Rite, scripture and the epic

Āgama is a word for what has 'come down' (it also means a coming, an arrival): a teaching received through a line of teachers, and, in the later use, the books that lay down how the Lord is to be worshipped. For the Vaiṣṇavas the chief of these is the Pāñcarātra, a body of texts called saṃhitās, among them the Sātvata, the Pauṣkara and the Jayākhya, which teach the worship of the Lord, the making and care of His image, and the forms in which He is known. The name Pāñcarātra is read as 'five nights', but its sense is not settled and has been taken in more than one way.

Pāñcarātra speaks of the Lord as Vāsudēva in His supreme form, with three emanations from Him, Saṅkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna and Aniruddha; and it speaks of five ways in which He is present to souls: in His supreme state, in the emanations, in His descents, as the Lord within the heart, and in the temple image. It has been a major influence on Śrīvaiṣṇava thought, and Parāśara Bhaṭṭar finds the same fivefold order in the thousand names, the first run of them describing the supreme form. Some temples are tied to particular saṃhitās, Śrīraṅgam among them.

The hymn has the word in the name Kṛtāgamaḥ, which stands twice (664 and 798). At its first place He is the Giver of the sacred teaching, who in mercy makes known the way to Himself. At its second, since āgama also means a coming, He is the One whose every coming into the world is His own doing and not the result of past deeds, and who likewise made the teaching by which souls learn to worship Him.

The Anuśāsana Parva is the thirteenth of the eighteen books of the Mahābhārata, the Book of Instruction. Anuśāsana means instruction, and a parva is a book or section; the other books are parvas too, the Bhīṣma Parva with the Bhagavad Gītā among them. In this one Bhīṣma, lying on the bed of arrows, teaches Yudhiṣṭhira the duties of kings, of officers and of every kind of life, the worth of gifts and the honour due to cows, and at its end he leaves the world.

The Sahasranāmam comes late in this long teaching. Yudhiṣṭhira, having heard all the dharmas, asks the question beneath the rest: who is the one God in the world, and what is the one final refuge? Bhīṣma's answer is the thousand names of Viṣṇu, with the verses on their fruits. The book closes with Bhīṣma's own departure, once the sun has turned north.

The bed of arrows (śaraśayyā) is where Bhīṣma lay after Arjuna's arrows brought him down on the tenth day of the great war. So many pierced him that they held his body clear of the ground, and he rested on them as on a couch. The epic tells that Arjuna set three arrows under his head for a pillow and, when the old warrior asked for water, drew it up from the earth with a shaft. Bhīṣma had the gift, from his father Śantanu, of dying only when he chose, and he chose to wait until the sun turned to its northern course, the auspicious half of the year. By his own words in the epic, fifty-eight nights had passed when the time came for him to go.

The whole Sahasranāmam is spoken from that bed. Yudhiṣṭhira comes there with Kṛṣṇa, with Vyāsa, Nārada and a great company of sages sitting round, and by Kṛṣṇa's boon the pain and the clouding of mind fall away from the old warrior, so that Bhīṣma can teach. The tradition tells that Kṛṣṇa was present when the names were spoken, so that the One praised was among those who heard His praise. In the name 'with the wheel in His hand' (1001), near the end of the hymn, some commentators also hear how Kṛṣṇa once took up a chariot wheel in the war to keep Bhīṣma's vow.

The Bhagavad Gītā is the 'Song of the Lord': the teaching that Kṛṣṇa gives to Arjuna from the chariot, between the two armies on Kurukṣētra, when Arjuna's courage fails at the start of the war. It has eighteen chapters and seven hundred verses, and stands in the Bhīṣma Parva, the sixth book of the Mahābhārata. Sañjaya, who was given the gift of seeing the war from afar, tells it to the blind king Dhṛtarāṣṭra.

It teaches how to act without clinging to the fruit of the act, how to know the Self as other than the body, and how to love the Lord and give oneself to Him; the tradition hears these as the ways of action, of knowledge and of devotion. The Śrīvaiṣṇava teachers read it through Rāmānuja's commentary, which Vēdānta Dēśika's Tātparyacandrikā explains further, and count it with the Upaniṣads and the Brahma Sūtras as one of the three foundations of Vēdānta. They treasure above all its final teaching, which they call the carama śloka: the Lord asks Arjuna to give up every other support and come to Him alone, and promises freedom from all sin.

The thousand names turn to it again and again. Mādhava (170) is one of the names by which Arjuna addresses the Lord in it; the Aśvattha (831) is the tree that Kṛṣṇa says He is among trees; the Bearer of the burden (854) recalls the promise to bring His devotees what they lack and to keep what they have. The recitation closes with three of its verses: Sañjaya's last verse, and two in which the Lord speaks, to carry the welfare of those who think of Him alone and to come into being age after age.

