The power of Brahmā, the fierce command, the form held open to sight

The last hundred or so verses of this stotra are organized by sound as much as by sense, and it is worth noticing before anything else. Names cluster by their opening syllable, sometimes for half a line, sometimes for a full verse; the verse immediately following pairs two names in prāṇa- and then four in vi-, and the one after that gives three in mu- and three in bha-. Here the pattern is at its cleanest: five names in b-, then a line in which four written words all begin pra-. Composition of this kind is not decoration. A hymn of a thousand names is a memory object before it is a text, and alliterative blocks are what keep a reciter from silently dropping a name in the middle of a line.

Brahmāṇī, the first name, belongs in ordinary usage to one of the seven mothers, the saptamātṛkās. Each of them is the power of a particular god, wearing his ornaments and riding his mount: Brahmāṇī or Brāhmī with the goose, the water pot and the rosary, then Māheśvarī, Kaumārī, Vaiṣṇavī, Vārāhī, Aindrī, and Cāmuṇḍā at the end of the row. The Devī Māhātmya stages their appearance on the battlefield, where the śaktis of the gods come out of the bodies of the gods to fight, and the mātṛkā panel — a row of seated mothers, often flanked by Vīrabhadra and Gaṇeśa — is one of the most widespread sculptural sets in early medieval India. The sahasranāma takes a name that in that setting denotes one member of a group of seven and gives it to the single goddess.

The formation of the word repays a moment. Sanskrit has a small class of feminines built with an inserted -ān- before the feminine ending, and the grammarians list the stems that take it: Indra gives indrāṇī, Varuṇa gives varuṇānī, Rudra gives rudrāṇī, Śarva gives śarvāṇī, and mātula, a maternal uncle, gives mātulānī, his wife. The class carries a strong flavour of "the wife of" or "the female counterpart of," and brahmāṇī sits inside it. That flavour is precisely what the next name cancels.

For the second name the printed text here reads brahma, the neuter nominative of brahman, and the nāmāvalī that goes with it reads brahmaṇe namaḥ — a neuter dative in the middle of a hymn where nearly every other salutation ends in the feminine -āyai. The effect is deliberate and a little shocking: having just called her somebody's power, the hymn calls her the absolute itself, in the gender that Sanskrit reserves for what is beyond persons. Editions differ here. Some count brahmajananī as a single name, "mother of Brahmā," which reads smoothly with the Purāṇic picture of the creator born from a lotus; the division followed in this text counts brahma and jananī separately, and the neuter dative in the nāmāvalī shows that its editors meant the split seriously rather than as a convenience of counting.

Budha, in budhārcitā, is a participle of √budh, to wake, and means simply one who has woken up — the ordinary Sanskrit word for a learned man, with the metaphor of waking still live inside it. The same word names the planet Mercury, and readers occasionally hear that sense here; the plain reading, and the one the hymn's other names support, is that reverence is itself a symptom of being awake.

The second line hides a join. Pracaṇḍā ends in long ā and ājñā begins with long ā, and two long ās contract to one, so what is spoken is pracaṇḍājñā. The printed text marks the contraction with a doubled avagraha, the little hook that normally signals an elided short a: the doubling is a scribal courtesy telling the reciter that a whole long vowel has vanished and that two names, not one, are hiding in the word. Some editions read it as one name, pracaṇḍājñā, "she whose command is fierce," which is a good phrase and keeps the count elsewhere by splitting something else. Ājñā by itself is sovereign command, the word for an order that carries no appeal; the same word names the centre between the brows in the yogic body, and that resonance is hard for a practitioner not to hear, though nothing in the verse demands it.

Pratiṣṭhā and prakaṭākṛtiḥ close the verse as a pair of opposites that are not opposed. Pratiṣṭhā is what a thing stands on — it is the ordinary Sanskrit for a foundation, and also the technical name of the rite by which an image is installed in a temple and becomes the god. Prakaṭa means open, evident, public. In Śrīcakra worship the outermost enclosure, the square boundary wall, is the enclosure of the prakaṭa yoginīs, the manifest ones, and the classes of goddesses grow progressively more secret as the worshipper moves inward toward the point at the centre. To call her prakaṭākṛti at the end of a verse about origination is to say that the outermost and most public appearance is as much hers as the hidden one.

The first line is a drill in two consonant clusters that English does not have. Brahmāṇī opens with br, a labial immediately followed by r with no vowel between, and then gives hma, in which h is a voiced breath and m closes the lips after it — not "brah-ma-nee" with a pause, but a single continuous run in which the breath passes through the h and out through the m. The ṇ that follows is retroflex, with the tongue curled back to the roof of the mouth, and it is retroflex because of the r earlier in the word: this is the sandhi rule that turns dental n into ṇ after r within a word, and brahmāṇī is one of the standard places to feel it happen. Then jananī immediately afterward gives you two plain dental n's, which is a useful contrast to hear back to back.

The second line is where recitation goes wrong. Four written words begin pra-, and the ear has almost nothing to hold on to. Fix the order by its sense rather than by its sound: she brings forth, she blazes, she commands, she supports, she appears. Once that sequence is in place the line stops being four interchangeable noises.

In the middle of that line, pracaṇḍā''jñā is chanted as one long word — pra-caṇ-ḍā-jñā — with no break at the avagrahas and no reduplication of the ā. The doubled hook is for the eye, not the mouth. The cluster jñ, which appears here and again in the name of many hymns, is not "g-ny": both consonants are palatal, and the standard modern pronunciations of it (gya in the north, jña with a genuine palatal nasal in the south) are both defensible, but whichever you use, keep it identical every time it appears.

Pratiṣṭhā gives the cluster ṣṭh: a retroflex sibilant, then a retroflex aspirated stop. The tongue stays curled back for both, and the aspiration is a real puff of breath after the ṭ, not a separate h. Prakaṭākṛtiḥ then asks for the vocalic ṛ, which is a vowel and carries a syllable of its own; kṛ is one beat, not two, and the visarga at the end is a light breath that in most recitation styles echoes the preceding vowel faintly.

When the verse is used for archanā, each name is turned into the dative and preceded by oṃ and followed by namaḥ. Nearly all of these behave predictably: brahmāṇyai, jananyai, bahurūpāyai, budhārcitāyai, prasavitryai, pracaṇḍāyai, ājñāyai, pratiṣṭhāyai. Two do not. Brahma becomes brahmaṇe, because it is neuter, and prakaṭākṛtiḥ becomes prakaṭākṛtaye, because it is an i-stem rather than the usual ā-stem. Those two exceptions are worth learning here rather than stumbling over them at speed, and the first of them is theologically loaded: for one salutation in the middle of a hymn addressed throughout to a woman, the worshipper bows to a neuter.