Rest for the scorched, proclaimed aloud by the secret texts

Birth, death and old age form a triad that Indian religious literature returns to so consistently that the compound janma-mṛtyu-jarā functions almost as a single word. The Bhagavadgītā uses it, with sickness added, in its account of what counts as knowledge; the Buddhist formulations of suffering run through the same items; and the medical and ascetic literatures agree on the diagnosis while disagreeing about everything else. The verb inside the compound here is worth noticing: tapta, from √tap, means scorched or burned. The same root gives tapas, the heat generated by ascetic practice, which is a heat one takes on deliberately. Here the heat is not chosen. The people described are being cooked by a process they did not start.

Against that, viśrānti. The word is built on vi plus √śram, to grow weary, and means the cessation of exertion — a rest that comes at the end of effort rather than in the middle of it. It is an ordinary word for a traveller stopping, and it became a technical term of some weight in Kashmiri Śaiva thought, where consciousness coming to rest in itself, rather than chasing outward through its objects, is the whole of what is aimed at. The name does not promise the relief of one difficulty. It promises the end of the exertion, which is why the tradition hears mokṣa in it rather than consolation.

Sarvopaniṣadudghuṣṭā turns on a contradiction that its author clearly enjoyed. Udghuṣṭa is from ud plus √ghuṣ, to shout: it means proclaimed at the top of the voice, cried through the streets, noised abroad. An upaniṣad, on the other hand, is a rahasya, a secret, taught by a teacher sitting with a student and traditionally withheld from anyone unqualified; the classical Advaita derivation of the word takes it from a root sad in the senses of destroying, reaching and loosening, so that the teaching destroys ignorance and loosens the bonds of one who sits near for it. To say that the secret texts shout her aloud is to say that the concealment was never about the subject matter. What is hidden in an Upaniṣad is hidden by the reader's inability, not by the text's reticence.

Whether the Upaniṣads in fact proclaim a goddess is a live question, and the Śākta tradition has answered it by pointing to a small number of passages and by producing more. The classical passage is the episode in the Kena Upaniṣad in which the gods, puffed up by a victory that was not theirs, are confronted by a mysterious presence they cannot identify, and Indra finally learns what it was from a woman who appears in the sky. The Śvetāśvatara's language about a supreme power belonging to the absolute has served the same purpose. Beyond those, the tradition has its own Upaniṣads — the Devī Upaniṣad, the Tripurā and Tripurātāpinī, the Bahvṛca and the Bhāvana — which are late by the standards of the classical texts and openly Śākta in content, and which are what make the claim of "all the Upaniṣads" defensible from inside the tradition even to a reader who thinks it strained from outside.

The last name is technical and rewards precision. Śaiva cosmology divides the whole ladder of reality into five kalās, phases or segments, each covering a band of the thirty-six tattvas. From the bottom they are Nivṛtti, which covers earth alone; Pratiṣṭhā, running from water up through primal nature; Vidyā, covering the soul and the constraints that limit it; Śānti, the pure levels above the fissure between limited and unlimited; and Śāntyatītā, the phase beyond peace, at the top. The scheme is used in initiation, where the officiant purifies the candidate's soul band by band, and in the daily worship of the deity, where the same ladder is climbed in imagination. Two things follow for this verse. First, pratiṣṭhā, which appeared as an independent name only four verses earlier, is a term in the same system, and readers who know the scheme hear the two names as marking the bottom and the top of one ladder. Second, the choice of the highest kalā for a name near the end of the hymn is not accidental: the last portion of the thousand names climbs, and śāntyatītā is deliberately the name of a level for which the word peace is already too positive a description.

The first line is a single word of sixteen syllables and it is the chief technical difficulty in this part of the hymn. Do not attempt it as a unit. Break it into its five pieces and learn them separately — janma, mṛtyu, jarā, tapta, jana, then viśrānti and dāyinī — and only then run them together. The junctions that give trouble are jarā-tapta, where a long ā meets a t and the temptation is to shorten the vowel, and tapta-jana, where the p is unreleased before the t.

Mṛtyu contains the vocalic ṛ, a full vowel occupying its own beat, followed immediately by the cluster ty. Say mṛ as one short syllable with the tongue curled, then tyu with the t and y sharing a single release.

Viśrānti has ś, then r, then a long ā, and then the nti cluster; the anusvāra-like nasal before the t is a dental n made where the t is made. Dāyinī ends the line with three open syllables, and the line's whole rhythmic shape depends on arriving at them without having rushed what came before. In performance the line takes as long as a full verse elsewhere in the hymn, and it should.

The second line is easier to say and harder to parse. Sarvopaniṣadudghuṣṭā is sarva plus upaniṣad plus udghuṣṭā, with the a of sarva and the u of upaniṣad combining into o — one of the commonest sandhis in the language, and one worth recognizing on sight, since sarvo- almost always signals it. The cluster dgh in the middle is voiced throughout, d then the aspirated gh, with the aspiration audible as breath and not as a separate syllable. The two ṣ sounds in the word are retroflex and the ṭ in ghuṣṭā is retroflex because of the ṣ before it.

Śāntyatītakalātmikā is śānti plus atīta plus kalā plus ātmikā, and again the joins are all vowel contractions: śānty-atīta, and kalā plus ātmikā giving a single long ā. Say it slowly enough that the four long ās in the second half of the word each get their full length; the word is largely made of them, and clipping any one of them makes it unrecognizable.

For archanā the three datives are janmamṛtyujarātaptajanaviśrāntidāyinyai, sarvopaniṣadudghuṣṭāyai and śāntyatītakalātmikāyai. The first is a mouthful even by the standards of this hymn, and in nāmāvalī recitation it is the point where a chanter either has the compound properly memorized or discovers that he does not.

What the verse asks is unusually plain. The first name identifies the person reciting it: someone scorched by birth, death and old age is not a category of unfortunate other people. It is a description of anyone who is going to die, which is to say of the reciter, and the name offers not a remedy for the heat but an end to the exertion of enduring it. Having said that, the verse immediately moves out of the language of comfort and into the vocabulary of the tattva ladder, and the juxtaposition is the lesson: the rest on offer is not rest as ordinarily understood, but the condition named at the top of a scale where even peace has been left behind.