The Shape of the Chapter · p. 419

The chapter opens with a sentence that is not his. It is one of the settled verses his gurus laid down — the paribhāṣās he undertook, in his own second verse, to explain without remainder — and the edition prints it, numbered, at the head of the chapter. It says how the phalaśruti unfolds:

"In the Phala chapter, one to twenty and a half verses say the recitation is meant to confer different kinds of results; the next 46 verses elaborate the same."

The pattern is simple. First the fruits are named; then their meaning is opened more fully. Everything after this is his.

What follows is the tradition speaking in its own voice, telling us what it holds the recitation of Lalitā's thousand Names to bestow.

Who May Chant These Names · vv. 49, 65–67, 73–75, 81–85 · pp. 432, 441–444

Anyone may. Initiation — in the Śrīvidyā or in any other practice — is not a prerequisite for chanting the thousand Names.

This is asked so often, and answered so confidently in the wrong direction, that it is worth setting down plainly from the commentary itself.

The chapter never makes the recitation conditional. Verses 66 and 67 do the opposite: the hymn should be repeated by anyone who wants well-being and anyone who wants release — and by those who are in any of the four stages of life. Bhāskararāya adds the reason, and it is a kind one: no one's keeping of their duties is complete, and the recitation makes good what falls short.

"He that is anxious of learning becomes learned by chanting this Sahasranāman. O Muni, there is no other hymn equal to its merit, which confers both worldly attainment and salvation at the same time." — vv. 65, p. 441

Initiation has its place, and the place is elsewhere. What does ask for a Guru is the Śrīvidyā — its mantra, its Śrī Chakra worship, its yantra, and the practices that go with them. Bhāskararāya is exact about it: the instruction of the Śrīvidyā is to be had from a Guru, and one who performs its prayogas without that instruction "not only will not secure the desired objects, but will get into troubles also." His reason is practical rather than protective. Coming by the mantra is not the practice — that much can be had by an easy road, even out of a book. The practice is doing it with all its observances known, inner and outer — and those are nowhere written down whole. Hence the line he quotes from the Uttara-catuḥśatī: it came down upon the face of the earth by teaching from one ear to another, and not from one book to another. And so two old sayings fit together: as a bee greedy for honey goes from flower to flower, a disciple greedy for knowledge may go from guru to guru — and yet the sandals belong to the one who gave the full consecration. Of the recitation of the Names the chapter makes no such warning anywhere. He himself does say something of the kind, once, and in one place only: where he is ranking who is the worthier vessel for a gift. There, the recitation kept as a formal undertaking — with its resolve and its counted fruit — stands upon having received the mantra. And in the same breath he opens a door beside it that asks for nothing at all — wider, in fact, than the verse itself opened it. Anyone at all, he writes: worshipper or not. And two verses later, plainer still — of him: even of the one who does not worship, and how much more of the one who does. Both are his. It is the second that the promises of this chapter are made in.

He goes further, and it is easy to miss. Commenting on the verse that promises Sundarī's pleasure to whoever writes the Names out and honours them, he notes that the verse's whoever means anyone at all — one who worships, or one who does not. The force of his remark falls on the second: even the one who has received nothing is inside this promise, since there is nothing standing in the way of his honouring the book. And what is promised there is that she is pleased.

And the Devī settles it herself, in the words the Purāṇa gives her:

"Whether he worships me in the Śrī Chakra or not, whether he performs the japa of the Pañcadaśī or not — if he only always recites these thousand Names to please me, without doubt he will obtain all his desires by my grace."

Bhāskararāya says himself what those verses are doing. Introducing them, he writes that he is now teaching the manner in which the tradition is to be carried forward — not who may say the Names, but how they are handed on. And where the chapter names a penalty, he is exact about whose it is: it falls on the one who gives, and, from a small word in the verse, on the one who takes as well. It is a rule about a handing-on between two people. It says nothing about someone who simply loves her and recites.

Verses 82 to 84 do speak of concealment, and it is better to look at them directly than around them. They ask that the hymn not be imparted to one who is not initiated into the Śrīvidyā, nor to one who is not a devotee. Those verses belong to the perspective of the tradition kept in its full rigour — under a Guru's guidance, where the rites and the discipline are received in their order and each thing is given its place. Read there, they are not a wall built around the Names. They are the care a lineage takes with what it hands on.

Set beside them are the verses already given above: the promise made in words that take in anyone at all, worshipper or not; the recitation enjoined upon every one of the four stages of life; the Devī's own word that neither the Śrī Chakra nor the Pañcadaśī is asked of the one who simply recites to please her. Those verses make their own provision, and they make it for the person who comes with a real yearning for the Mother, or who comes to take refuge in her, or who comes simply because they love her.

And the chapter says something further, which settles the matter more completely than any argument could. It is rare, Hayagrīva says, for anyone in this world to be devoted to the Names of Lalitā; the faith to take them up is generated across many births of calling upon other deities, and the recitation comes to one whose road is nearly finished. Then, of his own teaching, he says this:

"Even to thee, O Pot-born one, I did not declare it of my own accord." — v. 85, p. 444

He did not choose the hearer. She did. Which is to say that the guarding was never ours to do in the first place. It is the Mother who governs the world, and it is she who decides who is brought to these Names. Someone may speak of the Lalitā Sahasranāma, or write about it, or set it in front of a thousand people — and not one of them will hear it, or read it, or feel the wish to say it, unless she wills it. The gate is hers. It was never locked from the outside.

So come as you are; the Names are not a door that has to be unlocked first. That you are reading this at all is the answer to the question. You did not find your way here. You were brought.

Why He Calls It the Secret of Secrets

The chapter's second verse calls this the secret of secrets. Bhāskararāya does not leave the phrase as praise alone; he gives it a precise and unexpected meaning.

Ordinarily, he says, the fruit follows the effort: the harder something is, the more it yields. The most secret thing is what seems to break that rule—the act that yields much and costs little. The effort involved in speaking a Name is plain enough. The rest of the chapter therefore unfolds the other side: the greatness of what the recitation is said to bring.

Bhāskararāya also tells us why the rest of the chapter exists. One verse makes two claims: this hymn is the most secret, and it pleases Lalitā. Everything that follows exists to open those two words out. What may first seem like a long succession of promises is therefore one teaching unfolded in two ways.

The First Promises · p. 419

The chapter opens in extraordinary praise:

"Thus, O pot-born one, the thousand names declared to you — the secret of secrets, which pleases Lalitā… There has been no stotra equal in merit to this, nor is there ever to be one. This stotra causes all diseases to subside and confers all prosperity. It averts untimely death… removes the pain caused by fever…"

He does not let that stand as praise; he shows why it is so. Equal means equal in the two things just said — being the most secret, and pleasing Lalitā. There has been none takes in all time before this moment; there will be none, all time after it; and this present moment is not one in which such a hymn could come to be. So it touches none of the three times, which is his way of saying that no such thing is there to be found. It is a bold thing to write about a book one is only beginning to explain, and he plainly means it.

Even here, Bhāskararāya pauses over an exact detail: these are truly one thousand Names, neither more nor fewer. In some other sahasranāmas, he notes, the number is only approximate. He also acknowledges other thousand-name hymns to Devī while distinguishing this one as especially secret.

Beneath all this greatness lies something more intimate:

it is the thousand Names that please Lalitā.

A Lamp, and the Meaning of “Untimely”

A lamp with oil and wick still full, its flame torn sideways by a sudden gust

Two of the first promises stand side by side: the quelling of untimely death and the warding off of death at its appointed hour. Because the difference is easily missed, Bhāskararāya explains why both are named.

The appointed hour comes when the measure of a life is complete. Untimely death occurs inside that measure. Bhāskararāya gives a vivid image: a lamp still has oil and wick, yet a fierce wind extinguishes it. Untimely means not that what was given has run out, but that a sudden gust has not waited for it.

There is a reason these four are named one by one, when all diseases would already have held the fever. They are laid out to match the rites that come later in the chapter: first the rite whose single fruit has all four of these parts, and then, one after another, the rites that have each single part for their fruit. The list at the opening is the shape of the chapter's second half.

He is equally careful with the promise of long life. It may mean the removal of what would cut a life short of one hundred years, or it may mean life extending beyond one hundred. He preserves both readings so that this promise remains distinct from the one before it.

The Daily Path · p. 420

The text then turns from promise to practice:

"The devotee of Lalitā should always with effort repeat this… Then again he should repeat this secret Sahasranāman. The wise one who repeats it at least once in his lifetime…"

Between these sentences, the text gives a fuller daily order—observances belonging to a discipline received from a Guru and kept under that care. Śrīpura leaves those practices with the tradition that holds them. Two of his notes on them belong here even so. According to rule covers both ways, he says, the Vedic and the tāntric, and runs over the bathing and the sandhyā alike. And the word for worshipping is a causing-form: it may mean worshipping oneself, or — where a person is not able — having it done.

Bhāskararāya settles what this verse is actually asking, and it settles more than it seems to. The bathing, the sandhyā, the worship, the japa are not new commands laid on the reciter here — they are already required elsewhere, and the verse only repeats them. What it enjoins is one thing: when the thousand Names are to be said. And so the japa and the recitation are not limb and principal to one another. Each stands by its own injunction — which is a quieter kind of freedom than it sounds, and it is given here without fuss.

