Ten seals of the hand, and then the seal that is knowledge

Mudrā means a seal, in the flatly practical sense: the signet pressed into wax or clay that makes a document official. The word covers the ring, the impression, and by extension any mark of authentication, and only after that does it come to mean the shapes made with the fingers in dance and in worship. Keeping the ordinary sense in view is the best protection against exoticism. When a practitioner shows a mudrā at the end of an offering, what he is doing has the logic of a signature: the rite has been performed, and the hand certifies it. Tantric texts also offer a devotional etymology, deriving the word from mud, joy, and a root meaning to give or to melt, so that a mudrā is what bestows delight or dissolves. That derivation is a piece of theology rather than of philology, but it records accurately enough what the gestures are held to do.

The ten seals are a fixed set in this school. The ritual manuals agree on the number, and largely on the names, and they attach the ten to the enclosures of the Śrīcakra so that each seal belongs to a particular stage of the worship. The list runs through the ones that agitate, disperse, attract, subjugate, madden and goad, and closes with the seal of the sky-goer, the seal of the seed, the seal of the source, and the seal made in three sections. Two things confirm the arrangement from inside the hymn itself. The name that follows immediately here contains vaśaṅkarī, subjugating, which is the fourth of the set; and the next verse opens with yonimudrā and trikhaṇḍeśī, the seal of the source and the mistress of the threefold seal, which are the last two. The stotra is not alluding to the ten seals in passing. It is walking through the end of the list.

Samārādhyā, in the first name, is a gerundive from sam-ā-√rādh, to propitiate completely — she who is to be worshipped, and worshipped to the end. The point of the prefix is completion: the seals are shown when everything else has been done, and without them the tradition regards the worship as unfinished rather than as merely less elaborate.

Tripurāśrīvaśaṅkarī deserves to be read without flinching. Vaśa is control or subjection, and vaśīkaraṇa, bringing under control, is one of the six acts that tantric literature discusses openly and at length — pacifying, subjugating, immobilising, estranging, driving away, and killing. This hymn belongs to a tradition that has such a literature and does not pretend otherwise. What the compound actually says is that she brings the śrī of Tripurā, the sovereign splendour of the goddess of the three cities, under her own control, and the tradition's ordinary extension of such names is that what she controls she can confer. The same texts that describe the six acts insist that the practitioner who wants any of them has settled for very little, and the placement of this name is a small instance of that argument: it is the last thing said about power before the hymn changes the subject entirely.

The change is the second line. Jñānamudrā names a gesture that anyone would recognise on an image of the teaching Śiva or a seated sage — thumb and forefinger brought into a circle, the other three fingers open — but the compound is a karmadhāraya, the seal that is knowledge itself, which takes the name past the description of a hand. Jñānagamyā then says she is reached by knowledge, and the word gamyā is an ordinary gerundive of √gam, to go: she is arrived at that way and not another. And then the third name withdraws the instrument it has just offered. If she is jñānajñeyasvarūpiṇī, having knowledge and the object of knowledge for her own form, then knowledge is not a road that leads to her, because both ends of the road are already she. The sequence is not careless. It gives the practitioner a method and then removes the distance the method was meant to cross, which is the standard shape of this argument wherever it appears in Indian philosophy, and the reason the verse ends where it does.

Everything in this verse depends on one cluster. Jñā occurs four times in the second line, and jñ is the sound that divides reciters more than any other in Sanskrit. Written, it is unambiguous: the voiced palatal stop j followed by the palatal nasal ñ. Spoken, it is regional. Much of northern India says something close to gya, Maharashtra says dnya, and the south commonly says gnya. None of these communities is reciting badly; they are transmitting the pronunciation they received. But a learner should know what the two letters are before choosing which tradition to follow, and should at least once try the strict value, j and ñ made at the same palatal position with no gap, to feel why the spelling is what it is.

With that settled, the second line becomes the best drill in the hymn for the palatal series. Jñānamudrā jñānagamyā jñānajñeyasvarūpiṇī gives you jñā, jñā, jñā, jñe in quick succession, and the fourth changes only its vowel. Take the line at half speed, keep the ā long in every jñāna, and let the e of jñeya be a full long vowel rather than the short English e.

The first line has two other clusters. In vaśaṅkarī the ṅ is the guttural nasal, made where the k is made, and the word is properly vaśaṃ-karī with the accusative preserved inside the compound — a formation the grammarians treat as a class of its own, and one worth recognising because the hymn uses it more than once. In tripurāśrī the śrī is palatal ś, then r, then long ī, all three sounded; it is not shree with the vowel of English see.

Samārādhyā is built from sam plus ā plus the root, and the ending dhy is an aspirated dental followed by the palatal glide, d with breath running into y and no vowel between them. Svarūpiṇī closes the verse with a retroflex ṇ, which is retroflex because of the r earlier in the word, the same rule that governs tarpaṇa in the previous verse.

For archanā the five datives are daśamudrāsamārādhyāyai, tripurāśrīvaśaṅkaryai, jñānamudrāyai, jñānagamyāyai, jñānajñeyasvarūpiṇyai. Note that the two ī-stems, vaśaṅkarī and svarūpiṇī, contract to -ryai and -ṇyai, while the ā-stems keep the full -āyai.

What the verse asks depends on how you are using it. If you perform the Śrīcakra worship, the ten seals are shown at fixed points and this verse is a mnemonic for the end of that list; the two verses together will take you through it. If you are only reciting, the second line is still addressed to you, and it asks something more demanding than a gesture. It says that the last seal is not something you do with your hands, and that whatever knowing you bring to the recitation is not a tool you are using on her.