The thousandth name, and the line that closes the singing

The half-line that ends this module is a frame, not a name, and it marks a seam in a longer text. The thousand names are embedded in the Lalitopākhyāna, the long narrative section of the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa in which the sage Hayagrīva recites to Agastya, and after this line Hayagrīva keeps talking. What follows is the phalaśruti, literally the hearing of the fruit: verses that tell Agastya what recitation of the thousand names accomplishes, when it should be done, and for whom. Most printed editions include those verses, and many recitations chant them. This presentation ends where the names end, which is a defensible place to stop and also an incomplete one, and a reader should know that the text continues.

Almost every hymn of this kind ends that way, and it is worth understanding why rather than treating it as an embarrassment appended to something finer. A phalaśruti does at least three jobs. It is a colophon in verse, telling a listener that the recitation is over — useful in a culture where texts were heard rather than seen and had no last page. It is a rubric, prescribing when and how often and in what condition the text should be used, which is the only place such instructions could live. And it is a claim about what kind of thing the text is: not a description of the goddess to be assessed for accuracy, but an act that does something when performed. There is a fourth and less elevated function that honest scholarship has also noted, which is advertisement. Such passages commended a text to patrons and communities in a crowded field, and their language of unlimited benefit belongs partly to that competition.

How a modern reader should take the promises is a real question and deserves better than the two easy answers. Credulity treats the specific claims as a schedule of payments and is generally disappointed. Embarrassment treats all of it as metaphor for inner transformation, which sounds sophisticated but is an imposition, because the texts plainly mean some of it literally and the traditions that carried them have always contained people who tested the claims and stayed. The commentators themselves use both registers and switch between them without apology, reading an extravagant promise figuratively and a modest one literally, according to what the passage seems to be doing. Perhaps the most useful way in is to notice what a phalaśruti asks for in exchange. What it prescribes is repetition over years, at fixed times, in a settled condition of mind — and the previous verse of this very hymn has just named her as one who becomes known through practice carried past the ordinary measure. Whatever else the promises are, they are a description of what the tradition believes such a life produces, made by people who had watched it happen.

The closing names are arranged with obvious care. The thousand opens with śrīmātā, Śrī the mother, followed by two more names beginning with śrī; it closes with three names beginning with śrī, and then with lalitāmbikā, Lalitā the mother. The hymn ends where it began, on the same word, with the same prefix ringing three times on either side. There is a further echo worth catching: lalita, from a root meaning to play or to dally, means the one at play, and five verses back the hymn called her līlāvinodinī, she who diverts herself in play. The name that gives the whole text its title has been waiting at position one thousand, and what it means is what the hymn said about her when it came down into the domestic room near the end.

The last line then does something no other line in the thousand does. Jaguḥ is the third person plural of the perfect of √gai, to sing: they sang. The plural is not vague. In the frame of the purāṇa the hymn is composed and sung by the vāgdevatās, the goddesses of speech headed by Vaśinī, who are named as the seers of this stotra in the ritual preliminaries that precede any formal recitation of it. So the last act of the text is to step back and report that the singing was done by someone else, in front of the goddess, before any of us arrived. Sāhasrakam, formed from sahasra with the lengthening that makes a derived noun, means the set of a thousand taken as one thing. The genitive in this line is loosely written — one expects devyāḥ where the printed text has devyā — and the sense is not in question, but it is the kind of small irregularity that is worth noticing rather than smoothing over.

The last two quarters of the hymn are also its hardest to say. Sarvānullaṅghyaśāsanā contains ll and then ṅghy, a guttural nasal, an aspirated guttural, and a palatal glide in a single cluster, which is about as much as Sanskrit asks of a tongue anywhere. Take it slowly: sar-vā-nul-laṅ-ghya-śā-sa-nā, with both l sounds sounded and the ṅ made at the back where the gh is made. Śrīmattripurasundarī has ttri, a doubled dental followed by r, and the doubling must be heard or the honorific śrīmat disappears. And śivaśaktyaikyarūpiṇī has ktyai, three consonants running into a full diphthong, followed at once by kya. Get these wrong and the two most important names in the verse are unrecognisable.

Against that, the three śrī names give the ear something to hold. Sound all three parts of śrī — palatal ś, then r, then long ī — and the pattern of the closing line becomes audible as a pattern rather than as a difficulty.

For archanā the seven datives are ābālagopaviditāyai, sarvānullaṅghyaśāsanāyai, śrīcakrarājanilayāyai, śrīmattripurasundaryai, śrīśivāyai, śivaśaktyaikyarūpiṇyai, and lalitāmbikāyai. The last of these is the thousandth offering, and in most household and temple practice it is the point at which the flowers or the rice in the hand are finished and something is done to mark the close — an āratī, a final prostration, a period of sitting without speech. The closing half-line is not offered with namaḥ. It is the one place in the recitation where you are not addressing her but saying what has occurred, and it should be chanted plainly, in the same metre and at the same pace, without dropping into an announcer's voice.

What it means to have arrived here is worth stating carefully. Nothing in the hymn's last verse congratulates the reciter. It says instead that she is known to children and to cowherds, which is placed directly after a verse saying she is known only through practice carried past the ordinary measure. A person who has just spent thirty minutes on a thousand difficult names is being told, in the first four syllables of the final verse, that the knowledge in question was never rationed to the people who could pronounce them. That is not a rebuke of the effort. It is a correction of what the effort was for.

And then the text hands itself away. The last verb is plural and in the past: they sang. Whoever is reciting is not the author of this and is not its first speaker; the position offered is that of someone repeating what eight goddesses of speech said in front of the one they were describing. This is the reason the tradition treats the end of the hymn as a place to begin again rather than as a finish line. What the hymn asks of a person who has come to the end of the thousand names is not a conclusion drawn or a state attained. It is that he should have somewhere to be tomorrow at the same hour, and that when he sits down there he should remember that the last name of the thousand was not a definition but a form of address: mother.