He is exact about the counts inside that order, too. Each of the three carries an unstated eight — a thousand and eight, three hundred and eight, a hundred and eight — and three hundred means three hundred, not a hundred and three. Nor are the three an open choice: a small word in the verse is there to show that the second is taken only when the first cannot be, and the third when the second cannot. The care is being taken on the reciter's behalf, not the rule's.

What the text asks on either side of those observances is addressed to everyone: always, with effort, repeat this.

Then, at the widest edge of grace, it remembers even the one who recites the hymn once in a lifetime.

And he guards the reciter against a fear the passage could easily create. What is enjoined here, he says, may be only the order of those principal acts — so if one of them goes undone, nothing is spoiled and the fruit does not fail. Elsewhere he is plainer still. Where a set of offerings must stand together, the absence of one means no fruit at all; here it is not so. The other acts keep their own fruits without the recitation, and the recitation keeps its own without them. Even where the particular fruit of the full observance is not established, the fruits promised elsewhere for remembering the Name are still there to come. Nothing a person manages is lost for want of what they could not manage.

The path may be demanding, but the Mother's doorway is wide.

Beyond the Greatest Sacred Merits · pp. 420–421

The phalaśruti next places the uttering of a single Name beside some of the greatest sacred merits known to its world: bathing in holy rivers, offering gold at Kurukṣetra during an eclipse, and even the holiness of Kāśī itself.

He pauses first over why the Gaṅgā comes at the head of that list, when Puṣkara is the ford everyone names first. Because she runs through all three worlds — so that once she is named, the word all can gather in the holy waters of every world with her; name any other, and only the fords of this earth would come to mind. And of her name he quotes the Bhaviṣyottara: because Bhagīratha brought you down from heaven to the earth, O Devī, all the sages call you Gaṅgā. He could have simply set her at the head of the list. Instead he tells you why she belongs there, and then tells you where her name came from.

Bhāskararāya then explains the sanctity of this holiest kṣetra through the Liṅga Purāṇa's account of its name:

"The Liṅga Purāṇa says: 'Avi means sin, and mukta means freed — I do not separate him from that place; hence it is called Avimukta.'"

And the measuring words in that list are not spent on its last item alone. The four that come at the end — every day, with the highest faith, for a thousand parivatsaras — are to be carried back over all of them. And through crores of births, which comes at the beginning, is carried forward over all of them too. So each measure in the list is already twelve thousand unbroken years of it, and then crores of lifetimes of that.

He does not leave the sum vague either. The six heaps are gathered into one, and that one is multiplied by a crore, and the result multiplied by a crore again. He even gives the number its name — a samudra, an ocean, a crore times a crore — and quotes the Vāyu Purāṇa, where those who know numbers call it so. Against that ocean the chapter sets one Name.

He then turns to the Bṛhajjābāla and other texts to unfold its sacred geography:

"According to the Bṛhajjābāla and other books, there are four kṣetras in Kāśī: Kāśī, Vārāṇasī, Avimukta, and Antargṛha, each succeeding one holier than the preceding."

They are nested as well as graded: each one holds the next inside it, and each inner one is holier. The innermost, Antargṛha, is the best of them, and he says why — it is the body of Paramaśiva himself; body and the one embodied are not two things, and it does not end. Then he notices the word the verse actually uses. It says avimuktaka and not antargṛha, and the small added syllable carries the sense of something gone unrecognised: common speech, learned and unlearned alike, has fixed the name Avimukta on the wider place, so that the one it truly belongs to goes unnamed. It is a wistful thing to find in the middle of a commentary.

He says first why gold at all. The Bṛhaspati-smṛti names three gifts as the highest — cows, the earth, and learning — and he lets that stand. But all three are come by through gold, and so the giving of gold is the greater; which is why the verse says golden. Seven things, he adds, make any such act weigh more: the place, the time, the one fit to receive it, the thing given, faith, knowledge, and keeping it quiet. The verse names only some of them, and the rest are to be supplied.

Then he weighs the gold, rather than leaving it as gold. A bhāra is twenty tulās and a tulā a hundred palas, so a crore of bhāras is two thousand palas taken a crore of times. And he shows the size of the giver's fruit from an unexpected side — from the one who receives. Anyone who takes a gift anywhere, at any time, from anyone, may somehow be freed of it; but one who accepts at Kurukṣetra during an eclipse, the Mahābhārata says, is not freed at all. Where there is no undoing it for the one who takes, there is no measuring it for the one who gives. It is a warm way to weigh a gift — from the far side of it.

Beside all these immense measures of merit, the phalaśruti places the uttering of a single one of Her Names—and declares it greater. Bhāskararāya is emphatic here, and says why. Reading on from the chapter's opening, one would naturally take all of this to be the fruit of reciting the whole hymn; lest that mistake arise, the text says even of a single Name. What the whole recitation carries is that same measure a thousand times over.

And the thousand is exactly a thousand. He has been counting as he went — each hundred of the Names is one kalā, and each closes with a verse of the same shape. Twice he reads a name apart so that the sum comes out right. Where the hymn’s syllables read sādhvī, he takes the name as neuter — sādhu, so that the salutation runs to sādhu — and the ī left standing after it is a name of one syllable on its own, the one called kāmakalā. He says why, too: Sādhvī has already been a Name — it stands in verse 43, ninety-five verses earlier — and must not be said twice. At Tattvamayī, tat and tvam stand as words in their own right. He does it quietly, in their own places, a hundred names apart, rather than announcing it at the end — which is very like him (pp. 416–417).

The comparison reveals how deeply the tradition treasures the remembrance of the Mother through Her Names.

Four Ways of Coming to Her · p. 423

Four groups approaching the Mother — the suffering, the seekers, those with worldly needs, and the wise

Bhāskararāya then turns to a teaching from the Bhagavad-Gītā:

"According to the Bhagavad-Gītā (7.16), fourfold are the righteous who worship me: the suffering, the seeker of knowledge, the self-interested, and the wise. Amongst them, the first should repeat this Sahasranāman for removing his sins; the second for the purification of his mind (citta-śuddhi); the third to acquire wealth; and the fourth for the welfare of the world."

The suffering may come seeking relief.

The seeker may come longing for clarity.

The one with worldly needs may come seeking their fulfilment.

The wise may recite for the good of all.

No one is turned away at the threshold. The Mother receives each person where they stand, and the path itself may draw them deeper.

Reciting for Someone You Love

A woman reciting beside someone she loves who lies ill and asleep

Bhāskararāya offers a second reading of the verse of first promises. It turns simply on where the words are joined. Read this way, the fruit and the one who undertakes the recitation need not be the same person.

He states the meaning plainly: one may rightly undertake this for a fruit that belongs to somebody else.

He offers this as a natural second reading, supported by a parallel from the rules of sacrifice, and then moves on. Yet the sentence quietly opens the whole chapter to recitation offered on behalf of someone loved.

What the Text Promises About Prosperity · pp. 419–420, 431, 441

This question is asked often, and the chapter answers it in three places.

The first answer appears among the opening promises. The pairings are deliberate: the quelling of all disease beside the increase of all prosperity, and the quelling of untimely death beside the warding off of death at its appointed hour. Bhāskararāya explains why prosperity is placed beside disease: poverty is counted here as a kind of illness, and its removal is named as a fruit in its own right.

He then raises a possible concern. Might health and prosperity exclude one another—might the healthy person remain poor? Bhāskararāya says the verse places them together precisely to remove that doubt. Neither is bought at the cost of the other. Nor is prosperity left abstract: he describes abundance of every kind, including elephants and horses.

Further on, the chapter becomes specific. It promises that when the hymn is recited once daily for six months, the goddess of wealth will dwell in that home free of her restlessness. Bhāskararāya pauses over the phrase. Restlessness, he says, belongs to Lakṣmī's nature, and nature is difficult to set aside. Yet here even that restlessness is left behind. The promise is not of a passing windfall, but of wealth that remains.

Later comes the plainest statement: one who wishes for wealth comes to wealth, one who wishes for fame to fame, and one who wishes for learning to learning. Bhāskararāya carefully defines the third. The learning promised is the vast field of Veda and śāstra, and not the Śrīvidyā itself — because, he says, the instruction of the Śrīvidyā is to be had from a Guru, and one who performs its prayogas without that instruction not only fails of what he wanted but comes to trouble. The condition is on the Śrīvidyā's own practices. It is not on the reciting of the Names, which the same verse says makes the one who wishes for learning learned.

The setting of this verse matters even more than the promise itself. It follows the declaration that desireless recitation leads to the knowledge of Brahman. Bhāskararāya then asks a practical question: what happens if someone begins without desire but is later drawn, perhaps inadvertently, to recite for a particular result? Nothing is lost, he says. There is no penalty, and the wished-for fruit is given. He also completes the thought honestly: the desired fruit comes, but the knowledge does not, because the recitation follows the direction in which it was turned. Nothing is taken away; what is directed toward a smaller fruit arrives there. The following verse draws out the conclusion: even one who begins and falls away is not made poorer, but receives what was desired. How, then, could another hymn be its equal?

He offers a second reading of the same word, and keeps both. Learning may mean the knowledge of Brahman itself — so that as one says for the pleasure of Ambā, one may as well say for the coming of that knowledge, and by that alone it comes. On this reading wealth and fame are only there for illustration: as one who wants wealth comes to wealth, so this. They do not limit the promise. And that is the answer to anyone puzzled to find a wish for wealth set down after the highest promise of all.

