The last two seals, three triangles, and one plain word for mother

Two names in this verse are invisible unless you know they are there. Triguṇāmbā is triguṇā followed by ambā, the final ā of the first swallowing the initial a of the second; anaghā'dbhutacāritrā is anaghā followed by adbhutacāritrā, and there the avagraha marks the elided vowel. This matters more than an orthographic curiosity should, because the hymn claims a specific number. A thousand names is not a round figure loosely applied; it is an assertion, and the arithmetic only comes out if particular compounds are divided at particular joints. What fixes the divisions in practice is not the running verse text but the nāmāvalī, the list in which every name is put into the dative and followed by namaḥ for use in offering. That list is what a lineage transmits, and it is where the tradition records its decisions about where one name ends and the next begins. Editions and lineages do not agree at every point, and a reader who finds a printed count that differs by one or two from another printing has usually found a place like this one rather than a mistake.

Yonimudrā and trikhaṇḍeśī complete the sequence of ten seals that the previous verse began. The yoni seal is made by interlacing the fingers so that they enclose a triangular opening, and the name of the gesture is the ordinary Sanskrit word for womb, source, or place of origin — the same word used for the socket a thing sits in and for the birth a being takes. The trikhaṇḍā, the seal in three sections, is the last of the set and is shown at the close of the worship. Calling her its īśī, its mistress, rather than calling her the seal itself, is a small piece of care: the gesture belongs to her, as the mantra and the diagram were said much earlier in the hymn to belong to her, and is not the practitioner's property.

Guṇa means a thread or a strand, and the oldest image behind the Sāṃkhya doctrine is a rope of three strands: sattva, clarity, rajas, movement and passion, and tamas, weight and darkness. Everything that is made is made of them in some proportion. To call her triguṇā is to say the rope is hers. This sits against statements elsewhere in the hymn that deny the three strands of her altogether, and the contradiction is not a slip. A hymn of a thousand names is not building a consistent system; it is saying the true things that can be said, including the ones that cancel each other, and the tradition's readers have generally taken the pair to mean that she is not constituted by the strands but is not excluded from them either.

Between triguṇā and trikoṇagā stands ambā, and it is worth stopping on how unlike its neighbours it is. Every other name in this verse is a compound requiring analysis. Ambā is two syllables and is what a child says. The hymn puts it in the middle of its most technical line, and it will end the thousand with the same word in its affectionate form.

Trikoṇagā places her in the innermost triangle of the Śrīcakra, the enclosure immediately surrounding the central point. The diagram is built of nine interlocking triangles, and the small triangle at the heart of it is the last enclosure before the bindu; to say she goes or abides there is to locate her at the end of the inward journey the worship makes.

Of the second line, adbhutacāritrā is the name that opens onto the rest of the literature. Cāritra is conduct or course of action, and what it points to is a story: the long narrative in the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa in which this hymn is embedded, where Lalitā arises from the fire-pit of consciousness and destroys the demon Bhaṇḍāsura with her armies and her chariot. The second name of the thousand, near the very beginning, already referred to that birth. Here, six names from the end, the hymn stands back and calls the whole account wonderful — adbhuta, the word used of what cannot be accounted for by ordinary causes.

Vāñchitārthapradāyinī, the last name of the verse, is the first clear sounding of a note that will dominate what follows the thousand names in the purāṇa. But notice what it does and does not say. It is a statement about her, in the nominative, like every other name: she is one who gives what is desired. It is not yet a statement about what reciting the hymn earns. That claim comes later, in the section of promises that follows the stotra proper, and keeping the two apart is worth the effort.

The first line is four names, four syllables each, and three of them begin with tri. This is the most easily garbled line in the closing verses, and the remedy is to know why the four are in this order rather than to rely on the sound: two hand-seals first, finishing the list from the previous verse, then the three strands, then the mother, then the triangle she sits in. Fix that sequence and the line will not shuffle.

The retroflexes are the technical work here. Trikhaṇḍeśī has ṇḍ, both made with the tongue curled back, preceded by kha, a single aspirated guttural and not k followed by h. Trikoṇagā has a retroflex ṇ, and triguṇā has another; in both, the retroflexion is caused by the r earlier in the word, which is the same rule that governs tarpaṇa and svarūpiṇī in the two preceding verses. Once you have heard it three times in three verses it stops being a rule and becomes a habit.

In the second line, anaghā has gh as one aspirated sound, and the join with the following name gives you dbhu, a voiced dental stop running straight into an aspirated labial: a-na-ghā-dbhu-ta. The temptation is to insert a vowel. Do not. Vāñchitārthapradāyinī opens with the long ā and then ñch, the palatal nasal against the aspirated palatal ch, which English does not have and which will come out as a plain ch unless you make the nasal deliberately.

Both quarters of the second line are single names of eight syllables, so there is nowhere to breathe inside them; the only pause is at the caesura after the first line's fourth name and at the end. Reciters who run short of air here have usually spent it on the four short names above.

For archanā the eight datives are yonimudrāyai, trikhaṇḍeśyai, triguṇāyai, ambāyai, trikoṇagāyai, anaghāyai, adbhutacāritrāyai, vāñchitārthapradāyinyai. Saying them in this form is the quickest way to convince yourself that triguṇāmbā really is two names, because the two words separate cleanly and each takes its own ending, and the same is true of the pair in the second line. If you have only ever chanted the continuous text, do the eight once in the dative and the shape of the verse will change permanently.

What the verse asks is mostly attention. It is dense with technical vocabulary — two gestures, a doctrine of nature, a region of a diagram — and then it puts ambā in the middle of that and vāñchitārthapradāyinī at the end of it, which are the two most ordinary things a person could say to a goddess: you are my mother, and you give me what I want. The hymn does not treat the technical and the childlike as belonging to different levels of practice. They are in the same four lines, in the same metre, and are offered with the same syllable of homage.