Formed and formless, and the swan that settles only on still water

Mūrta and amūrta are a pair before they are two names. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad opens one of its sections by declaring that brahman has two forms, the formed and the formless, the mortal and the immortal, and the whole later apparatus of Indian theology — saguṇa and nirguṇa, sakala and niṣkala, the deity with attributes and the deity without — descends from that sentence. Mūrta is from √mūrch, to congeal or take solid shape; the noun mūrti is the ordinary word for an image in a temple. So the first name says she can be cast in bronze and the second says she cannot, and the sequence is not a hesitation. It is the standard position: the image is not a symbol of her and not identical with the whole of her, and a tradition that installs images and also insists on formlessness needs both names adjacent in order to say so.

The third name needs a note about the printed text. This edition writes the line with avagrahas — the mark that shows a short a has been swallowed by a preceding long ā — which gives mūrtā, amūrtā, anityatṛptā, and the third name accordingly means satisfied by impermanent things. Other editions and commentators divide the same syllables as nityatṛptā, eternally satisfied, which is an equally good sentence and a completely different claim. Nothing in the recitation distinguishes them: the sequence of sounds is identical either way, and only the written division decides. The reading followed here, satisfied by what perishes, is the more interesting one and the one the ritual life of the tradition supports. What is actually offered to her is flowers that wilt within the hour, water, cooked rice, a lamp that burns out. If she were satisfied only by what lasts, none of it would count. The Gītā makes the same point about a leaf, a flower, a fruit and water, and adds the condition that carries the weight: that it be given with devotion.

Munimānasahaṃsikā is the most compactly built name in the verse and rewards being taken apart. Muni is a sage, and the word is connected with √man, to think, with an older sense of one moved by inward impulse and a settled later sense of one who keeps silence. Mānasa is the mind — the same root again — and it is also the name of the lake in the Himālaya, Mānasa, which mythology makes the destination of the wild geese and swans on their yearly flight. The compound therefore contains a pun that is not a pun in Sanskrit, since the lake is called Mānasa precisely because it was said to be produced from the mind of the creator. The haṃsa is the bird of that lake and one of the most heavily loaded animals in the tradition: it is credited with the ability to separate milk from water, which makes it the emblem of the discriminating intellect; it is the mount of Brahmā; it gives its name to the highest grade of renunciate, the paramahaṃsa; and, since the breath is heard as haṃ going out and saḥ coming in, it is the name of the mantra that a body recites without intending to. Two verses back in this same stretch the hymn called her the giver of breath and then the breath itself; here the bird of that breath alights on a quiet mind. The image also carries a condition. A swan will not settle on rough water, and the name says which minds she is found in.

The second line turns on satya. Satyavratā makes truth her vrata, and vrata is worth precision: not a promise but an observance, a fixed course of conduct, used in the Vedic hymns of the unvarying courses the gods keep. Satyavrata is also a personal name in the epics and Purāṇas, most notably the king who becomes the Manu of the flood story and hauls the fish that grows too big for every vessel. Satyarūpā picks up the same word and makes it her form, which returns the reader to satyajñānānandarūpā three verses back and closes a loop the hymn opened there.

Sarvāntaryāminī names her as the inner controller, and the term is precise and traceable. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Yājñavalkya is pressed to name the thread that holds the worlds together and answers with a formula he then repeats through every element and every faculty: the one who dwells in the earth and is other than the earth, whom the earth does not know, whose body the earth is, who controls the earth from within. That is the antaryāmin, and the crucial clause is the one about not being known — the controller is not a resident the host can introspect. Note that the printed line here spells the name with a dental n, sarvāntaryāminī, while the entry for the name itself gives the retroflex, sarvāntaryāmiṇī. The retroflex is what the internal sandhi rule after an r would ordinarily produce, and editions print both; the salutation is usually given as sarvāntaryāmiṇyai namaḥ.

Satī closes the verse with two syllables, and it does two things at once. Grammatically it is the feminine present participle of √as, to be: the one who is, the exact counterpart of sat. Onomastically it is Satī, Dakṣa's daughter and Śiva's first wife, who went to her father's sacrifice uninvited, heard her husband insulted there, and abandoned the body she had received from the man who insulted him. What follows in the myth is the origin story of the entire Śākta landscape: Śiva carrying the corpse across the world in grief, the body dismembered so that he would stop, and each place where a piece fell becoming a pīṭha, a seat of the goddess. The verse thus ends on a name that means bare existence and also names a specific death, and the tradition does not choose between them. The English word sometimes used for the practice of widow-burning descends from this same word and has nothing to do with what the name means here.

The organising principle of these verses continues without a break: the first line is bound by m and the second by s, the same device that gave the previous verses their runs of p and k. Five verses in, the pairing of adjacent names that contradict each other has also become plainly deliberate — the giver of breath and the breath, the far and the near, the holder of the noose and its destroyer, and now the formed and the formless. When two names in this hymn look like they cancel, the safe assumption is that the composer put them side by side on purpose.

The opening of the first line is the hardest thing in it to read from the page and the easiest to say. Written with avagrahas, mūrtā'mūrtā'nityatṛptā looks like one enormous word; spoken, it is a continuous stream of long ā vowels with the short a of amūrtā and anityatṛptā simply absent. Say mūr-tā-mūr-tā-ni-tya-tṛp-tā, eight syllables, and do not attempt to reinsert the vowels the avagrahas mark. The rt cluster in mūrtā is an r followed by a dental t; the pt in tṛptā is labial p followed by the same dental t; and the vowel ṛ in tṛptā is a vowel, not a consonant with an attached i, closest to the syllabic r in the middle of a rapidly said "pretty".

Munimānasahaṃsikā has no difficult clusters and one thing to watch: the anusvāra in haṃ, which before the s of sikā is a pure nasalisation and not a full n or m. Let the ṃ resonate in the nose without closing the lips. The name also has a memorable internal rhythm — short, short, long, short, short, long, short, long — and it is worth learning by that rhythm, since it is long enough to be dropped from the line entirely by a distracted reciter and short enough that nobody notices.

In the second line, satyavratā and satyarūpā are identical for their first two syllables and diverge at a cluster: vr in the first, a labiodental v with r immediately after, and rū in the second. Keeping them straight is easier if you hold the sense — the vow before the form. Sarvāntaryāminī contains three r-sounds in five syllables and the tongue has to travel: rv, then nt, then ry. Take it slowly at first; the temptation is to let all three collapse into a single blurred r-colouring.

The salutation forms in this verse are, unusually for this stretch, almost all regular ā-stem or ī-stem datives: mūrtāyai, amūrtāyai, anityatṛptāyai, munimānasahaṃsikāyai, satyavratāyai, satyarūpāyai. The exception is the last name, where satī gives satyai, and it is the sort of small irregularity that gets flattened into satyāyai by people going fast.

What the verse asks is a shift that most reciters find happens without being sought. The first two names put the question of whether she has a form and refuse to settle it, and the third and fourth then decline to treat that as the important question. What is important, on the evidence of those two names, is that the offering in front of you is perishable and acceptable, and that the water has to be still. The second line then says four times, in slightly different grammar each time, that she is what is actually the case. There is nothing to visualise in that and nothing to feel about it. The verse ends on the shortest name it contains, and the right way to say satī is quietly, as the end of a sentence rather than the climax of one.