Sacred Times for Recitation · p. 423

The text names certain days as especially auspicious:

"On Saṅkrānti day, at the equinoxes, on the three birth-days, at the solstices, on Navamī, on the fourteenth day of the bright fortnight, and on Fridays…"

He says which days those are: the equinox is the day the sun enters Aries and Libra, the solstice the day it enters Cancer and Capricorn. Both are already covered by Saṅkrānti, and they are named again for a reason — to show they are holier still, and especially not to be let go. He also reads the small or at the ninth as taking in the eighth as well, and of the bright fortnight as running over all three of those days and not the fourteenth alone.

One practice here keeps a weekly rhythm, and it is the only one that does. Whoever worships her at the Cakrarāja with the thousand Names on a Friday is promised every desire here, every kind of good fortune, sons and grandsons, enjoyments as he wishes them — and at the end her union, which the verse calls the hardest thing of all to reach. It is a gentle shape for a practice to take — one day in the week, kept for a lifetime. Every Friday, Bhāskararāya notes, and for as long as one lives: the words carried down from the earlier verses say so.

Bhāskararāya gives four readings of the “three birth-days” without choosing among them. They may be the birth-stars of oneself, one's wife and one's son; one's own birth-star together with the star before and after it; or, counting from one's own star, the first, tenth and nineteenth. They may also be three days rather than three stars: the day one was born, the day one was initiated, and the day of the full consecration. He includes sacred conjunctions such as Kapilāṣaṣṭhī and Ardhodaya as well.

After preserving all four readings, he explains how the question should be settled. Where traditions differ, follow the tradition in which one stands: The tantras are many-formed; what is to be done is what the guru approves.

He remains practical. These sacred days are especially remembered for one who cannot maintain daily recitation throughout life. If even all of these are beyond reach, one may be set aside—but not the full moon. And if a birth-star, a saṅkrānti and a Friday coincide on the same ninth day, one recitation answers for all three.

The Names are woven not only into daily worship, but into sacred time—the turning of days, seasons and celestial rhythms.

The Traditional Prayogas · pp. 425–428

The commentary preserves several prayogas—traditional ritual uses of the Sahasranāma.

Among them is the Āyuṣkara prayoga, associated with long life. On the full-moon day, the practitioner fasts, bathes, faces east as the full orb rises, performs prāṇāyāma with the Vidyā, and recites the thousand Names.

The fever rite is given step by step. The person with fever sits on the practitioner's right, facing north, and is bathed with ash or with the mantra. The first part is recited; the hand is placed upon the person's head while the middle part is spoken; the hand is then withdrawn for the final part. Bhāskararāya adds: if the rite is done for oneself, the hand is laid on one's own head. If repetition continues until the fever subsides, only the middle part is repeated — as many times as was resolved at the start. The opening and closing are each spoken once and remain in place, and the rite ends as such rites end, with the feeding of brāhmaṇas and the rest.

Another rite is given for fever:

"He should allow the patient to sit on his right side facing north, besmearing him with holy ashes with the mantra; he should repeat the first part; then place his right palm on the patient's head and recite the Sahasranāman… The repetition should be continued till the fever subsides, as the Vedānta-Sūtras say: 'Repetition should be continued, as the instruction is repeatedly given.'"

The commentary continues with practices involving consecrated ash and water:

"By applying sacred ash consecrated through the recitation of this Sahasranāma for the purpose of healing, all diseases are said to be immediately cured."

"Consecrate a pot of water through the recitation of this Sahasranāma and bathe with it one who is afflicted by a graha (elemental influence); the graha is said to depart at once."

He reads the ash rite's phrase two ways and keeps both: all those diseases, or the diseases of everyone — the second widening it past the person keeping the rite. And having touched means while touching: the hand rests on the ash through the reciting, not before it.

Bhāskararāya understands graha broadly, including Bālagraha, Piśāca, other troubling influences and the nine planets—the traditional language through which such disturbances were understood. Those he has in mind are the ones the affliction has brought near to death.

Another practice follows:

"Meditating upon the Divine Mother abiding in the Ocean of Nectar while reciting this Sahasranāma is said to render even ingested poison harmless, causing it to be digested and assimilated."

Bhāskararāya does not leave "the Ocean of Nectar" unexplained. Wherever there is a Śrīpura, he says, there is a lake of nectar. In the city called Aparājitā, reached by those who worship the Brahman-with-qualities, there are two such lakes. There is also one in the brahmarandhra, so the meditation does not point only to a distant place. She is contemplated as standing within whichever lake one's practice reaches — and the word he supplies is worship: she is not only held in mind there but honoured there, inwardly. The poison, he adds, includes both what grows and what bites. And he sets a limit here that is easy to miss: this rite does not ordinarily have its fruit residing in somebody else — the poison that goes is the reciter's own. The rite for long life was resolved upon either for oneself or for another by name; this one is generally kept by the person it is for.

One further prayoga is especially gentle. For a woman who has not had a child, butter is consecrated with the thousand Names. Bhāskararāya reads the passage closely and draws out two points. The plural, he says, gathers together the woman who has borne no child, the woman whose children died, the woman who has borne only daughters, and the woman who bore once and no more. Nor is putra restricted to sons. From grammar, Manu's usage and the rule by which one form may stand for both, he reaches a plain conclusion: those who wish for a daughter have the same standing in this rite.

The final detail is warm and direct. The phrase "let him give it to her" means that she eats it. If she has herself received the teaching from a guru, she consecrates and eats it on her own, with no one standing between.

He closes these rites with one condition he asks not be forgotten, and it is worth seeing exactly what it binds. Standing in the occasional observances belongs to those who keep the daily ones; standing in an optional rite like these belongs to those who keep both. He calls it a settled point of the other tantras. The condition is on the rite, not on the reciting — of that the chapter asks nothing of the kind.

Two further observances in this stretch he gives in full order. One is the flower-offering at the Śrī Chakra. The other is the feeding of the thousand, which is really two rites joined: the Nityābali first, sixteen guests with one of the sixteen Nityās welcomed in each, and then the thousand fed on the day after. Their instructions are left here with the tradition that holds them. He notes only why they had to be looked for elsewhere in his own book: this rite is more secret than the one it is modelled on.

These passages are preserved here faithfully as part of the tradition’s ritual inheritance. They belong to the devotional world of the commentary and are presented as such, not as medical guidance.

The Full Moon: She Is Already There

The full moon whose disc is itself the Śrī Chakra, with Lalitā seated at its centre

The first of these rites places the meditation on Lalitā within the disc of the full moon. Before he reaches the moon at all, Bhāskararāya settles which day is meant — the word names the last night of the bright fortnight, so one might look for the night the tithi covers. For the worship of the tithi-nityās, he says, those in this tradition take the tithi standing at sunrise, and he writes out the line that says so. It is the sunrise tithi here too; and where the tithi stands over two sunrises, either day will do. He is being kind to the person with a calendar in their hand.

Then he explains why this place is chosen.

The moon holds one changeless portion, the Sādākhyā kalā, which is Tripurasundarī Herself and neither waxes nor wanes. Its other fifteen portions wax and wane; they are the fifteen Nityās of the lunar days, from Kāmeśvarī to Citrā. On the one night when all fifteen are full, the sixteen stand together, surrounded by the deities of the moon's rays. Bhāskararāya's conclusion is tender: the moon's orb becomes the Śrī Chakra, made visible.

From this he draws a tender conclusion. In certain sacred forms—the śālagrāma stone and the bāṇaliṅga—a deity is held to be so constantly present that no invitation or gesture of summoning is made. The full moon, he says, is such a place. She is already there. Nothing needs to be called down.

Two small things at the close of this rite change its shape. The worship here is the limb and the recitation is the principal act — the offerings are made for the sake of the reciting, and not the reciting for the sake of the offerings. And the word having meditated reaches forward and holds, the way he sleeps with his mouth open means the two are one moment and not two. So the tradition reads it not as meditate first and then recite, but recite while meditating on her. It is a small change to make to a sentence, and it turns the rite gently inside out.

Bhāskararāya is equally careful about the five offerings: scent, flower, incense, lamp and food. These are not the principal thing. What matters most is the contemplation held while they are given, expressed in the Śruti's words: that which I am, that is He; that which He is, that am I. The offerings are limbs of that contemplation. The words that go with them are as plain as words can be: śrī lalitāmbikāyai namaḥ — to Śrī Lalitāmbikā, salutation. (For those keeping the vidyā's own practice he names an alternative from the Tantrarāja, and leaves it there.) He also offers a second way of taking the whole rite, and it goes further than the first. A householder is to keep both the inner worship and the outer. On this reading the contemplation of not-being-two is the inner worship. And the outer worship is held in the mind as well — it is the giving itself, the resolve by which scent and flower and lamp are offered, the things being only the means of it. To keep them in proportion, he quotes the Padma Purāṇa: a thousand horse-sacrifices and one hundred vājapeyas do not equal a hundred-thousandth part of Lalitā's worship; one who worships Her with scent, flower and ointment is at once the giver, the sage, the one who offers sacrifice, the ascetic and the pilgrim.

