A slight smile, and a priceless gift

Dakṣiṇa is one of the busiest words in Sanskrit. It means the right hand, and from that the south, which is on your right when you face the sunrise; it means favourable, straightforward, honest, and it is the standard word for the fee paid to a priest at the close of a rite. Every one of those senses is complimentary. The left has no comparable word of its own that is polite, and this name does not invent one: it forms its opposite by simple negation, adakṣiṇa, not-right. The usual term for the left-hand observance, vāma, is avoided. That avoidance is itself informative about how the tradition talks in a text meant for general recitation.

What the name asserts is that both kinds of practitioner reach her. The previous verse said the same with savya and apasavya, and saying it twice in three verses is not redundancy but emphasis at a structurally important place: the hymn is closing, and it is settling accounts on a question the tradition has never settled. That the question was live is easy to demonstrate from the commentarial literature on the Saundaryalaharī, where the two best-known interpreters take opposite views. Lakṣmīdhara reads the poem consistently as a document of the interior samaya way and is openly hostile to kaula practice; Bhāskararāya, a century or so later and the great commentator on this stotra, was associated with kaula lineages and reads accordingly. Two commentators, one text, and an argument about whether the rite has a body in it. The name in this verse does not adjudicate; it says both parties arrive.

Darasmera is a compound of two small words. Smera is from √smi, to smile, and dara used adverbially means a little, slightly, just. The result is not a description of cheerfulness but a precise measurement, and it belongs to a whole vocabulary of graded smiles in Sanskrit poetics — the smile that only shows in the eyes, the smile that parts the lips, the laugh that shows the teeth, the laugh that makes a sound. Sculptors worked to the same scale. The faces on the Cōḻa bronzes of this period are almost all set at the first or second degree, and the effect they aim for is not warmth but composure that could become warmth. That is what the name specifies.

Kula is the word this school's left wing takes its name from, and it is worth knowing how wide it is. In ordinary use it means a family, a clan, a herd, a lineage, a group of people who belong together. In Kaula usage it names the totality — the body, the senses, the energy of the practitioner, śakti as the whole manifest side of reality — and it is set against akula, the unmanifest, Śiva. A kaula is a member of that lineage and one who works with that totality rather than away from it. Kaulinī is the feminine, and the name has a second life worth noticing here: Kaulinī is also the name of one of the eight goddesses of speech whom the frame narrative credits with composing this very hymn. The last verse of the stotra will make that authorship explicit. Kevalā, standing next to it, is the ordinary adjective for alone, isolated, unmixed, pure — the same word used of unadulterated substances.

Kaivalya is the abstract noun formed from kevala, and it arrives here with a great deal of luggage. It is the standard term for liberation in Sāṃkhya and in classical Yoga, where it names the final isolation of consciousness from everything that is not consciousness, the two having been wrongly confused. That is a dualist's word, and its literal meaning is aloneness of a rather bleak kind. A nondualist Śākta hymn borrowing it has to mean something adjacent but not identical: not the separation of spirit from nature, since this text has spent nine hundred names insisting that nature is her, but the state of having nothing outside oneself with which to be compared. The commentators generally read kevala here in that second sense, and the reading is helped by the previous name, where kevalā is applied to her rather than to a liberated soul. Anarghya, priceless, is a-argha, without a price — the negation of the same word that gave the previous verse its guest-water. And pada is a station, a foothold, a place to stand, from the root that also gives the word for a foot: what is given is not an experience but a standing-place.

The first name is nine syllables and contains two sandhis of the same kind, one after the other. Dakṣiṇa ends in short a, adakṣiṇa begins with short a, and the two fuse into long ā; then adakṣiṇa ends in short a, ārādhyā begins with long ā, and short plus long again gives long ā. So both long vowels in the middle of dakṣiṇādakṣiṇārādhyā are seams, and the word means, cut at those seams, worshipped by the right-handed and by the not-right-handed alike.

That name also gives you kṣ twice. Sanskrit treats kṣ as a single cluster: a guttural k released directly into a retroflex ṣ, with the tongue-tip curling back for the sibilant. It is not the ksh of English cash-shop, and it is not two separate syllables. Say dakṣi twice at half speed before attempting the compound.

The second name has a fusion of its own — mukha, face, plus ambuja, lotus, giving mukhāmbuja, with the a and the a again producing ā. The kh in mukha is a genuinely aspirated guttural, k with breath after it, not the ch of German ach. Then mb, a labial nasal into its own stop, which is easy.

The third and fourth names are joined in writing by an avagraha, the small mark that looks like an S in the Devanagari text. It records an elision: kevalā ends in long ā, anarghya begins with short a, and a long ā followed by a short a swallows the a entirely. The mark tells you a vowel used to be there. It is not pronounced, and the two names run together as kevalānarghya. Reciters who try to sound the mark introduce a syllable the metre does not have.

Then anarghya brings back the cluster you met in the previous verse: r, aspirated gh, palatal y. Two verses in a row have handed you the same difficulty, which is as close as this hymn comes to setting an exercise. If arghya was manageable yesterday it will be manageable today.

Kaivalya has the full-length diphthong ai and then ly, a dental l running into the palatal glide. Padadāyinī at the end is all dentals and one of the easiest sequences in this part of the text; let it be a rest after the rest of the line.

In archanā the four become dakṣiṇādakṣiṇārādhyāyai namaḥ, darasmeramukhāmbujāyai namaḥ, kaulinīkevalāyai namaḥ and anarghyakaivalyapadadāyinyai namaḥ. The last is an ī-stem and takes -yai, which is worth attending to because -dāyinī names are common in this closing stretch and they all behave the same way.

What to hold while chanting it: the verse puts a smile in the middle of a doctrinal statement about eligibility and a doctrinal statement about liberation. That placement is the argument. Whatever the two schools do differently, and whatever aloneness turns out to mean, the thing they are both approaching is faintly amused.