The world as one mouthful, and a printed word that hides a seam

Begin with what the printed line hides. Ayoniryoninilayā looks like one long word and is two names, ayoniḥ and yoninilayā. The visarga that ends the first has become r before the voiced y that begins the second, which is regular sandhi and which leaves no visible seam. Anyone counting names off the page will count one here and be wrong, and the mistake matters because the two names contradict each other on purpose. Yoni is womb, source, origin — and, in this tradition's diagrams, the downward-pointing triangle. She has none; she is where every one of them is housed. The sandhi presses the two statements into a single utterance so that neither can be taken by itself.

Grāsa, in the first name, is not a general word for eating. It means a mouthful, the quantity taken in at one time, and the legal literature is precise enough about it to specify how large a mouthful should be. The universe is that quantity. The nearest thing in earlier literature is Arjuna's terrified description of the cosmic form devouring the worlds with flaming mouths, and the coincidence is closer than it looks, because that stanza is addressed to Viṣṇu and this verse goes on to name her as Viṣṇu twice over.

Vidruma is coral, literally the not-tree, from vi and druma: a growth that looks like a tree and lives in the sea. Its value in India lay in a red that is deep without being fiery, which is exactly the register of her colour in this tradition. The meditation verse recited before the thousand names calls her aruṇā, the red of dawn, and the iconography keeps to warm reds throughout — not the black of Kālī nor the incandescence of the fire she is elsewhere said to have been born from.

Vaiṣṇavī is a technical name before it is a description. Among the group of Mother goddesses that the Devī Māhātmya has emerging from the male gods to fight in its later battles, Vaiṣṇavī is the one who comes out of Viṣṇu, rides his mount and carries his weapons; the Mothers are counted as seven or eight depending on the source, and one of them, Vārāhī, is a major deity of this school in her own right. So the name places her within a familiar Śākta list. Then viṣṇurūpiṇī withdraws the placement. To be Viṣṇu's power is to be derivative; to be his form is to be prior. This is the second time in two verses that the hymn has taken this exact route — dear to the brahmins, then the brahmin's own form; Viṣṇu's power, then Viṣṇu — and the repetition looks deliberate. It is also worth noting how much further this goes than the more famous Śākta claim, made at the opening of the Saundaryalaharī, that Viṣṇu, Śiva and Brahmā all worship her. Worship still keeps them separate. Rūpiṇī does not.

Kūṭastha is a Vedāntic term of art, standing in the Gītā for the imperishable person as against the perishable one that is all beings. Kūṭa means a peak or summit, and also a heap or mass, and also an anvil, and the commentators have made use of all three. The anvil is the reading most often given: what stays wholly unaltered while everything else is beaten into shape on it. The heap gives a different sense — standing in the aggregate, present throughout the mass of beings — and the two readings pull in opposite directions, one towards transcendence and one towards immanence. Nothing in the word settles it, and the tradition has not tried very hard to.

Kula, in the last name, is the densest word in the verse. In ordinary Sanskrit it is a family or lineage. In the Kaula traditions from which Śrīvidyā descends it is all of the following at once: the initiatory lineage, the body understood as the site of practice, the totality of knower, means of knowing and object known, and śakti herself as distinguished from akula, the Śiva-pole. Which of these a commentator emphasises tends to reveal where he stands on the long internal argument between the kaula and samaya readings of this tradition — whether the Śrīcakra is to be worshipped with external substances and rites that orthodoxy forbids, or entirely within the body and the mind. Bhāskararāya, writing in the eighteenth century, is the great defender of the first position; the commentary on the Saundaryalaharī attributed to Lakṣmīdhara is the classic statement of the second, and it is polemically hostile to the kaula. That a name of the thousand simply says she is the kula has been useful ammunition to one side of that dispute, and readers of English translations should know that a rendering of kularūpiṇī is rarely a neutral act.

The practical warning for this verse is the one already given: ayoniryoninilayā is two names and must be offered as two in the archanā, ayonyai namaḥ and yoninilayāyai namaḥ. In continuous recitation they are run together exactly as printed, with the r sounding, so the seam is inaudible; you are not mispronouncing anything by joining them. But if you are counting, or if you are placing names into a sequence of offerings, treat the printed word as a compound of two and not as one.

The first line is a run of v and needs the Sanskrit value of that letter, made with the lower lip approaching the upper teeth but without the firm contact of an English v. Four names in a row take it. The three sibilants of the line are all different and all matter: viśva has ś, the palatal, tongue near the hard palate; vaiṣṇavī and viṣṇu have ṣ, the retroflex, tongue curled back; and there is no dental s in the line at all. Getting ś and ṣ to sound unlike each other is the single most valuable thing to work on here, and this line gives them to you within four syllables of one another.

Viṣṇu also gives the cluster ṣṇ, retroflex sibilant plus retroflex nasal, with the tongue staying curled back through both. Vaiṣṇavī opens with the diphthong ai, which is a full long vowel and not the quick glide of English "eye"; the vowel lengthening in vaiṣṇavī from viṣṇu is the ordinary derivational process that turns a name into an adjective of belonging, and the same process lies behind baindava, kaumārī and a great many other words in this literature.

In the second line, kūṭasthā packs three difficulties into three syllables: a long ū, a retroflex ṭ, and then sth, a dental sibilant plus an aspirated dental stop. The tongue has to travel from the retroflex ṭ to the dental s, and hurrying it produces a sound that is neither.

Metrically the verse is regular anuṣṭubh, with the caesura after vidrumābhā. The second line has an unusual internal rhythm because of the concealed seam: eight syllables that are two names, then eight that are two more, with the boundary in the first half falling after the third syllable rather than the fourth. Reciters used to the four-plus-four pattern of the preceding verses will momentarily lose their footing, which is worth knowing in advance.

The six offerings of the first line and a half are straightforward ā-stems and ī-stems: viśvagrāsāyai namaḥ, vidrumābhāyai namaḥ, vaiṣṇavyai namaḥ, viṣṇurūpiṇyai namaḥ, kūṭasthāyai namaḥ, kularūpiṇyai namaḥ. Ayoni is an i-stem, giving ayonyai, which is worth noticing because it is short and unlike its neighbours and therefore easy to over-lengthen into a false ayonīyai.

What the verse asks is that you hold a contradiction without dissolving it. She has no origin and she is where origin lives. She stands unmoved and she is the whole shifting family of knower and known. The hymn does not offer a reconciliation, and the two names are joined at the seam precisely so that no reciter can hold one of them without the other.