He settles two further points. A healthy person may keep this rite just as an ill person may, for preserving health is also counted as a fruit. He also offers several meanings for the rite's name, which the text says is “told in the kalpa”. One is especially striking: it remains valid even at the dissolution of the world, for those who kept it with a wish for long life when there was no longer a world in which to live it. But kalpa may also be the Kalpasūtra Paraśurāma made. Such books exist to gather up what lies scattered through other branches, so by naming a few uses they point at the rest, and this is one of them. Or it may be the tantras that stand equal to those books, where it is said outright. And one reading turns on the naming itself. Because this rite bears a name, the rites that follow may be named on the same reasoning — a fever-remover, and so on. That name is exactly what the resolve spoken beforehand has to carry.

Guardians Who Come Unbidden · pp. 429–431

Protective figures ringed outward around a reciter who does not know they are there

There is a shape to this whole stretch that is easy to lose. From here on, he says, the rites are stated in order of decreasing effort, and he holds them together by exception. Daily runs on and governs what follows. Six months stands as an exception to the lifelong, one month to the six, a fortnight to the month — and once in a lifetime, an exception to all of them. The chapter is not heaping promise upon promise. It is coming down the ladder to meet whoever is standing on it.

The chapter then turns to those who would wish a reciter harm, and to the powers said to meet them. The striking point is not their strength, but that none has been summoned.

The first is Śarabheśvara, who undoes the enemies of a reciter. Bhāskararāya pauses over the choice of deity. Śarabha is the descent of Śiva who came to withdraw Viṣṇu's descent as Nṛsiṃha. As the Liṅga and Kālikā Purāṇas describe him, he is the slayer of the slayer. This is why he is named here.

If someone performs a rite intended to bring about another's death, Pratyaṅgirā is said to turn it back. Bhāskararāya identifies her as the Bhadrakālī of the Atharva Veda, carried in thirty-two verses by the Śaunaka branch and forty-eight by the Pippalāda, with her uses described in the Nārada Tantra.

One who looks upon a reciter with a cruel eye—an eye red with anger, he specifies—is met by Mārtāṇḍa-Bhairava, a descent of Śiva born at Premapura in the Karṇāṭaka country and widely honoured across Mahārāṣṭra. Wealth taken from a reciter is answered by Kṣetrapāla — and he reads the line more narrowly than it first appears. By thieves is an instrument, he says: the one meant is the man who has thieves do it for him. It is he whom Kṣetrapāla strikes, and with him gone the thieves scatter of themselves. Here Bhāskararāya tells one of the commentary's tenderest stories. When Kālikā's anger did not subside even after Dāruka was slain, Śiva Himself became a child and, on the pretext of taking Her breast, drank away the fire of Her wrath.

A scholar who challenges a reciter across the fourteen sciences finds his speech stilled by Nakulīśvarī — and challenge stands here for wrangling and bare refutation as well, so it is not the honest questioner the verse has in view. She is the one whose mantra appears in the Ṛgveda's Āraṇyaka and was taken up by Paraśurāma in his Kalpasūtra. A king who turns against a reciter finds his fourfold army—elephants, horses, chariots and foot soldiers—undone by Daṇḍinī, who is Daṇḍanāthā, who is Vārāhī. Bhāskararāya explains "undone" carefully. It does not mean simple slaughter: the soldiers are divided against one another; some are driven away and some fall. The army ceases to act as one.

These six are not merely a list of avengers. Bhāskararāya identifies them with the six acts, the ṣaṭkarma described in tantric works. He gives the Tantrarāja's terms: protection, quieting, recitation, gain, restraint and ending. He names the other list first, from the Śābaracintāmaṇi — quieting, winning over, halting, setting at odds, driving away and slaying — and then says that whatever such lists contain belongs within his six and has no separate standing. The passage is therefore an ordered account of what such practice is held to do. For the full classifications, he directs the reader to the twenty-third wave of the Saubhāgyaratnākara rather than lengthening the present discussion.

Bhāskararāya then explains the purpose of the passage through Śarabheśvara. Here is a powerful deity who walks another road altogether—a Śaiva form renowned for undoing a Vaiṣṇava one. The devotee has not worshipped him for this purpose and may not even know of him. Yet he acts unbidden. If the text meant only that enemies come to nothing by themselves, it could have said so. Instead, it describes these deities stirring into action. The point, Bhāskararāya says, is the reach of the care surrounding the devotee—and that this care does not wait to be summoned.

Where the chapter says the three worlds are bewildered at the mere sight of the daily reciter's face, he stops on the word merely. By that word, he says, the intention of bewildering is turned out of the rite — so in the resolve spoken beforehand one must not say for the bewildering of the three worlds. What the verse promises is not permitted to become what is asked for.

Flowers—and What Matters More Than Rules · pp. 433–434

A single flower laid before the Śrī Chakra, the named blossoms waiting their turn on a leaf

After this comes a much quieter question: what may be offered?

The list is unhurried and precise: campaka, jāti, mallikā, karavīra, utpala, bilva leaves, kunda, kesara and pāṭala. Bhāskararāya explains each as though the flowers might truly be gathered: jātī is mālatī; mallikā is vicakila; karavīra is hayamāra; kunda is mādhya; kesara is kāśmīra; and pāṭala is the white-and-red flower like sesame. He adds other fragrant flowers, including ketakī and mādhavī—the latter being vāsantī—while "and the like" includes punnāga and bakula.

The little word or is repeated all through those verses, and he stops to say why. It is there so that nobody takes the list for a set that must be gathered whole: each flower stands on its own. The plural in with these thousand Names does the same work for the Names — each one, by itself, is the means. And if the count of flowers falls short, closely similar ones may make it up. He does not argue that; he remembers something instead. The Liṅga Purāṇa tells how Viṣṇu, one lotus short of his number, offered the lotus of his own eye to finish the count. He answers a question about arithmetic with a story about love, and lets that be the answer.

"Fragrant," he notes, excludes only what smells unpleasant. Scentless flowers are not excluded: the red japā has no fragrance and is dear to Her. Flowering sprays are preferred to leaves, a distinction that matters because tulasī is set aside in Her worship. Where flowers are unavailable, leaves may take their place. Yet Bhāskararāya carefully limits this allowance to regular observances, not to a rite undertaken for a desired result.

A flower, leaf or fruit should not be placed face downward; it is offered as it grew — except in the handful offered together, where the verse itself makes room. Where one hundred thousand flowers are prescribed, they are offered one at a time. A heap placed down at once, the Phetkāriṇī Tantra says, is not the same offering.

Then comes the line that releases any anxiety created by these details. Worship of the Devī is always praised when offered with a mind full of devotion, using flowers born in water or on land, whether enjoined or forbidden. Bhāskararāya does not treat this as carelessness. The permission to offer even what is elsewhere set aside is given, he says, to show how essential devotion is. The flowers are named with great care—and then we are told just as clearly that they are not the heart of the worship.

Of the merit of such an offering, the text says only that even Maheśvara cannot describe it. He does not let that pass as praise. Maheśvara here is the fourth of the five who lie beneath her seat, and so not all-knowing himself; if the words fail him, they fail us the more. What the verse is saying is that this fruit has no edge to it at all.

The Promises Rise Higher · pp. 439, 445

As the chapter continues, its language becomes ever more expansive:

"He obtains svarājya… He becomes Lord of speech, Lord of eye-sight, Lord of hearing, Lord over wisdom… He becomes the creator of all the universes and protector, and he becomes the universal one."

The promise rises until Bhāskararāya speaks of:

"that stage when he is called the son of Devī — a special privilege of the devotees of Devī alone."

And once again the chapter returns to the Mother's command:

"It is by the command of Lalitā that this holy hymn is declared to thee. Therefore, O pot-born one, do thou chant this always with devotion."

After all this grandeur, the heart of the instruction remains simple:

chant with devotion.

Her Own Sovereignty: A Promise He Does Not Soften

Of one who feeds a thousand after worshipping with these Names, the chapter says that Lalitā gives her own sovereignty. It is the largest promise in the chapter, and it might seem natural to read it as a figure of speech. Bhāskararāya considers that reading and rejects it.

One familiar reading would soften the claim. Vedāntins hold that the state of a released soul does not include governing the world; on that reading, "sovereignty" would mean only undividedness. Bhāskararāya records this option, then gives his view. In ordinary usage, sāmrājya means the governing of the world. To read it otherwise would set aside what the text says and add what it does not. He therefore leaves the promise at full strength. A thousand people who know the vidyā would not bestow a lesser blessing, he adds, and this is why the fruit of the rite exceeds the one before it.

He then addresses the natural objection. If many people keep this rite, many may hold that sovereignty at once. Would they not disagree and pull the world apart?

His answer begins from something the objectors already accept. The Lord's action is not arbitrary; it follows the deeds of the beings who are made. This is how the ancient charge of partiality and cruelty is answered. If divine activity follows those deeds, then the activity arising in many minds at once will arise in the same way. There is nothing over which they need disagree. Nor is anyone's freedom diminished, since each acts by their own will.

He supports this with a story from the Vāsiṣṭha-Rāmāyaṇa: eight brothers of Mathurā who, through the Mother's boon, held sovereignty over the same seven-continent earth at the same time.

