Five names of holding, then four of having gone beyond

The five names of the first line share more than an initial syllable. Dharā, the earth, is a feminine agent noun from √dhṛ, to hold or bear. Dhara, in the compound that follows, is the masculine of the same formation and is the ordinary poetic word for a mountain, that which holds fast. And dharma is also from √dhṛ: what holds things in their places, the upholding order. So the run dharā, dharasutā, dharmiṇī, dharmavardhinī is not alliteration laid over unrelated ideas but a single root turned four ways, and dhanyā, from dhana, wealth, sits among them because in this literature the earth's holding and its yielding are the same act.

The printed text of the line reads dharādharasutā as one continuous string, and how it is divided is a genuine question rather than a settled fact. Split as dharā plus dharasutā it yields two names, the earth and the mountain's daughter. Read as a single compound, dharādhara is the bearer of the earth, that is, the mountain, and dharādharasutā is the mountain's daughter in one word. Editions and nāmāvalī traditions differ, and the difference matters because the total must come to exactly one thousand; a good deal of traditional commentarial labour goes into defending particular divisions for exactly this reason. The listing followed here takes the two-name reading. A reader using another edition may find the count in this stretch running one behind or ahead.

Whichever division is adopted, the mountain's daughter is Pārvatī, and the name places this goddess in the oldest strand of the Śaiva narrative. The Kena Upaniṣad already knows a figure called Umā Haimavatī, the daughter of the snowy mountain, who appears to the gods when they cannot identify the power that has humbled them and tells them what it is; she is the first goddess in Sanskrit literature to instruct the gods rather than be praised by them. Kālidāsa's Kumārasambhava opens with the Himālaya as the king of mountains and makes his daughter's austerity and marriage the subject of the poem. When the sahasranāma calls her dharasutā it is not inventing an epithet but claiming that whole inheritance in four syllables.

Dharmiṇī has a second life outside religion. In the technical vocabulary of Indian logic, dharmin is the property-possessor, the subject about which an inference is made, as against the dharma, the property inferred to belong to it — the mountain, in the standard example, is the dharmin and fire the dharma. Monier-Williams records both the ethical sense, faithful to duty, and the logical one, bearer of a characteristic. A hymn is entitled to both, and the second gives dharmiṇī a considerable reach: she is that in which every property inheres.

The second line changes method. Atīta is the past participle of ati-√i, to go past, and the three compounds widen in scope with each repetition. Lokātītā puts her beyond the worlds — loka in the plural means the tiered cosmos of the purāṇas, the heavens and hells and intermediate spheres that a soul may reach by merit, so the name is denying that she is located in any of them, including the best. Guṇātītā is the strongest philosophically. The guṇas of Sāṅkhya — sattva, rajas, tamas — are not qualities that things possess but the three constituent strands of which unmanifest nature and everything evolved from it are twisted; to be beyond them is to be outside the whole material order, mental states included. The Bhagavad Gītā devotes its fourteenth chapter to the guṇas and ends it with a portrait of the man who has gone beyond them, and that chapter is the standard reference for what the word means. Sarvātītā then removes the remaining qualification: beyond everything.

This kind of serial negation is the oldest technique in Indian metaphysics, and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka's neti neti is its charter. But the verse does not end in negation, and where it does end is the interesting part. Śama, from √śam, to become quiet, is the first of the qualities that Vedāntic teaching lists as prerequisites for study, and it means specifically the settling of the mind rather than the restraint of the senses, which is dama, its companion. To say that her very self is śama, after saying three times that she is beyond, is to identify what is left when the beyonds have done their work. The hymn is near its end here, and the choice of a word for stillness is not accidental.

Both lines are metrically regular: six syllables and two in the first half, three and five in the second, then four and four twice over in the second line. The break falls at the end of dharmavardhinī.

The first line is five successive dha syllables, and dha is a single voiced aspirated dental — the tongue at the teeth, the voice already on, and breath released through the same closure. It is not d followed by an English h, and it is not the th of "this". Five in a row is a good deal of aspiration to sustain, and the common failure is for the later ones to lose their breath and turn into plain d. Count them deliberately: dharā, dhara, dhanyā, dharmiṇī, dharmavardhinī, with the last containing two of them.

Dharmiṇī and dharmavardhinī also give a lesson in the nasals. Dharmiṇī ends with the retroflex ṇ, the tongue curled back to the roof of the mouth, while dharmavardhinī ends with the dental n, the tongue at the teeth. The two words look parallel and are not, and reciters who have not noticed the difference produce the retroflex in both. The rule behind it is the one that retroflexes a following n after an r or ṛ within a word under stated conditions, which is why the same suffix appears as -iṇī in one word and -inī in the other.

The second line is the easiest in this part of the hymn to say and the easiest to lose. Lokātītā, guṇātītā and sarvātītā share five of their eight sounds; they differ only in their first two syllables, and each is a sandhi of a stem in a with atītā, the two a-sounds merging into one long ā. Learn them as loka-atītā, guṇa-atītā, sarva-atītā and the order will hold, because the order is an argument moving from the widest place to the widest category to everything at once. Learned as a sound, the three will transpose.

Śamātmikā closes the verse with the palatal ś, then śama plus ātmikā joining a short a to a long ā to give ā, then the cluster tm — a dental stop released directly into the labial nasal, with no vowel between. English speakers supply one and produce shama-tuh-mika.

In archanā all nine take a straightforward feminine dative: dharāyai, dharasutāyai, dhanyāyai, dharmiṇyai, dharmavardhinyai, lokātītāyai, guṇātītāyai, sarvātītāyai, śamātmikāyai. Reciters using an edition that reads the first two as a single name will offer dharādharasutāyai instead, and should not be disconcerted to find their count differing from a neighbour's.

What the verse asks is the willingness to say both halves with the same conviction. The first line is the goddess as the ground of the world and the guarantor of its order, the deity a householder can reasonably petition. The second says three times over that she is not any of that. Most reciters find one of the two halves easier to mean, and the verse's construction — five and four, holding and going beyond, in a single anuṣṭubh — is a standing refusal to let either be dropped.