Above the categories, and made of them

Tattva is a made word and a rather awkward one. It is the pronoun tat, that, with the abstract suffix -tva added to it, so its literal sense is thatness — the state of being that. Sanskrit uses it for truth, for reality, for the essence of a thing, and above all for an item in a numbered list of the constituents of the world. Which list depends on the school. Classical Sāṃkhya counts twenty-five, from puruṣa and prakṛti down through intellect, ego, mind, the eleven faculties, the five subtle elements and the five gross ones. The Śaiva systems keep those twenty-five, treat them as the impure end of the scale, and add eleven more above them, running up through māyā and its five constraining sheaths to śuddhavidyā, īśvara, sadāśiva, śakti and śiva: thirty-six in all. The number is not decoration. A tattva scheme is a map of how consciousness becomes a world, read downward, and of how a practitioner retraces the descent, read upward.

The first two names take the two available positions on such a map and refuse to choose between them. Adhikā governs an ablative — greater than, in excess of, over and above the tattvas — and it places her outside the scheme, at the point where counting stops. Mayī, the feminine of the suffix -maya, means consisting of, made out of, and it places her inside every item counted. This pairing is the oldest move in Indian theology and the stotra has made it before, but it lands differently here, thirty names from the end, because by now the reader has watched the hymn do it perhaps forty times. Whatever it says she is beyond, it will say in the next breath that she is.

The third name is a pun that the tradition takes entirely seriously. Written out, tattvamartha looks like tattva with a stray -m before artha. It is not. The commentators generally read the first member as tat tvam, the fragment of the sentence tat tvam asi, that thou art, which Uddālaka repeats to his son Śvetaketu nine times in the sixth chapter of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. So the name says that her own form is the meaning of that sentence: not that she teaches the identity of self and absolute, and not that she exemplifies it, but that she is what the sentence is about. A minority reading keeps tattvam as one word and takes artha in the sense of purpose, giving something like she whose nature is the goal of all the principles; the two readings are not far apart in effect, and the first is much the commoner. It is worth noticing what the poet has done technically. Three names in a row open on the same syllables, and the third one only pretends to. Sanskrit compounding, which normally blurs the seams between words, is being used here to hide a sentence inside a noun.

Then the register drops. Sāmagānapriyā names the Sāmaveda, the collection whose verses are almost all borrowed from the Ṛgveda and whose distinctive content is not words but melody: how the borrowed verses are stretched, repeated, broken and fitted with meaningless syllables called stobhas in order to be sung. It is the one Veda that cannot be printed adequately, because what it consists of is a performance. To say that this singing is what she loves, in a hymn composed in the plainest of metres and recited rather than sung, is a small act of deference from one kind of sacred speech to another. Kṛṣṇa makes the same ranking in the tenth chapter of the Gītā when he names the Sāmaveda as his own among the four.

Saumyā is the adjective from soma, and it carries the moon with it, since soma is the moon as well as the pressed plant of the Vedic rite. The dictionary range runs from lunar and cool through mild, placid and benign, and in classical prose the vocative saumya is simply the polite way to address a man you are being kind to, roughly good sir. After the metaphysics of the first line, the word is almost startlingly ordinary.

Sadāśiva is a technical name, not a synonym for Śiva. In the thirty-six-tattva scheme he stands third from the top, below śiva and śakti and above īśvara, at the level where the universe about to be emitted is still felt as a vague I-am-this rather than as an object. He is also the fifth of the five brahmans whose corpse-couch this hymn has already described, and he will return in that role six verses further on. What the stotra pairs with that exceedingly abstract figure is kuṭumbinī: kuṭumba is a household, a family, the people and property that make up a domestic establishment, and kuṭumbin is the man who has one. The feminine is his wife. It is the vocabulary of the household register, and it is the last word of a verse that began at the top of the tattva scheme.

The first line is a trap of the kind that catches experienced reciters. Three names in a row begin tattva-, tattva-, tattva-, and the third is longer than the first two put together. What goes wrong is not mispronunciation but arithmetic: one of the three gets said twice, or one gets dropped, and nothing in the sound tells you. Fix the line by its logic rather than by its music. Above, made of, and then the sentence — beyond the list, inside the list, and then the reason both can be true.

The cluster is ttv, and it is three articulations with no vowel anywhere in them: a dental t held closed, a second dental t released, and then v, which in Sanskrit is made with the lower lip against the upper teeth and is softer than an English v. Say tat, then tva, as two distinct movements, and only then run them together. The commonest fault is to reduce the double t to a single one, which turns tattva into a word that does not exist.

The join in the first name is worth seeing because it is the most frequent sandhi in the language: tattva ends in short a, adhikā begins with short a, and two short a sounds fuse into one long ā. So the long vowel in the middle of tattvādhikā is a seam. The same rule, run twice, is what produces the long vowels in several of the names later in this stretch of the hymn.

In the third name, the syllable that separates the two readings is the -m of tattvam, and it is exactly one consonant. Give it its full value. If it is swallowed the name collapses back into the first two and the pun is lost, which in this case means the doctrine is lost.

Sāmagānapriyā rests the line. Two long ās, no conjunct except pr, and the r after p is a single tap of the tongue-tip, not the American approximant. Saumyā, by contrast, is dense: au is a full-length diphthong and not the short glide of English how, and my is a labial m running straight into a palatal y with no vowel between them.

Sadāśivakuṭumbinī is eight syllables and only two of them need care. The ś of śiva is the palatal sibilant, made with the tongue flat against the hard palate, and it is not the retroflex ṣ. The ṭ of kuṭumbinī is retroflex, tongue-tip curled back, and it sits between two labials; the mb that follows is a nasal into its own voiced stop, which English handles without difficulty.

In archanā the six names take the dative, and this verse hands you both of the endings you need. Tattvādhikā is an ā-stem and gives tattvādhikāyai namaḥ; tattvamayī is an ī-stem and gives tattvamayyai namaḥ, with the ī turning into the glide y before the ending. The two stand side by side at the head of the line, which makes this a good place to fix the difference by ear.

What to hold while chanting it: the verse spends half its length establishing that she cannot be located on any map of reality and the other half describing a household. Neither half is a concession to the other.