Another objection follows: this would create a sixth kind of liberation where the books usually count four or five. Bhāskararāya does not retreat. That is acceptable, he says, because these kinds are graded stages, and this one stands naturally beyond nearness yet short of the final state. He concludes, in his own words, that those who worship are makers of the world's arising, its continuance and its passing away. And he does not leave it as his own word. He sets the Śaiva verses beside it — the powers are this whole world, and Maheśvara is the one who holds them, so the universe is the spreading out of his own power; and as it is for Śiva, so it is for this supreme yogin, who is his equal. He answers one more objection in a breath: how can one office serve many at once? As one offering in a great sacrifice serves many who make it, and as one Brahmaloka serves many worshippers at the same time.

This is the boldest passage in the phalaśruti. What matters is not only the size of the claim, but Bhāskararāya's refusal to soften it through either a figure of speech or a tidy list of four.

The Promise of Jñāna · vv. 63–64, p. 441

The net of I and mine coming apart and dissolving into undivided light

Here the phalaśruti reaches its summit.

When the hymn is recited without seeking a particular personal reward, its fruit is no longer only a worldly blessing. The promise becomes Jñāna—the knowledge that brings freedom.

"If a person chants this supreme hymn without hoping for any (specific and selfish) result, there is nothing in all the three worlds which is unattainable by him. He gains Brahma-Jñāna by which he will be freed (from all misery)."

Bhāskararāya then explains what this Brahma-Jñāna means:

"Brahma-Jñāna: the knowledge which removes the confusion of the difference between the Jīva and Brahman, arising from the Mahāvākyas… aiming at the Ātman (Self) alone… and which is in the form of experience."

This is not knowledge held in the mind alone. It is knowledge in the form of direct experience.

Bhāskararāya then explains the difference in one sentence spoken before the daily recitation. If the resolve is for the wearing away of the wrong I have gathered, that becomes the purpose of the recitation. If it is instead for the pleasure of Śrī Tripurasundarī, then by that alone, he says, the knowledge comes.

He notices, too, what the verse might have said and did not. It could have said: whoever recites the thousand Names for the pleasure of Śrī Mātā. It says instead: whoever recites without wanting. The word is chosen to convey something about a life and not only about a morning — that one who keeps this practice would not at any time take it up for the sake of a thing wanted.

One might object that naming any purpose is itself a desire. Bhāskararāya answers that only desire for some thing makes an act desire-driven. An act offered for the pleasure of the Supreme has always been called desireless by those who know. The difference between the highest fruit in the chapter and an ordinary morning rests, in this passage, upon which of these two resolves is made before recitation.

Freedom is then described as release from the most ancient net:

"Freed: he will be freed from the bondage of ‘I’-ness and ‘mine’ which has come to him without beginning, as a net."

The thousand Names therefore lead beyond every lesser fruit.

At their highest, they lead to the end of separateness itself.

One Hymn, Both Kinds of Fruit · vv. 65–68, pp. 441–442

The text declares:

"O Muni, there is no other hymn equal to his merit which confers both worldly attainments and salvation at the same time."

The Sahasranāma does not place worldly life and liberation in opposition.

It is praised as bestowing both.

Bhāskararāya turns the verse over and finds it kinder than it looks. To the one who set out for worldly good and fell away from it, the hymn gives release. To the one who set out for release and fell away, it gives worldly good. And to the one who wants both, it gives both — the enjoyment first, and the release after it.

He sets the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa beside it:

"Without the worship of Tripurā there is nowhere, in any of the worlds, enjoyment and release together. With the mind on her, the breath gone to her, the offering made to her, the effort turned toward her — doing what you do in oneness with her, you will come to release. This secret is told out of a wish for the good of all."

And then, as he so often does, he offers a second way of hearing the same two words and keeps both. If the verse before gives the knowledge of Brahman, this one gives what that knowledge is reached by — and then bhoga-mokṣa is not enjoyment and release side by side, but release from enjoyment: the loosening of the appetite for things. He closes it with a line from the Aṣṭāvakra Gītā: if you wish for freedom, child, let go of objects as you would let go of poison.

For the age of Kali, the text speaks with particular urgency:

"To make up for the imperfect performance of Dharma in this Kali age… there is no protective mantra except the repetition of this Sahasranāman."

In an age when discipline is weakened and sacred observance becomes difficult, the Names themselves are offered as refuge.

Even When the Name Is Spoken Imperfectly

A well-digger reaching water that takes away both the thirst and the mud the digging made

When the chapter turns to this age—where three of dharma's four feet are broken and people have no refuge but the Names—Bhāskararāya raises an objection. The sacred books already prescribe expiations for a lapse. Why is this recitation needed?

An expiation is itself a rite, he answers, and every rite has parts that may also fall short. This would require an expiation for the expiation, with no end. He answers through the image of digging a well. The digging creates thirst and covers the body in mud, yet the water found at the end removes both. In the same way, a mistaken utterance may create a fault, while the right utterance removes it. Any fault arising from mishandling the remembrance of the Name is undone through that same remembrance, and the endless chain stops.

He then gathers some of the chapter's most consoling passages. From the Bhāgavata:

"Whether as a hint, or in jest, or as a sound meaning nothing, or even in contempt — the taking of that Name is known to remove sin without remainder."

He explains even these phrases: a hint includes calling one's own son by the Name, while a sound meaning nothing means exactly that. Then he turns to the Śakti-rahasya:

"From intoxication, from carelessness, from madness, from a bad dream, even from a stumble of the tongue — your Name spoken, O Gaurī, is for the undoing of people's wrong."

He takes all five in turn, and the kindness is in the taking of all five — he is closing every door by which a person might feel shut out. Intoxication is what comes of drink. Carelessness is inattention. Madness is being taken over by something not oneself. The bad dream is speech let out while asleep. And a stumble of the tongue is when one sets out to say one thing and something else comes out of the mouth. Elsewhere he adds: a name said even unwillingly frees a person — how then should the wise not serve him? And again: a name spoken indistinctly, or merely in passing, gives what is wished for, however hard to come by.

One more of the verses he gathers is as plain as anything in the chapter: what ought to have been done was not done; what ought not to have been done was done as though it ought — for both, O Śiva, the two syllables of your name are said to be the remedy. Beside it he sets a verse of his own about the remedies the books prescribe: they are easily afforded by the wealthy, and they do not reach equally far. He ends that verse by saying he does not understand it.

He closes the passage with a verse from an earlier hymn of his own: if remembrance of Her, made at the very beginning, does not carry a person across, then he would abandon the rites altogether. The verse reads less like an argument than a sigh of relief.

The Rarest Grace · vv. 69–75, pp. 442–443

The text then gives a striking series of comparisons:

"To a thousand names of Viṣṇu a single name of Śiva is preferred. To a thousand names of Śiva one single name of Devī is preferred."

The ladder does not begin at Viṣṇu. It begins at the bottom, with ordinary speech. There is merit even in saying pot or cloth, he says, for one word rightly known and rightly used becomes a wish-granting cow in heaven; and a thousand such words weigh less than one word naming a person of good repute. Only from there does he step up to the name of Viṣṇu. The comparison begins in the plainest place a person could be standing — which is a kind way to build a ladder.

He reads the verse's first word in the plural, too: not the name of Viṣṇu but the name of the Viṣṇus — among Viṣṇus beyond counting, the name of any one of them, even a single name. And that small plural changes everything that follows. The Viṣṇus stand on one level, so a name of any of them, said in any manner at all, gives the same fruit. The Śivas stand on levels that rise one above another, and their names run into one another; so there a name recited with the level's own meaning held in mind rises with it. The verse is not ranking who is greater. It is saying what happens when a name is said with its sense in view.

Then the hinge of the whole ladder, made by a single choice of words. Where the text comes to her, it does not compound the words at all: it says simply her name. The uncompounded form stands there on purpose, to clear away any notion that the Devīs too are many. And the names of the Parā Śakti and those that come from her — each from a thousandth part of the one before — are all taken within that single word. The ladder climbs through the countless and arrives at one.

Of the countless thousand-name hymns to Devī, ten are called the foremost, and among those this Sahasranāma is declared supreme. Bhāskararāya names the ten — Gaṅgā, Bhavānī, Gāyatrī, Kālī, Lakṣmī, Sarasvatī, Rājarājeśvarī, Bālā, Śyāmalā, Lalitā — and gives the jingle the learned keep them in: gaṅgāśyālakā bālarāsabha. Its ten syllables are their ten first letters, shuffled into a phrase that means nothing edifying whatever — there is a donkey in it, and an in-law — which is exactly why it stays in the head. He is not being light about it. He sets it beside the verse the Devī Bhāgavata uses to hold the eighteen purāṇas — two m’s and two bh’s and three br’s and four v’s — and pauses to note that its last syllable is short, the long reading being forced by the plural. And he adds one thing more, which is not about memory at all: some hold that all ten are Tripurasundarī’s own, under one tantra or another.

Bhāskararāya handles this ladder carefully because it passes through forms cherished by other devotees. The passages exalting Viṣṇu in the Vaiṣṇava purāṇas are not contradicted, he says; they speak with the underlying identity in view. What may appear there to lower Rudra concerns only a manifestation, not the Lord Himself. The gradation concerns light, not worth—as he has already shown through the firefly, fire, moon and sun. One verse he quotes settles it more gently than any argument could, from the Sūta-saṃhitā: all names whatever are fashioned by his own power of appearance upon what is in itself eternal happiness; and even so, the words śiva and the rest are the chief ones, by his own intending. The names are ranked. What they name is not.

