The circle of heroes, and the point at its centre

Vīra is ordinary Sanskrit for a man of valour, cognate with Latin vir, and it long predates any tantric use. In the Kaula literature it becomes technical. Practitioners are sorted by disposition into the paśu, the bound creature who keeps to the ordinary rules, the vīra, who is fit for observances involving what is ordinarily forbidden, and the divya, in whom the distinction has stopped mattering; and the vīra is the middle term on which most of the ritual literature concentrates, because he is the one who has something to do. Goṣṭhī began as a cow-pen, go plus a form of √sthā, then came to mean any standing-together: a company, an assembly, in classical usage a salon of cultivated talk. Vīragoṣṭhī is the seated ring of practitioners, what the texts elsewhere call the cakra, and the name says that this is where she likes to be. It is a claim about location as much as about temperament.

The second name withdraws the compliment from the assembly and gives it to her. Vīrā is the feminine of the same word, and the effect of setting it immediately after vīragoṣṭhīpriyā is to say that the quality the circle is named for does not originate in the circle. This is a move the sahasranāma makes repeatedly and never explains: an attribute is granted to her devotees and then, in the following name, claimed as hers.

Naiṣkarmyā is the strange one. The abstract noun naiṣkarmya is a vṛddhi derivative of niṣkarman, without works, and it belongs to the vocabulary of Vedānta far more than to that of tantra. The Bhagavad Gītā uses it in its third chapter to make a point that is nearly the opposite of what the word suggests: freedom from action is not reached by declining to act. Śaṅkara's pupil Sureśvara wrote a whole treatise called the Naiṣkarmyasiddhi on what the state amounts to. Its appearance here, two names after the circle of adepts, in a hymn whose entire apparatus is ritual activity, is worth pausing over. The commentators generally take it to mean that her acts of creating, maintaining and withdrawing the world leave no residue on her, being play rather than obligation; the practical corollary, which the rest of the verse will develop, is that nothing done in front of her diagram is a transaction either.

Nāda comes from √nad, to sound or roar, but in this literature it does not mean audible noise. It names the first stirring of sound before articulation, the middle term in the sequence bindu, nāda, kalā by which the schools of mantra describe the unfolding of the absolute into speech, and it corresponds to the levels of the word — parā, paśyantī, madhyamā, vaikharī — of which only the last reaches the ear. To call her nādarūpiṇī immediately after calling her actionless is to block a misreading: what is beyond action is not thereby inert. It resounds, and everything audible is downstream of it.

The second line changes register. Vijñānakalanā is built on √kal, to impel or bring about, so the sense is that she is the setting-in-motion of discriminative knowledge rather than the knowledge itself. Kalyā carries two lexical lives at once: as the feminine of the adjective kalya it means whole, sound, in good health, ready — the same stem gives kalya for daybreak, the hour when one is fit for work — while Monier-Williams also records a separate feminine noun kalyā meaning praise. A hymn is not obliged to choose. Vidagdhā is the past participle of vi-√dah, burnt up, and its transferred sense is one of the most characteristic words of courtly Sanskrit: the vidagdha is the connoisseur, the person of finished taste, on the metaphor of clay fired hard or gold burnt clean. That this vocabulary of the literary salon should appear in a tantric hymn is not an accident; the goṣṭhī of the first name is the same social form that the poets used.

Baindava is the vṛddhi adjective from bindu, a drop, a dot, the point without magnitude. As a seat it means the centre of the Śrīcakra, where the diagram's nine enclosures converge and where the goddess is invoked before any offering is made. The verse thus ends exactly where the diagram ends, and the reader who has followed the eight names from the outer ring of adepts to the innermost point has traced the same path inward that the ritual takes.

The metre is anuṣṭubh and the syllable count falls out cleanly: six syllables of vīragoṣṭhīpriyā plus two of vīrā make the first eight, three of naiṣkarmyā plus five of nādarūpiṇī make the second. The caesura is at the end of nādarūpiṇī, sixteen syllables in, and that is the only place to breathe.

Three clusters in this verse cause most of the trouble. In goṣṭhī the ṣṭh is a retroflex sibilant followed by an aspirated retroflex stop: the tongue curls back for ṣ and stays back for ṭh, and the h is breath released through the same closure, not a separate syllable. In naiṣkarmyā the sequence rmy runs a retroflex-tinged r into a labial m into a palatal y with no vowel between them; English speakers insert one almost involuntarily, producing something like narish-karamya. Say kar, then close the lips for m, then release directly into yā. And in vidagdhā the g and dh are both voiced, the second aspirated — g, then d with breath, then ā — which is easier if you slow the word to three deliberate beats before restoring speed.

The jñ of vijñānakalanā is pronounced differently across India. The southern recitation traditions that carry this stotra generally give it as a palatal j followed by the palatal nasal ñ; much of the north says gya. Either will be understood; consistency within a recitation matters more than the choice.

Baindavāsanā hides a join. The elements are baindava and āsana, and the final short a of the first meets the long ā of the second to give a single long ā: baindav-āsanā. The opening ai is a full diphthong of two morae, not the clipped English vowel of "bite". The same diphthong appeared in mahāsanā's cousin earlier in the hymn, and the two names should be heard together — she is seated on the great seat, and the great seat is a point.

For recitation as archanā the names take the dative. The ā-stems give vīragoṣṭhīpriyāyai, vīrāyai, naiṣkarmyāyai, vijñānakalanāyai, kalyāyai, vidagdhāyai, baindavāsanāyai, all in -āyai; nādarūpiṇī, being an ī-stem, gives nādarūpiṇyai. The verse is a good place to hear the difference between the two endings, since seven of the eight take one and one takes the other.

What the verse asks is set by its second name and its third. Most people who chant this stotra do so alone, and the first name describes a circle; the tradition's own answer is that the recitation joins one to a company that is not assembled in the room. The third name is the harder demand. Naiṣkarmyā stands two syllables from the beginning of a hymn that will later promise results, and it says of her that action leaves no mark. Chanted honestly it asks the reciter to stop keeping accounts of the recitation.