Known only by long practice, and given away for nothing

Abhyāsa is repetition. The word is used of rehearsing a text, of drilling a skill, of doing the same thing again tomorrow, and it is the least glamorous term in the religious vocabulary. Patañjali's definition is worth having in mind: practice becomes firmly grounded, he says, when it has been attended to over a long time, without interruption, and with earnest regard — three conditions, none of which is intensity. Atiśaya means a surpassing degree, an excess, going past. So the name says that she is known where repetition has been pushed beyond what would ordinarily be thought enough. Placed where it is, this is not an abstraction. A person who has reached this verse has just recited nine hundred and eighty-nine names and is doing so, in most cases, because he did it yesterday as well. The hymn is describing the activity of the person holding it.

The six paths are a piece of technical Śaiva doctrine and the name is unintelligible without them. Adhvan is a road or course, and the six are arranged as two sets of three. On the side of sound there are the phoneme, the word, and the mantra; on the side of what sound refers to there are the phase or portion of manifestation, the reality-level, and the world. Between them these six are supposed to exhaust everything there is: whatever can be said and whatever can be spoken about, from a single letter up to a cosmos. The paths are not merely descriptive. In Śaiva initiation the rite is understood as a purification of the six paths, worked through the initiate's body, so that the whole of manifestation is treated and released. Against that background, to call her ṣaḍadhvātītarūpiṇī — having a form that has gone past the six paths — is to say that the completed map does not contain her. It is the same claim the tradition makes when it says that a mantra cannot capture the deity whose mantra it is.

The second line does something the first line gives no warning of. Vyāja is a pretext, a disguise, the reason you give that is not the reason you have; a-vyāja is the negation of that, and avyājakaruṇā is compassion with no pretext and no occasion — mercy that is not responding to anything and is not owed. Other Indian schools have their own term for this, nirhetukā kṛpā, grace without a cause, and the theological problem is identical wherever it appears: if the gift is genuinely unconditioned, nothing anyone does makes it more likely, and if anything does make it more likely, it is not unconditioned. The hymn does not solve this. It states both sides within four names and moves on. The commentators generally read the two as addressed to different moments rather than to different people: the practice is what a person can do, and the compassion is what is actually operating, and no one is in a position to see the join.

Mūrti, in avyājakaruṇāmūrtiḥ, is a body or a material form, the ordinary word for an image installed in a temple. Saying that she is the mūrti of unfeigned compassion is stronger than saying that she is compassionate. It puts compassion first and treats her visible form as what that compassion looks like when it has taken a shape — the same grammatical move a worshipper makes when he says of a statue that it is the god.

The last name closes the verse with the oldest image available. Dhvānta is darkness, ajñāna is not-knowing, and the compound makes them one thing: the darkness that is ignorance. A dīpikā is a lamp, and the diminutive is not accidental — this is a small oil lamp, the kind lit at dusk in a doorway, not a blaze. Two things follow from the image. A lamp does not argue with the dark or push it anywhere; it ends it by being present, and the dark has no case to make. And a lamp is what one carries. It is also worth knowing that dīpikā is one of the standard words in a Sanskrit book title for a commentary — the lamp on a difficult text — so the last thing this verse calls her is, in the idiom of the manuscripts, an explanation.

This verse is slow. Four names, four quarters, one name to each — the longest units in this part of the hymn, and after the rapid eight of the previous verse the change of pace is audible. Do not carry the earlier speed into it.

The second line looks like one impossible word and is not. Avyājakaruṇāmūrtiḥ ends in visarga, and before a vowel that visarga becomes r, so mūrtiḥ plus ajñāna gives mūrtir ajñāna and the printed text runs the two together. The quarter division falls inside the join: eight syllables end at mūrti, and the r begins the next eight. This is a different sandhi from the vowel-elisions of the two preceding verses, and recognising it is what lets you breathe in the right place. Pause after mūrti, and let the following quarter begin with ra-jñā-na.

One dative in this verse is an exception that catches almost everyone. Nearly every name in the thousand is a feminine ā-stem or ī-stem and takes -āyai or -yai, and the hand learns to supply it automatically. But avyājakaruṇāmūrtiḥ is an i-stem, so its offering form is avyājakaruṇāmūrtaye namaḥ, not mūrtyai. The other three are regular: abhyāsātiśayajñātāyai namaḥ, ṣaḍadhvātītarūpiṇyai namaḥ, ajñānadhvāntadīpikāyai namaḥ. If you perform the archanā, mark this one.

For the sounds: abhyāsa opens with bh, one aspirated labial, immediately followed by y, and then a long ā — a-bhyā, two syllables and not three. Ṣaḍadhvātīta gives you a retroflex ṣ and a retroflex ḍ in the first two syllables and then dhv, an aspirated dental running into v, which returns at once in dhvānta in the second line. Karuṇā has the retroflex ṇ caused by the preceding r, the rule that has now appeared in four consecutive verses. Avyāja begins with a bare a followed by vy. And jñā occurs twice, in jñātā and ajñāna, so the palatal cluster drilled in the second verse back is still being asked for.

What the verse asks is uncomfortable and should be left that way. It tells you that she is known through repetition carried past the ordinary measure, which is a description most people reciting the hymn cannot honestly apply to themselves. Then, in the next breath, it says her compassion has no pretext, which removes the qualification it has just imposed. The wrong response is to pick one. If you take only the first, the recitation becomes a tally and the tally will always be short. If you take only the second, there is no reason to sit down tomorrow. The verse gives you both in eight seconds of chanting and expects you to keep chanting.