He then explains why the Mother stands at the head of the sequence, and his reason is not about rank. Śiva's own pre-eminence, he points out, is traced everywhere to Śakti: without Śakti there is in the subtle Śiva neither name nor abode; and, as the Ācārya says, Śiva joined with Śakti is able to act. If that eminence arises through Her, then by the simple rule that a quality belongs to its cause, the eminence is Hers.

His quietest evidence is the best of it. In the ritual portion of the Veda, where other gods are mentioned they are called by their own particular names; of her it says only to the great deity — the form is for the great deity, it satisfies that very great deity. And from Kaśyapa a line that climbs the same ladder in half a verse: Viṣṇu is the heart of Brahmā; Śiva is called the heart of Viṣṇu; the twilight is the heart of Śiva — and therefore it is to be worshipped.

One measure from the passage is striking in itself. A thousand four-age cycles make one day of Brahmā; a thousand Brahmās make one ghaṭī of Viṣṇu; twelve lakh of these make half a wink of Maheśa; and ten crores of Maheśas make one instant of Śrī Mātā.

Then comes perhaps the tenderest teaching in the whole chapter:

"Rarely one in this world is devoted to the names of Lalitā. It is by repeating the names of other deities in crores of births, that faith is generated to repeat the names of Śrī-Devī."

Under that verse he lays a whole ladder of affection, and it is gently done. Those given wholly to the older rites come, after many births, as the merit of those rites ripens, to love the names of Viṣṇu — and this happens to many. From there, over some further births, love for the names of Śiva arises in a few. And because the Śivas stand on levels whose order is hard to make out, even a person who has climbed higher appears to be standing in the middle. So love for the Mother's names, more hidden than either, turns out to be the rarest thing of all. He is not shutting a door with that. He is saying what a gentle and long-prepared thing it is to find oneself here. Beside it he sets a verse from the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa: he for whom there is no birth after this one, or who is Śaṅkara himself — by him alone is the blessed fifteen-syllabled vidyā obtained.

And then the verse that says most about anyone reading this page. Just as one becomes a worshipper of the Śrīvidyā only in the last of all births, so the recitation of these thousand Names belongs to a last birth. By worshipper the verse does not mean someone who merely holds the mantra; it means the contemplation in which guru, deity, mantra and oneself are held as one. The verse takes no measure of anybody. It says where a person already stands when the Names have found them.

Even the longing to chant Her Names is presented as grace.

The turning of the heart toward Lalitā is not treated as ordinary. It is devotion flowering after countless lives.

With Devotion Alone · vv. 77–80, p. 444

At last, the chapter returns to the thread running through everything: devotion.

The first of these verses sets three things side by side — the repetition of the king of mantras, the worship of the king of chakras, and the reading of the secret Names — and says they are the fruit of no small austerity. Each of the three is rare on its own, Bhāskararāya notes, so all three meeting in one life is rarer still. And he is careful with the negative: the verse does not say this is not the fruit of austerity. It says the austerity is not a small one — and not small is to be filled out as without limit.

"He that wishes to please the great Īśvarī without chanting this Sahasranāman, is like one, who is confounded and wants to see objects without eyes."

"He who lets go of this secret thousand Names and still wants attainment is surely wanting to put an end to hunger without eating."

Having said it one way, he notes, the chapter strengthens it by turning it round — twice, and the second image is the homelier of the two.

"The devotee of Lalitā should always repeat this; and in no other way can Devī be pleased… Therefore should one chant this secret Sahasranāman of the holy mother with devotion."

That second verse looks like a duty laid upon devotees. He reads it the other way round, and says so plainly: this very thing is what makes someone a devotee. Whoever recites these Names always — he is the devotee, and no other. The two halves of the sentence are joined in reverse, as in the old line those who are the offerers are the priests. One does not become a devotee first and then recite. The reciting is what the word means.

He does not leave those four as a description; he puts each of them to work. That the one reciting is a worshipper answers a question the chapter has been inviting — if the Names undo everything, are the books of expiation left with nothing to do? They are not: their place is with those who are not worshippers. That it is the whole hymn and not a part is set against anyone who reads the “even a single Name” verses as a rite complete in itself. His reason is a concrete one: the Names run from one syllable to sixteen, so they could never all carry the same measure. Those verses praise the whole through its part. That it is lifelong is set against expecting this particular fruit from a handful of unsettled days. He is not narrowing the door. He is saying what this particular promise is a promise about.

In his commentary on verse 18, Bhāskararāya describes such a devotee through four qualities: devotion, recitation of the complete stotra, steadfastness until the end of life, and daily practice after the morning bath and japa.

Two small things in the chapter's last verse of instruction. When it says to recite without interval, he does not read that as often; he reads it as inward — with the joining of the mind to non-difference. And then he answers a question that hangs over the whole chapter. It enjoins the recitation again and again, each time with another fruit named: do those become so many separate observances, so that it is wrong to say one recitation carries all of this? No, he says. A difference of contemplation is enough to account for it, and the fruit is not the thing being taken up. It is one recitation from beginning to end. What changes is what is held in the heart while it is said.

In time, recitation is no longer merely an outward act.

It becomes remembrance.

Remembrance deepens into love.

And the thousand Names become the quiet heartbeat of life.

How the Chapter Ends—and How He Ends

Agastya has one question left. If this teaching is to be withheld even from someone who has the vidyā, why has it been given to him? Hayagrīva answers that he did not speak on his own. The prompting came from Lalitā, and Her prompting arises only where it should.

Bhāskararāya notices how Agastya is addressed at this moment: pot-born. He turns to the lexicon and shows that the same word may name the Devī—She who dwells in sweet sound. The double meaning, he says, calls Agastya her son. Through his practice, he is shown standing as Her child, and a mother's prompting toward such a one could not fail to arise.

The final verse is no longer instruction. After speaking, Hayagrīva meditates on Lalitā. His heart is drowned in happiness, and the hair of his body stands on end. Bhāskararāya pauses even over drowned: the heart has turned so wholly toward one thing that it no longer moves outward toward anything else. With this, the twelfth and final portion of the commentary closes. Bhāskararāya names it in the same breath: the chapter of fruits is the kalā called Kṣamā, forbearance.

Before those verses he sets down, in the old way, the day the work was finished: in the autumn season, in the month of Āśvina, in the year Kālayukta, in the bright fortnight, on the ninth. That is Mahānavamī — the very day this chapter gives its longest passage to. He laid the commentary down on the day the chapter calls the greatest.

Then, briefly, Bhāskararāya speaks in his own voice. He says that the work was determined and churned from scripture, memory, reasoning, the purāṇas, aphorisms, lexicons, āgamas and the tradition of his gurus—and that it still wants correcting by good people who are kind to him. Of himself, he says:

"Mistakes are certainly mine — from dullness of mind, from laziness, and because the senses of words and the reasonings are of their nature hard to fathom. But the good are kind at heart, and the glory of the Name is without precedent. So I have no fear at all — not of the malicious, and not of my own faults."

Without precedent is his own phrase and he had already said what he meant by it: of the sort that undoes the fault caused by the lapse of its own parts. Nothing in the whole body of remedies was ever framed that way — a remedy that repairs the failure of the remedy. That is why the chain stops here, and why a man who has just listed his own faults can say he has no fear.

At the very end, he names what carried him:

"A single Name brought me to the far shore of the ocean of the thousand Names. Victorious are my guru's feet — for whom this ocean of becoming is one drop of water."

What a Single Name Is Said to Do · pp. 421–422

Having measured a single Name against the greatest sacred merits, the chapter stays with that single Name and turns to what it undoes. Even one Name, it says, removes wrongdoing, including the two great kinds: what gathers from leaving undone what should be done, and what gathers from doing what should not be done. Both are said to go swiftly. The verse says even great ones, and Bhāskararāya pauses on the even: it gathers the smaller wrongs in by the way of how-much-more, so that if the great are undone there is no question left about the rest.

Bhāskararāya then invites us to consider the scale of the claim. The fourteen worlds together, he says, could not produce as much wrongdoing as one Name removes. Imagine every living being in every world doing wrong at every moment, from waking until death, across crores of births: even that vast heap would fall short. A full recitation carries the power of one Name multiplied by a thousand.

For one who would set the hymn aside and seek relief elsewhere, the verse offers an image rather than an argument: it is like going to the snow mountain to escape the cold.

Bhāskararāya adds a sharper image, and he has a particular person in view rather than anyone at all: the one already keeping this practice who sets the recitation aside and goes looking for the ordinary expiations instead. That, he says, is fleeing from a scorpion only to hide in the mouth of an angry, venomous snake — and what those expiations cannot lift is the wrong that arises from the setting-aside itself.

Bhāskararāya is careful about what is removed and how. He counts two kinds rather than three: what gathers from leaving an enjoined act undone, and what gathers from doing what is forbidden. The law-books' third category, unrestrained senses, is included within these two because restraint itself is enjoined. One word describes their removal: swiftly—without waiting for any further expiation.

What Is Asked For, and What Is Given · pp. 420, 427–428, 431, 442

The chapter speaks openly about ordinary human hopes. Among its first promises, beside long life and the ending of fever, it says that the hymn gives sons to those who have none.

