Mistress of the breath, the fifty seats, the mother of heroes

Prāṇa is one of the oldest technical words in Indian religious thought and one of the least well served by the English "breath." In the Upaniṣads it is the vital principle that keeps a body from being a corpse, and the older texts stage a competition among the faculties — speech, sight, hearing, mind — in which each departs in turn and the body carries on impaired, until the breath begins to leave and the others discover they cannot survive its going. By the classical yoga literature prāṇa has been subdivided into five currents distinguished by direction and function, prāṇa proper along with apāna, vyāna, udāna and samāna, and it has become the object of a discipline: prāṇāyāma is the deliberate handling of something that ordinarily handles itself. Both names in this verse presuppose that background. Prāṇeśvarī places her at the point where the practitioner's attention goes during that discipline, and prāṇadātrī reminds him that the current he is learning to steer was given to him.

The long third name is the most information-dense in the verse. Pīṭha means a seat or pedestal, and in Śākta usage it names a sacred site where the goddess is permanently present. The origin story is told in several Purāṇas, most fully in the Kālikā Purāṇa, which is centred on the seat at Kāmākhyā in Assam: Satī dies at her father's sacrifice, Śiva carries her body across the world in grief, and the corpse is dismembered so that he will stop, each fallen part becoming a site of worship. Lists of the resulting seats disagree more than almost any other enumeration in the literature — four, seven, eighteen, fifty-one, sixty-four, one hundred and eight — and the disagreement is geography rather than carelessness, since every region wants its shrine on the list.

What makes fifty the number this hymn chooses is that fifty is also the count of the phonemes of Sanskrit as the tantric traditions reckon them, the varṇamālā or garland of letters that runs from a to kṣa. Those fifty sounds are themselves treated as a goddess, Mātṛkā, the little mother, from whom all speech and therefore all knowledge and all mantra descend. Setting the number of seats equal to the number of letters is a claim, not a coincidence: the map of holy places and the map of the alphabet are being asserted to be the same map, so that a pilgrimage circuit and a recitation are two ways of traversing one thing. The equation is worked out at length in the Śākta and Kaula literature, where the letters are distributed over the seats and over the practitioner's own body, and it is why a Śrīvidyā practitioner can say without strain that the pilgrimage places are inside him.

Viśṛṅkhalā, without chains, is a plain word made technical by its surroundings. Śaiva doctrine has a precise account of what the chains are: the limited soul is bound by sheaths that give it a little agency, a little knowledge, appetite, time and constraint, and every one of these is a restriction on a capacity that is unlimited in the absolute. To call her unfettered is to say that she wears none of them. The tradition also hears the plainer sense — that she is not to be bound by the propriety, caste rule and ritual boundary that structure ordinary religion — and that reading connects the name to the transgressive strand in the tantric tradition rather than to its metaphysics.

Viviktasthā and vīramātā continue in that register. Vivikta is the past participle of vi-√vic, to separate or sift, and it does double service: a solitary place, and something that has been discriminated, told apart from what it is not. Both senses are alive in the yoga literature, which prescribes solitary places for practice and discrimination as the content of what is practised there. Vīra means a hero, and in the Kaula classification of practitioners into three temperaments — the bound herd-animal, the hero, and the divine — it names the middle grade, the adept who undertakes rites that involve the very substances and situations orthodoxy avoids. "Mother of heroes" is also, and much older than any of this, a standard Vedic blessing pronounced over a bride. The hymn is willing to let both meanings stand.

Viyatprasūḥ closes the verse with cosmology. Viyat is the sky or ether, and in the standard account of how the elements unfold, space is the first and subtlest to come out of the absolute, with air, fire, water and earth following in order of increasing grossness. To be the mother of ether is therefore to be prior to the entire material series — and there is a quiet joke in it, since ether is the element defined by containing everything else and having no content of its own. Even that, the verse says, had a parent.

The first line is a long one to get through cleanly, because its third name is eight syllables of unbroken compound. Take pañcāśatpīṭharūpiṇī apart before trying to chant it: pañcāśat, fifty; pīṭha, seat; rūpiṇī, having the form of. The junction to watch is śat-pī, where a final dental t meets an initial labial p with no vowel between them and the temptation is to insert one. Keep the t unreleased and let the p do the releasing. The ñ in pañcā is a palatal nasal, made where the c is made, so that the tongue never leaves the palate across ñcā.

Both prāṇa- names give the same two things to attend to: the initial cluster pr with a long ā immediately after it, and the retroflex ṇ. The ṇ is retroflex because of the r that precedes it in the word, the same rule that operates in brahmāṇī in the previous verse, and hearing the two verses back to back is a good way to fix it. In prāṇeśvarī the e is a long vowel in Sanskrit — there is no short e — so the word has three long syllables before its final ī and should not be hurried.

The second line is four names in vi-, which is where a reciter is likely to lose one. The Sanskrit v is neither the English v nor a full w; the lower lip approaches the upper teeth without the friction an English v has. Viśṛṅkhalā is the hardest word in the verse: ś is palatal, ṛ is a vowel and takes its own beat, and ṅ is the guttural nasal made at the same place as the kh that follows it. Say vi-śṛ-ṅkha-lā at half speed until the ṅkh stops turning into an English "ng-k." Viviktasthā has two identical vi syllables in a row and then the cluster sthā, a dental s followed by an aspirated dental th; the h in th is breath, never a separate consonant. Vīramātā begins with a long ī, which distinguishes it audibly from the two vi- names before it, and that length is the only thing keeping the four names apart at speed. Viyatprasūḥ ends the line with the three-consonant cluster tpr, which should be practised as a single release rather than as t, then p, then r.

For archanā the datives are prāṇeśvaryai, prāṇadātryai, pañcāśatpīṭharūpiṇyai, viśṛṅkhalāyai, viviktasthāyai, vīramātre and viyatprasuve. Two of them are irregular and worth learning. Vīramātā is a stem in -ṛ, like the ordinary word for mother, so its dative is vīramātre and not the expected -āyai. Viyatprasūḥ is a stem in long ū, and its dative shortens the vowel to viyatprasuve. Both endings will feel wrong in the mouth after a long stretch of -āyai, which is exactly why the verse is a good place to notice that the hymn's grammar is real and not a formula.

As for what the verse asks: the two prāṇa names are the only place in this stretch where the hymn touches something the reciter is doing at that very moment. Chanting is a discipline of breath before it is anything else, and a long recitation is governed by where one chooses to inhale. It is difficult to say prāṇadātrī, giver of breath, at the end of a line and then take the next breath without noticing what has just been claimed about it.