Consciousness poured out as the guest-water

Arghya is a technical term of hospitality before it is a term of worship. It comes from argha, worth or value, and behind that the root √argh, to be worth — the same family that gives arh, to deserve. The arghya is the valuable thing, the water offered in a small vessel to a guest of standing the moment he arrives, before he is seated and before anything else is done for him. Ritual worship simply treats the deity as such a guest, which is why the standard sequence of sixteen services begins with a seat, then water for the feet, then the arghya, and only much later reaches incense and lamps. In the Śrīvidyā rite a special vessel of arghya water is prepared and consecrated near the start of the sequence, and it becomes the medium through which most of what follows is offered. To say that her arghya is consciousness is therefore not a vague gesture at inwardness. It names the one article in the liturgy that everything else is poured from.

The second name does the same thing to the flower, and together they invoke the practice of interior worship, antaryāga, set against the outward rite performed with physical materials. The claim that inner worship is the higher of the two is very widely made in tantric literature, and it is worth being careful about what the texts actually do with it. In most schools, including this one, the internalising does not abolish the external rite; it doubles it. The practitioner performs the outward sequence and simultaneously performs an inward one, and the two are held together. There is a much-quoted verse listing the flowers of the inner worship — non-injury first, then restraint of the senses, compassion, patience, knowledge, austerity, meditation and truth — which circulates in devotional anthologies and is attributed to several different sources without agreement; it states the idea neatly, and its uncertain provenance is a reasonable warning against treating the idea as the property of any one text.

Caitanya is the abstract noun made from cetana, sentient, by lengthening the first vowel: the state of being conscious, consciousness as such. It is a plainer and later word than cit, which this hymn uses in its fourth name and again at the couch of corpses, and it is the standard term in the philosophical prose of the period. Choosing it here rather than cit keeps the two names sounding like ritual instructions rather than like metaphysics, which is the tone the verse wants: this is a rubric, not a meditation.

Sadoditā compresses sadā, always, and uditā, risen, and the compound is doing more than praising her constancy. Udita, arisen, has a technical life in the Śaiva philosophical vocabulary, where it is paired with śānta, quiescent, to distinguish the manifest state of a power from its resting state; a power described as perpetually udita is one that has no resting state to fall back into. Set against the ordinary sun, which is the standard example of something that rises, the name is a denial rather than a compliment: what makes a sunrise beautiful is that it is temporary, and she is being distinguished from it in exactly that respect. The tradition makes the same point elsewhere with the moon, where fifteen digits wax and wane and a sixteenth never does.

Sadātuṣṭā raises the question that every theology of worship has to answer. If she is always content, what is the rite for? The answer the tradition gives is not that the offering completes her but that it completes the offerer, and this verse has already arranged its own version of that answer: the arghya is consciousness, and consciousness is the one thing the worshipper has that was not brought in from outside. Read in that order, the five names make a single argument. Nothing you can pour out of a vessel will add to someone who is already satisfied, so what is poured must be you.

Taruṇāditya closes the verse by returning to the colour this whole tradition works in. Pāṭala is a pale red, rose or pink, the colour of the trumpet-flower the word also names. The first of the meditation verses that open this stotra begins by calling her aruṇā, the red of dawn, and the red appears again and again through the thousand names in the form of vermilion, hibiscus, coral, ruby and, six verses from here, the scarlet bandhūka blossom. The sun chosen is specifically taruṇa, young or tender, which is the sun of the first moments and not of noon. Whatever else this school is, it is committed to a single hue, and it keeps finding new objects in the world that carry it.

Both names in the first line open with caitanya, and the diphthong at the head of them is the first thing to get right. Ai is a full-length vowel in Sanskrit, worth two beats, not the quick glide of English eye. The c before it is a palatal affricate made with the tongue-body flat against the hard palate; English speakers produce something a little too far forward, closer to the ch of church. Aim it back and hold the vowel.

The hardest thing in the verse is the cluster in arghya: r, then an aspirated guttural gh, then the palatal glide y, three articulations with no vowel between them and the tongue travelling from a tap at the ridge to the soft palate to the hard palate. There is no way to acquire it except at half speed. Say ar, then ghya, then bring them together. You will meet the same cluster in the next verse in anarghya, so the work is not wasted.

Samārādhyā ends in dhy, a breathy dental stop into the palatal glide: one release, not d then h then y. This is the same ending as ārādhyā in the next verse and as several of the worship-names elsewhere in the hymn, and it is one of the most useful clusters in the text to fix properly.

In the second line, sadoditā contains a fusion you should be able to hear as a seam. Sadā ends in long ā and uditā begins with short u, and ā followed by u gives a single o. So the o in the middle of the word is where always meets risen. The very next name keeps sadā intact before a consonant, so the two names side by side show you the rule and its absence in the space of eight syllables.

Sadātuṣṭā gives the retroflex pair ṣṭ: the sibilant with the tongue-tip curled back, and the stop made in the same position without moving. Do not let the ṣ drift forward into an English sh. Then taruṇādityapāṭalā offers the other retroflex, ṭ in pāṭalā, and a ṇ in taruṇa that is retroflex for a purely mechanical reason — the r two syllables earlier has pulled it back. Once you know that rule, this name and vinivāriṇī in the previous verse stop looking arbitrary.

The metre is worth noticing here because the two lines are shaped so differently. The first is two names of eight syllables each; the second is four, four, eight. The caesura in both falls after the eighth syllable, which in the first line is inside the first name, between arghya and samārādhyā. Hear the pause without opening a gap in the sound.

In archanā, caitanyārghyasamārādhyāyai namaḥ is the longest dative in this part of the hymn and forces the rghy cluster and the dhy cluster into one breath. If you can produce it without slowing down, the verse holds no further difficulties.

What to hold while chanting it: the first two names are instructions, and they are not metaphors for sincerity. They say that what is being handed over in this rite is the awareness doing the handing. The three names that follow are there to tell you that the recipient does not need it.