She cures the disease of existence and keeps its wheel turning

Mukundā is the feminine of Mukunda, a name so firmly attached to Viṣṇu and to Kṛṣṇa that meeting it in a Śākta hymn is a small jolt. The traditional derivation treats it as a compound of mukti and a root meaning to give — the one who gives release — and that is how the commentators on this hymn read it. Lexicography also records mukunda as a kind of drum, a precious stone, and one of the nine treasures of Kubera, a range that should make anyone cautious about a single confident etymology. What matters for the hymn is the borrowing rather than the derivation. This stotra takes divine names that belong to male gods and puts them in the feminine without comment or apology: two verses earlier it did the same thing with Brahmāṇī, and the effect accumulates. The claim is not that she resembles those gods but that whatever any of them is called, she is what is being called.

Muktinilayā, the dwelling of liberation, sounds like a spatial metaphor and the tradition has argued about how far to press it. Vaiṣṇava scholasticism developed a graded account of what release consists in — dwelling in the same world as god, coming near him, taking on his form, and finally merging with him — and the first three of those are frankly locational. Advaitic readers resist the whole picture: liberation is not a destination because there is nowhere to go and nobody to go there, so nilaya must mean that she is what liberation consists of rather than where it is held. The name supports both readings, and the commentarial literature characteristically records them side by side rather than choosing.

Mūlavigraharūpiṇī rewards a reader who knows a South Indian temple. Vigraha is a body, and in temple usage the mūlavigraha or mūlamūrti is the fixed image in the innermost sanctum — often ancient, often stone, often barely visible under its cloth and flowers, and never moved. It is distinguished from the processional image, the bronze that is bathed, dressed, carried through the streets at festivals and treated as the god out visiting. The two are one deity, and the ritual life of the temple depends on knowing which is which. To call her the one who takes the form of the root body is therefore quite specific: of all the images of her — the drawn diagram, the bronze in the street, the picture on a household shelf, the form visualized in meditation — there is an original they refer back to, and she is that. Mūla is also the word for the root mantra of a deity, the formula from which a rite's subsidiary formulae derive, and readers in the mantra traditions hear that sense here too.

Bhāva, in bhāvajñā, is one of the hardest words in the language to translate because it is used technically in three different fields. In devotional literature it is the attitude a worshipper holds toward the deity, and whole taxonomies of it exist. In dramaturgy it is the underlying emotional state a performance evokes and refines into aesthetic flavour. In the Kaula literature it names the temperament of a practitioner, sorted into the bound, the heroic and the divine, with different rites permitted to each. To say that she knows bhāva is to say, in the first sense, that ritual cannot be faked; in the third, that she knows what kind of practitioner she is dealing with, which is a considerably more uncomfortable thought.

The metaphor of existence as illness in bhavarogaghnī is old and pervasive. Indian religious literature returns constantly to the teacher as physician, the teaching as medicine and rebirth as a chronic condition; the Buddha's first sermon is structured as a medical diagnosis, and the stotra literature of every sect calls its god a healer. The compound bhavaroga, the sickness that is becoming, is standard poetic property rather than the invention of this hymn. What is unusual is the verb chosen to deal with it. Ghnī is from √han, to strike or kill, the verb of the battlefield. She does not treat the disease or manage it; she kills it.

And then the verse ends by making her the one who turns the wheel of becoming. The phrase is arresting partly because the same construction is famous from elsewhere: setting a wheel in motion is what the Buddha is said to do with the dharma, and the wheel of becoming itself is painted at the entrance of Tibetan monasteries in the grip of the lord of death. Here the wheel that turns is the round of birth and death, and the agent who turns it is the same person who was destroying it a moment earlier. Commentators generally take this as a statement about sovereignty rather than a paradox to be resolved: bondage and release are not two independent forces contending for a soul but two operations of one power, and there is no second principle anywhere in the system to be blamed for the bondage. The consequence for a practitioner is severe and is meant to be. The wheel does not stop when it is outwitted. It stops when she lets it.

The first line is three names, all beginning with m, and the vowel that follows the m is the only thing separating the first two: mukundā has short u twice, muktinilayā has short u once, and mūlavigraharūpiṇī opens with a long ū. Vowel length is doing structural work here, and a reciter who lets the long ū collapse loses the shape of the line. Hold it for two beats and the third name announces itself.

Mukundā ends in the cluster ndā, a dental n immediately followed by a dental d, both made with the tongue against the teeth rather than the ridge behind them. Muktinilayā gives kti, a guttural k released straight into a dental t. In both cases the danger is an intrusive vowel — mu-ku-na-dā, muk-ti with a breath after the k — and the remedy is to make the two consonants share a single release.

Mūlavigraharūpiṇī is eight syllables and should be learned as its three pieces, mūla, vigraha, rūpiṇī, before it is chanted as one. The ṇ at the end is retroflex, again because of the r earlier in rūpiṇī, and the line therefore closes with the same four syllables as the previous verse's third name — an echo that is a genuine help to memory.

The second line is the aspirated labial bh three times over, and it is the single most common thing for English speakers to get wrong in this hymn. Bh is one sound, not b followed by h: the lips release with a voiced puff of breath behind them, the way the b of "abhor" does not. Practise bhā, bha, bha at the head of the three names until the aspiration is audible without the word breaking in two.

Bhavarogaghnī then asks for gh and n as a cluster, ghnī, which is a voiced aspirated guttural followed immediately by a dental nasal. It is easier than it looks if you start from the n and add the gh in front of it rather than trying to attach the n to the end of gha. Bhavacakrapravartinī, seven syllables of compound, contains two r-clusters, kra and pra, one after the other, and then the rti in which the r closes a syllable rather than opening one. Sanskrit r is a tap, a single quick flick of the tongue, and the syllable-final r of rti wants to be given that flick rather than the long glide of an American r.

For archanā these become mukundāyai, muktinilayāyai, mūlavigraharūpiṇyai, bhāvajñāyai, bhavarogaghnyai and bhavacakrapravartinyai. The ī-stems all behave the same way, collapsing the long ī to y before the ending, and this verse is a compact place to drill that pattern three times.

One thing the verse asks of the person chanting it is a decision about what is being requested. It is easy to say bhavarogaghnī as a petition — cure me — and then to say bhavacakrapravartinī two seconds later as though it were unrelated praise. Said together and meant together, they amount to an admission that the condition one is asking to be relieved of is being maintained deliberately, by the person one is asking. Bhāvajñā, standing at the head of the same line, has already said that she can tell whether the reciter has noticed.