Later, this returns as a practice rather than a promise. For those who long for a child, butter consecrated through the thousand Names is given, and the text states this without qualification.

Beside the promise of wealth stands a companion promise. Six months of daily recitation brings the goddess of wealth to remain; one month of reciting three times daily brings Bhāratī—speech Herself—to dance upon the tongue. Bhāskararāya used the same image in his opening verses, where a goddess of speech dances on the tip of his own tongue. Here it is offered to anyone who keeps the month. He notes that the tongue's tip is called a stage, a word chosen to suit the dancing.

He then gives the promise its honest limit. The promise is that what has already been learned stays—unforgotten, without the repeated revision and drilling usually needed to hold it. The text does not promise knowledge without study. Study remains necessary because, he says, the guru is the one cause of knowledge for which nothing else can substitute.

There is also a rite of hospitality: after worshipping with these Names, one feeds a thousand — and he is exact about whom, saying those who know the vidyā and not others — with milk-rice, cakes and the six tastes. The six include the bitter, he notes, because bitter gourd is food like any other.

Bhāskararāya acknowledges that one thousand people are not easily gathered. If they cannot all come at once, those who do come may be fed over as many days as needed until the number is complete, with the observance continuing throughout.

Where the chapter promises sons to those who have none, Bhāskararāya turns the sentence around. It is not the lack that gives a person standing here — it is the wanting. One who has no child and does not want one has no place in that rite; one who already has a child and wants another does. Then the question that follows of itself: if someone wants many things at once, which comes first? None need come first. One performance may be undertaken for all the fruits together, and he quotes an old rule for it — in one performance one may desire all objects; where the performances are separate, one each. And when the verse goes on to promise puruṣārtha, he reads it first as liberation — so that even one who wants nothing has a place here. Then he says plainly that there is no ground for narrowing it at all: it means the giver of all four aims of life.

He also explains why a single day is the primary form. The fifteen-day pattern belongs to the shorter hymn, where each of fifteen letters has its own deity and day. The thousand Names are not arranged in that way, so the rule does not apply here.

Reciting the Names—and Knowing Their Meaning

One line in the chapter simply says, "let him recite the Names." Bhāskararāya examines how far that instruction reaches.

It reaches beyond the mouth, he says. He compares it with the ancient rule that one must study one's own branch of the Veda. Here, study may include repeating the words after a guru, but no one has understood that to be all it asks. The same applies here. He then turns to the Devī Purāṇa for a line that carries almost a whole teaching by itself:

"Even he who knows the meaning of a single one of the Names — through its root and its derivation — dwells in Lalitā's own world for crores of ages."

Another passage gives the other side without softening it: what has not been studied and not been understood, but only mouthed, never catches — like dry fuel where there is no fire.

Having set the standard, Bhāskararāya spends the rest of the passage ensuring that no one is shut out.

If someone cannot yet reach the meaning, recitation remains a true practice. Scripture promises all good to one who knows the meaning; by that word "all," Bhāskararāya understands that knowing only the words still brings something, though not everything. If even the words are beyond reach, keeping the book remains, and that too counts. Someone objects at this point: but the Kalpasūtra says a family's books are to be kept hidden — how then may one who is not a devotee honour this one? He answers that the instruction was aimed at the ill-natured, who would only jeer at what the book means. It was never aimed at a good person who hopes one day to come to the worship. The reading is his, and it is a kind one. His reason is hopeful rather than merely concessive: as reciting the words may bring knowledge of their meaning in another birth, keeping the book may bring the power to recite in another birth. Worship offered without the tradition, or with some of its limbs missing, is not wasted. In time, it ripens into worship that is whole.

At the end of this passage, he is speaking of his own book. He gives here the verse that will appear again at the close of the commentary—perhaps the plainest thing he says about himself:

"Mother — this commentary, laid at your feet, which you yourself caused to be made, which opens out the meaning of your Names: may it be for your delight."

The verse's second half is a curse in traditional form, directed toward one who worships Her yet will not even keep a copy of the work. Read as an author's parting plea for his life's labour, its heart is simple: he is asking that the book be read.

The Promise of No Difference · pp. 434–435

This is among the highest teachings in the chapter, and it is easily missed.

First comes a caution about measurement. Lalitā alone, the verse says, knows the fruit of worshipping Her own chakra. How could Brahmā and the others fully know it when their understanding is small beside Hers? By the text's own account, the fruits named throughout the chapter are indications, not a complete inventory.

He stops first on the words every month. The verse could have said every full moon; it says every month, and that is how it says for as long as you live. The phrase is then carried down into the verses after it, which is how those observances become lifelong as well. And with these means with any one of the flowers already named.

Then comes the promise. Of one who worships with these Names at every full moon, the text says that he becomes of Her form and She of his. Lest this be taken as a figure of speech, it adds that no difference exists between them at all. The verse goes further: to impose a difference there is itself the fault.

Bhāskararāya follows the teaching to its end. If there is no difference, then what is called dying does not belong to him either. He answers through the Śruti rather than argument: his breaths do not depart; they are gathered in, right here. To insist upon a real difference after this is, he says, to oppose scripture with reasoning that cannot stand. This is why the verse calls it not merely a mistake, but a fault.

Beside this stands a nearer doorway. For one who worships the Devī at the centre of the chakra with the thousand Names on Mahānavamī, liberation is said to rest already in the hand. Bhāskararāya unfolds this day by day: worship on one day brings dwelling in Her world; on two, Her form as well; on three, nearness too; and on all four, union with her. He is candid about the standing of that ladder: the text does not set it out, and he is drawing it from the shape of the thing. He leaves a second way of taking it open beside his own — that the four kinds of freedom answer instead to the fourfoldness of the nine nights themselves.

Who May Receive—and Why He Spoke at All · pp. 432–433, 440, 445

A short passage explains who should receive gifts, framing the matter not as charity but as recognition. One who knows the king of mantras, worships the Śrī Chakra and recites the Names is recognised by the wise as a worthy vessel. If the wish is to please the Devī, gifts should be offered there with care. The text speaks bluntly about one who does neither — who neither recites the Names nor knows the fifteen-syllabled mantra — and asks the discerning to consider carefully before giving. It is worth noticing which way that falls: the one who recites is not the person the verse is speaking about.

Because the passage may sound harsher than intended, Bhāskararāya gives it two limits. The rule binds a worshipper of Lalitā; the governing words are "by one who wishes to please the Devī." It does not restrict anyone else's giving. He also explains that the familiar statement—when the Śāmbhavī circle is engaged, all castes are twice-born—does not concern who may receive a gift. It applies only to who may be touched during worship and should not be stretched beyond that setting.

Before the ranking comes the reason for it. There is no mantra like the Śrī mantra-rāja, the text says; no deity like Lalitā; no hymn like the secret thousand Names. He notices what the verse has done: it has made the three of them each other's only measure, because there is nothing else to measure them against. That, he says, is the answer to anyone who asks why these three should be what makes a person fit to receive. The as and the so may also be read the other way about.

He offers a patient gradation rather than dividing everyone into two groups. Three qualities make the vessel: knowing the mantra, worshipping the chakra and reciting the Names. Because chakra worship cannot occur without the mantra, the expected eight combinations become six. All three together are best. Next come the pairs, with mantra and Names placed above mantra and chakra. Then come the single qualities, with mantra alone above the Names alone. It is worth saying plainly what this passage is and is not. It ranks who is the worthier vessel for a gift. It is not a rule about who may recite the Names. Nor does he let the harsh word in it stand unexamined. There are two beasts inside it, he says. Of the five the verse addresses, three do hold the knowledge and simply never worship or recite — their knowledge, being unused, is as good as absent, and they are beasts only in the old figure that calls an unlearned man one. It is the other sense, the four-footed one, that he keeps for the one who merely recites and the one who has none of the three. Even when the text calls a gift to the unfit fruitless, Bhāskararāya preserves degrees: for some, the particular fruit is absent; for others, no fruit comes. If the best recipient cannot be found, he says, give to the middling. Though reached through reasoning, he treats this as an instruction — and he has a warrant for doing so: the Pulastya-smṛti counts four kinds of instruction, and the fourth is the kind that has its root in reasoning.

Two further teachings appear near the close. Those living in any of the four stages of life should recite the hymn always, for a practical and compassionate reason: it makes good what falls short in the keeping of their duties. Why should it? Because every observance the scriptures lay down bears its fruit only for someone able to bring all of its parts together, and bringing all the parts together is, for most people now, next to impossible. Then he lets the Mother answer in her own words, from the Devī Bhāgavata, where she says to the gods: by the uttering of my name in all the sacrifices you shall be always satisfied and content. And he ends that passage with something easy to walk past. The recitation turns out to be two things at once: done for the rite's sake, making whole what the rite left short — and done for the person's sake, with a fruit entirely its own. It is not only a repair. It stands by itself as well.

Why these Names rather than others? All holy names remove wrongdoing, Bhāskararāya says, but among lights that dispel darkness there are degrees: the firefly, fire, moon and sun. This does not diminish any sacred name; it speaks only of degrees of light.