Gōkula, from go, cow, and kula, herd or fold, is the cowherd settlement where Kṛṣṇa passed His childhood, in the care of Nanda, chief of the herdsmen, and of Yaśōdā, the wife of Nanda. The country round it is called Vraja. The tradition places it on the Yamunā near Mathurā, and a town called Gokul stands there today. In the Purāṇas the word can mean the herd itself, or the camp where it is kept.

The thousand names remember it. The Lord of the cows and the earth (500), the Benefactor of the cows (601) and the Master of the senses and the herds (602) recall the boy who tended the cattle; the Guardian of all (603) recalls the hill Gōvardhana, lifted to shelter the cattle and the people of Gōkula from the storm; and the Slayer of Kēśin (658) recalls the horse that Kaṃsa sent against the child in Vraja. The Tamil tradition sings of the same village under the name Āyppāḍi: in her Tiruppāvai Āṇḍāḷ, the Āḻvār, imagines herself one of its girls, keeping the vow of the month of Mārkaḻi with her friends in order to reach the Lord.

Hastināpura was the capital of the Kuru kings, the seat of the Kauravas and then of the Pāṇḍavas. The name is usually taken to mean 'city of elephants', from hastin, an elephant, and pura, a city; another account names it for a king called Hasti. A town of the name stands in the Meerut district of Uttar Pradesh, on the Gaṅgā, and is held to mark the old city, though how far it is the city of the epic is a question for historians.

In the frame of the hymn Yudhiṣṭhira is king at Hastināpura after the war, and the victory weighs on him. Kṛṣṇa tells the king that Bhīṣma will soon leave the world, and that a great knowledge of duty will leave the world with the old warrior; so the king goes out from the city to Kurukṣētra, to the bed of arrows, to learn. The questions he asks there are the ones the Sahasranāmam answers.

Kurukṣētra means the field of the Kurus. The Purāṇas say it was named for the ancient king Kuru, an ancestor of both the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas. It is also called dharmakṣētra, the field of dharma, and the land of the Gītā. It lies in the plains of what is now Haryana, and a town of the name stands there today. The epic tells that the great war was fought on it. Kṛṣṇa spoke the Gītā to Arjuna there, between the two armies, and Bhīṣma fell there and lay on the bed of arrows.

The thousand names touch the field only lightly. Dhanañjaya (669) is the Winner of wealth, and also the name of Arjuna, His friend, whose chariot the Lord drove on Kurukṣētra. The last verse of the Gītā, which Sañjaya speaks near the end of the recitation, names Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna together, as they stood on that field.

The Mahābhārata is the great epic of the Bharata people: the story of the Kuru house, of the quarrel between the Kauravas and their cousins the Pāṇḍavas, and of the war on Kurukṣētra that ended it. The tradition ascribes it to the sage Vyāsa and counts it as eighteen books, with the Harivaṃśa added as a supplement that carries the life of Kṛṣṇa further. Its traditional length is over a hundred thousand verses, which makes it one of the longest poems in the world. It calls itself an itihāsa, a word that means 'so indeed it was', an account of how things came to pass.

The Sahasranāmam stands in its thirteenth book, the Anuśāsana Parva, as the answer that Bhīṣma gives from his bed of arrows. The epic reaches the reader through nested tellings: the sage Vaiśampāyana, a pupil of Vyāsa, tells it to King Janamējaya at his serpent sacrifice, and the bard Sauti tells it again to the sages gathered at Naimiṣa. That is why the chapter of the hymn opens with a line in Vaiśampāyana's voice. The Bhagavad Gītā stands in the sixth book of the same epic.

The thousand names themselves remember its author. The tradition holds the sage Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana, Vyāsa, to be the Lord's own descent, and the name Vyāsa (581) recalls Him dividing the one Vēda into four and giving the Mahābhārata to the world.

Naimiṣa is the forest of sages where the Mahābhārata was told a second time. Śaunaka, a sage of that forest, held a sacrifice that lasted twelve years. The bard Sauti, son of Lōmaharṣaṇa, came to it and, at the sages' asking, recited the epic as Vaiśampāyana had told it to Janamējaya. Every hearer after that, and so every reader of the Sahasranāmam, receives the hymn through this telling, for the hymn is a part of the epic.

