line is where the verse becomes practical, and it turns on pāśa, the noose. Pāśa is one of the three categories on which the whole of Śaiva Siddhānta is built: pati, the lord; paśu, the bound creature; pāśa, the bond that ties the second to its condition. The vocabulary is agricultural — a paśu is a tethered beast and a pāśa is the tether — and it makes bondage a matter of a rope rather than of substance, which is what allows it to be cut. In her iconography the noose is one of the four things Lalitā holds, along with the goad, the sugarcane bow and the flower arrows, and the opening verses of this very hymn have already interpreted the two implements: the noose is desire, the goad is anger. Pāśahastā therefore does not say that she carries a weapon. It says that what binds a person is in her hand.

Pāśahantrī immediately reverses the relation without changing the object. The hand that holds the cord severs it. This is a construction the hymn has used repeatedly in these verses — the giver of breath who is the breath, the far and the near in one compound — and it is not paradox for its own sake. The doctrinal claim is that bondage and release are not two powers competing for a soul but one power in two phases, which is why the tradition can say without embarrassment that the same desire that binds is the thing that is finally used to draw the devotee in.

Paramantravibhedinī reads para in its other sense. A paramantra is the other side's mantra — a spell directed at you by somebody who means harm. Ritual literature in Sanskrit takes hostile magic entirely seriously and devotes a good deal of space to abhicāra and to the counter-measures against it, and this name belongs to that literature: the incoming formula is not deflected but split, vibhedinī, broken along its seam. There is a second reading available, taking parama-mantra and making her the one who opens up the supreme mantra to its meanings, and commentators have proposed it; the compound as analysed here, with para meaning hostile, is the straightforward one and is what the surrounding vocabulary supports.

The whole verse is an exercise in the labial p, and the run of twelve consecutive p-names across this verse and the previous one is the longest stretch of its kind in this part of the hymn. Two things go wrong at speed. The first is that the ear stops distinguishing the names and simply hears a texture, at which point a name gets dropped and nobody notices. The second is that the short a of pa- gets swallowed. Sanskrit's short a is a real vowel, closer to the u of English "but" than to anything else, and in a line where six syllables in a row are pa or para it has to be sounded each time or the line turns to mush.

Parañjyotiḥ contains ñjy, three palatals in succession: the palatal nasal, the palatal stop j, and the glide y. The tongue stays in one position throughout and only the manner changes. Parandhāma has ndh, a dental nasal and an aspirated dental, again with no tongue movement between them. If you have learned these names written with anusvāra — paraṃ jyotiḥ, paraṃ dhāma — you are already saying the same thing, since the anusvāra takes the place of articulation of the consonant that follows it. The written form in this edition simply makes that explicit.

Both of those names take two words in the dative for individual salutation, parasmai jyotiṣe and parasmai dhāmne, and both of those datives are irregular enough to be worth memorising: jyotis is a neuter s-stem, dhāman a neuter an-stem. Paramāṇu is masculine and gives paramāṇave. Only parātparā, of the four names in the first line, behaves the way the ear expects, with parātparāyai. That is now the fifth consecutive verse in which the salutation forms cannot be produced by pattern.

Parātparā has the cluster tp, dental t followed by labial p, which requires the tongue to leave the teeth at exactly the moment the lips close. Rushed, it becomes a single p and the name loses a syllable. The two long ā vowels on either side of it, in parāt and parā, carry the rhythm and should be given their full length.

In the second line, pāśahastā and pāśahantrī are identical for their first four sounds and diverge only at the end, which is precisely the situation in which reciters repeat one and skip the other. Fix the order by the sense: the noose is picked up before it is cut. The ś of pāśa is palatal, made further back than English "sh"; the st of hastā is two dentals; the ntr of hantrī is dental n, dental t and r in immediate succession, the same cluster that appears again three syllables into paramantravibhedinī. Say hantrī and mantra against each other to fix it.

The caesura falls after parātparā, at the end of the first line, and that is the one place to breathe. The second line runs sixteen syllables in three names with no natural break inside it.

What the verse asks of the reciter is a particular sequence of attention that it has arranged deliberately and that is spoiled by dwelling too long on the first half. The four names of the first line raise the mind as far as the vocabulary will take it and then, with parātparā, remove the ground from under that too. The second line then puts a rope in her hand. Whatever bound the person chanting is now held by somebody, which is a different situation from being bound by nothing in particular, and the next name says what she does with it. The verse ends in the least exalted place it has been — a spell breaking on impact — and it is meant to, because that is the register in which most people who recite this hymn actually need help.