He also answers the harder form of the question. If this recitation repairs what other observances leave incomplete, are the other sacred books unnecessary? Before he answers he says why the question arises at all, in a line from his own hymn to Śiva: to an eye covered over by the spectacles of appearance, even a small stroke looks large. Nobody is being blamed there; the eye is simply wearing something. It is a gentle image for a hard question. Then the answer, which is broad-minded. People are not alike: one is drawn to a demanding way, another to a gentler one. So the Goddess herself made all those books, out of a wish to favour all those people. None is without purpose. Quietly, he adds that they also lead a person around to this.

He is careful, too, about whom “anyone else” names, and the care runs in the reader's favour. Not everyone outside that circle: those given to disregarding the thousand Names — worshippers in appearance only. He does not soften the never, though. Not even, he says, at the occasions of priestly service and the rites for the departed that scripture itself lays down; even there it is those devoted to the worship who are wanted.

Hayagrīva then places the whole chapter in its true setting. He did not speak on his own. Lalitā Herself prompted the teaching. Having said this, he meditated upon Her; his heart drowned in bliss, and the hair of his body stood on end.

Why the Hymn Reaches Further · pp. 421, 439, 443–444

Three passages explain the reasoning behind the chapter's claims. Because they offer arguments rather than promises, they are easily passed over.

Everyone's practice is incomplete. The difficulty of this age, Bhāskararāya says, is the incompleteness with which people keep their observances—and this includes not only the smaller parts, but the principal act itself. He gives two examples, and the first is the blunter. An offering is at bottom a particular resolve of the mind — and it comes about merely by saying the words clearly enough, this is for Agni, not mine. The outward act can be complete while the inward act it consists of is not there at all. Then the daily sandhyā, where the principal act is contemplation of the mantra's meaning: the not-two-ness of the awareness in the sun and the awareness within oneself. Even among the learned who know this secret, he says, such contemplation happens sometimes and not always. The lapse is therefore not simply carelessness; it is unavoidable and shared by all. Ordinary expiations address failures in the supporting parts. When the principal act is missed, the rule is simply to perform it again. This recitation, he says, makes good both kinds of incompleteness. He places it above the expiations not because other observances do not matter, but because none is kept perfectly.

It reaches past the highest limit. Of one who worships at the full moon, the chapter says that nothing in the three worlds is difficult to obtain. Bhāskararāya makes the comparison exact. Even one who keeps the highest worship taught in the upaniṣads, and to whom high and low fruits come—one by whose mere will the ancestors are said to rise—still has something beyond reach: the sovereignty over the world that Vedāntins may only wish for. For the worshipper described here, he says, even that is near. The claim is not simply that the hymn gives more. It is that the promise stops nowhere.

Even arriving here is rare. Near the close, Bhāskararāya gives a ladder from the Rudrayāmala, where each step is reached through the one before it. Through the gathered merit of many births, a person comes to initiation. Among those initiated, through much good fortune, devotion to Śiva and Viṣṇu arises. Among those, through much merit, comes the state of Śakti; among those, through great blessing, the state of Sundarī; and among those, through still further blessing, the fourth. And the ladder does not end there: one rung further, and it is the rung this whole chapter stands on — even within that, the recitation of her Names is rarer than all the rest. Then it turns from rarity to promise: in whatever birth she, the eternal, is pleased by the recitation of her names, freedom is there while one still lives, and nothing is left to be done. He is not measuring the reader. He is revealing the grace already present in having come this far.

Who May Keep the Great Ninth Night

Mahānavamī worship receives the longest single explanation in the chapter. Much of it establishes which nights are meant: the last two of the nine, understood as the union of Śiva and Śakti. The eighth joined to the ninth, and the ninth to the eighth, form what Bhāskararāya calls almost the Half-Woman-Lord's own day. The eighth is worshipped at midnight — he gathers text after text for that one, and of the contrary opinion he says only that it is the babbling of the blind. Of the ninth he says something much lighter: that some hold it is worshipped by day.

And the two nights are not two observances. Each arises on its own, yet neither bears its fruit apart from the other — the Bhaviṣyottara speaks of worshipping the world-mother on the eighth and on the ninth as one thing done. From that he draws his settled point: this is a rite of its own, and not a part of the nine nights.

It also comes round twice. The nine nights are kept in autumn and again in spring, and he establishes it patiently — from the Mārkaṇḍeya, from the Rudrayāmala, and from the Devī Bhāgavata, where the Devī tells Sudarśana to hold the festival in Caitra and in Āśvayuja alike. So the eighth and the ninth fall twice in a year, and those are the four days the chapter goes on to count.

The most memorable sentence concerns who may worship. Here, Bhāskararāya says, everyone has standing. Rather than paraphrase, he quotes the Bhaviṣyottara at length: the Devī is to be worshipped in every place, every town, in every house by those given to Śakti, in every village, in every forest — by brāhmaṇas, kṣatriyas, vaiśyas and śūdras; by devoted mlecchas; by every class of people on earth; and by women. Notice where those places are. Not a temple among them — every house, every village, every town. The worship is put where people actually live.

He will not let the widest words stay vague, either. Mlecchas means the śabaras, the kirātas, the pulindas. And others means those born of mixed parentage, either way about. In this worship, he says plainly, people of every birth have standing. He is naming, one by one, the people a rule of that time would have kept outside.

He adds one steadying condition, not as a restriction but as guidance: each should worship according to the custom of their own line. The form of the Devī held within a family's tradition is the form that family should worship. The door is opened as widely as possible, and each person enters through the path already known.

Other Treasures in the Chapter · pp. 424, 427–429, 432

Several further teachings remain, and none should pass in silence.

When the chapter promises joy with sons and grandsons, Bhāskararāya notes that "every prosperity" had already included them. Why, then, are they named again? They are not being added to a list; they are being seated at the table. The words show that the enjoyment is done together with them, not experienced alone — and the table he seats them at is wider than sons and grandsons: great-grandsons, kinsmen, servants, all who depend on the house. Here, in the same verse, means this earth, and he takes that word for the measure of the promise, since only merit of an extraordinary intensity is said to bear its fruit inside the life that earned it. All good fortune he opens out as offspring, wealth, health, learning and strength.

Where the chapter promises union "at the end," Bhāskararāya does not assume that the end is near. What he stops on first is the phrase prayed for even by Śiva and others. That is what sounds the note of a liberation reached together with Brahmā, and he quotes the Kūrma Purāṇa for it. Only then does the second reading of "at the end" follow — from that, and not the other way about. He supplies one thing more the verse leaves unsaid: having gone by the path of the gods. And he reads hardest of all to reach as the mark that this union is the last of them. It may mean after this body falls. It may also mean the end of Brahmā's age, when, according to the Kūrma Purāṇa, those who are ready enter the supreme state along with Brahmā himself at the great dissolution. He preserves both readings without choosing between them and adds: a delay of that length is no fault in it.

Of one who recites even once in a lifetime, the chapter says: everyone who comes within his sight is freed. Bhāskararāya does not soften the words. He takes them to mean every living being that enters that person's sight. Whatever else the hymn is held to bring to the one reciting, this promise is entirely about others.

Near the end comes the chapter's widest doorway. The thousand Names may be written in a book, and the book itself worshipped. Bhāskararāya is precise about who this is for: this verse, he says, is for those who are not the regular devotees — the regular devotees being those who have received the mantra and the Names from a Guru, with their meaning. So the promise here is made expressly to the one who has received nothing, and what is promised is that Sundarī is pleased with them. It is one of the plainest signs in the chapter that the door is not bolted.

The chapter's measures of merit extend beyond the passages quoted above. Beside a crore of liṅgas at Kāśī, a crore of gifts of gold at Kurukṣetra during an eclipse, a crore of horse-sacrifices on the bank of the Ganges and a crore of wells dug in a waterless desert, it places one more: feeding a crore of learned people every day through a famine, with the highest faith, for one thousand parivatsaras. Bhāskararāya unfolds the arithmetic: one parivatsara is a twelve-year cycle, making twelve thousand years without interruption. Against each immense measure, the chapter places the recitation of a single Name.

A short verse asks a question rather than making a promise: without reciting this hymn, how shall one be a devotee at all? Elsewhere, the simplest form of worship is given plainly: worship with the five offerings, and then recite.

The chapter also contains rites concerned with worldly influence—the drawing of another person's regard, the winning over of one in authority, and similar aims—each with its days and conditions. They are acknowledged here so that the account remains faithful to the text, but their instructions are not reproduced. Because they concern acting upon other people, this shrine does not pass them on. They remain available in the commentary itself.

How Śrīpura Receives These Promises

Everything above belongs first to the voice of the tradition, preserved alongside its page in the original edition.

Śrīpura neither diminishes these promises nor adds to them. The phalaśruti is received as a sacred inheritance, with reverence for the world of devotion, worship and faith from which it comes.

Yet Bhāskararāya points toward something deeper still.

The fruit of recitation ripens fully with artha-jñāna—knowing the meaning of what is lovingly recited.

And this is why Śrīpura exists.

It is a sanctuary for rasikas—those who delight in the Divine Mother's Names—where each Name may be contemplated, savoured and received with joy in the boundless glory it reveals.

Meaning need not remain in the intellect alone. Through devotion, understanding becomes intimate; contemplation becomes remembrance; and remembrance ripens into love.

Śrīpura is therefore a place where the thousand Names may be not only recited, but entered—Name by Name—so that their meaning may deepen devotion and give love a sacred path toward the Divine Mother.