The forest is identified today with Nimsar on the Gomatī river, in the Sītāpur district of Uttar Pradesh. The name is explained from nimiṣa, 'a twinkling of the eye': an army of asuras is said to have been brought down there in an instant. The Purāṇas too are held to have been first told there, to a great gathering of sages. The Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition counts Naimiṣāraṇya among the 108 holy places that the Āḻvārs sang, and Tirumaṅgai Āḻvār sang of it.

Purāṇa means 'old' or 'of former times', and the Purāṇas are the books of ancient accounts. The traditional mark of a Purāṇa is that it tells of five things: the making of the world, its remaking after dissolution, the lines of gods and sages, the ages of the Manus, and the histories of the royal houses. The tradition counts eighteen great Purāṇas and as many lesser ones, and credits Vyāsa with gathering them, as it does the epic.

Several are Vaiṣṇava in heart. The Viṣṇu Purāṇa, which the tradition ascribes to the sage Parāśara, and the Bhāgavata, with its tales of the Lord's descents and of Kṛṣṇa's childhood, are drawn on by the commentators of this hymn. The Harivaṃśa, the 'line of Hari', is not one of the eighteen but a supplement to the Mahābhārata, and tells more of Kṛṣṇa and the Yādava house.

The names meet them in small ways. The name Pṛthu, the Vast (414), recalls King Pṛthu, from whom the earth takes the name Pṛthvī, and whom the Purāṇas remember as the Lord's own manifestation.

A sacrifice, in Sanskrit yajña (from yaj, 'to worship, to offer'), is worship by offering. In the Vēdic rite ghee, milk, grain and other gifts are poured into a sacred fire with mantras, for the gods to whom they are given; what is poured is the oblation, haviḥ. Priests carry the rite out: the hōtṛ recites the invocations, the adhvaryu does the work of the rite and gives the offerings, the udgātṛ sings the Sāman chants, and an overseer watches the whole. The one for whom the rite is done, who sponsors it, is the sacrificer, yajamāna or yajvā.

The hymn names the Lord by this one word again and again. He is the oblation poured (haviḥ, names 362 and 706; the Great Offering, mahāhaviḥ, name 686); the Sacrifice itself (yajñaḥ, names 449 and 974; mahāyajñaḥ, name 685); the Sacrificer (yajvā, name 976; mahāyajvā, name 684); and the Lord of sacrifice (yajñapatiḥ, name 975). Its limbs are His limbs (name 977). He carries it through, bears it, makes it and owns it (names 978 to 981), enjoys what is offered and is the means by which it is completed (names 982 to 984), and He is the secret within it (yajñaguhyam, name 985). Parāśara Bhaṭṭar points for this to the Vēdic saying that the sacrifice is Viṣṇu, and the tradition holds that every offering goes to Him in the end.

The word reaches further than the priest's fire. In the Gītā's teaching, which the name at 974 recalls, any act done as an offering to the Lord and without clinging to its fruit is a sacrifice, so that the reciter's own daily work may be one. The frame of the hymn speaks in the same spirit of the one who worships Him always and offers his sacrifices to Him alone (pv-5).

A Sāman is a sung melody of the Sāma Vēda, the Vēda of song. Almost all its verses are verses of the Ṛgvēda set to melodies and sung in the sacrifice by the singer priests, the udgātṛs. The same word, sāma, also means gentleness, the soft way of dealing with another.

The hymn gives the Lord to the Sāman in four names: trisāmā, praised in the three Sāman chants (name 584); sāmagaḥ, the singer of the Sāman (name 585); sāma, the Sāman itself (name 586); and sāmagāyanaḥ, the singer of the Sāman chants (name 991). Kṛṣṇa says in the Gītā that among the Vēdas He is the Sāma Vēda.

Parāśara Bhaṭṭar hears in the name sāma the Lord who ends, from a root meaning 'to end', the sins of those who sing of Him; and teachers hear in the singer, sāmagaḥ, the Lord who sings the Sāman Himself in the joy of His own experience, as the freed souls sing it in His highest abode. The sweetness of the chant is His own, and the gentleness that the word also means is His way with those who come to Him.

The three Sāman chants are the three great melodies of the Sāma Vēda that the name trisāmā takes up (name 584): the Bṛhat, the Rathantara and the Vāmadēvya. Teachers of the hymn commonly name them so, and read the name as the Lord whom these three chants sing; that is why the hymn calls Him praised in the three Sāman chants.

The nyāsa uses the name twice. It is the hymn's heart (ny-2), and, joined with sāmagaḥ, the singer of the Sāman, and sāma, the Sāman itself, it is the hymn's armour (ny-6): three names that find the Lord in the chanting of the Sāman.

Some teachers divide the three in other ways. In every reading the chants are sung to Him, and He is the One they sing of.

Sāṅkhya is one of the oldest systems of Indian thought. Its name is taken to mean 'reckoning up': it counts the tattvas, the principles of which the world is made. In its classical form it counts twenty-five: primal matter, the twenty-three things that unfold from it, from the intellect and the sense of selfhood down to the mind, the organs and the elements, and the spirit, which is other than all of them. Its aim is release: the spirit's coming to know itself as other than matter, and so to be free of sorrow.

The tradition ascribes the teaching to the sage Kapila, and the commentators on the hymn count a sage of that name as a descent of the Lord. The name Kapilācārya (538) recalls the sage born to Kardama and Dēvahūti, who taught his mother the way to freedom. In the fruits of the hymn Sāṅkhya stands beside yōga as the reasoned knowledge of the principles, one of the branches of knowledge that all come from Janārdana. The Śrīvaiṣṇava teachers count three realities, matter, souls and the Lord who is the inner ruler of both.

Śāstra comes from the root śās, which means both to command and to teach. It names an order or a precept, an instruction, and a book or body of teaching that carries authority: the Vēdas themselves, the law books, and the sciences and arts each have their śāstra, and the ending -śāstra marks the subject, as in dharma-śāstra, the teaching of right conduct.

In the fruits of the hymn the śāstras are named beside the Vēdas, yōga, Sāṅkhya and the crafts, among the kinds of knowing that all come from Janārdana. The name Śāstā, the Ruler and Teacher (209), takes the same root: all things go by His command, the Vēdas and śāstras are His word, and He teaches the way, as He taught Arjuna.

The Upaniṣads are the closing portions of the Vēdas, where the teaching turns from the rite to the knowledge of the Self and of the Lord. The word is taken to mean 'sitting down near': the pupil sits close to the teacher and receives what is not given to a crowd, which is why it is also rendered 'secret teaching'. Because they stand at the end of the Vēdas they are called Vēdānta, and the tradition counts them the first ground of its understanding of Brahman. The usual list holds a hundred and eight, and about a dozen of these are called the principal ones.

The names of this hymn lean on them often. The Hidden One (549) is the secret of the Upaniṣads; the Light within the Sun (572) and He of golden hue (746) recall the golden Person seen within the sun's disc; the fair-winged Companion of the soul (862) recalls the two birds that sit as friends on one tree; He of a hundredfold bliss (626) recalls the Upaniṣad's count of bliss in steps of a hundred; and He who goes beyond words (914) recalls the words that turn back from Him without reaching the end of Him. The Śrīvaiṣṇava teachers read all these, with the Brahma Sūtras and the Gītā, as speaking of one Lord, Nārāyaṇa, whose body the souls and the world are.

Vaṣaṭ is the cry of the Vēdic fire sacrifice. When a verse of offering ends, the priest who recites, the hōtṛ, calls out vaṣaṭ, and at that call the priest who does the work of the rite, the adhvaryu, throws the oblation into the fire. The cry is made for the god to whom the offering goes.

In this hymn the word stands in the third name, vaṣaṭkāraḥ (name 3). The first śloka joins it by sandhi to the name before it: viṣṇurvaṣaṭkārō reads as viṣṇuḥ and vaṣaṭkāraḥ. In the sense of the rite, the name tells that He is the One for whom the call is made, and to whom every offering truly goes.

The Śrīvaiṣṇava teachers, following Parāśara Bhaṭṭar, hear more in it. He derives the name from the root vaś, 'to rule as one wills', and reads it as the Lord who directs everything and everyone as He wills, which carries on the thought of the names before it. Ādi Śaṅkara hears in it the sacred call itself, so that the Lord is the very sound at which offerings are given, a holy word like ōṃ.

Vēdānta means the end (anta) of the Vēdas. It named first the Upaniṣads, which stand at the close of the Vēdic books, and then the teaching drawn from them. That teaching has three sources which the schools of Vēdānta generally read: the Upaniṣads, the Brahma Sūtras, which set their thought in order, and the Bhagavad Gītā. The schools differ on how the soul, the world and the Lord are related; Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita and Dvaita are the best known.

The Śrīvaiṣṇava Vēdānta is Rāmānuja's Viśiṣṭādvaita. It is called ubhaya vēdānta, the twofold Vēdānta, because it rests on the Sanskrit texts and on the Tamil hymns of the Āḻvārs together. The title of the teacher Vēdānta Dēśika, 'the teacher of the Vēdānta', and his other title Nigamānta Mahādēśika, the great teacher of the end of the Vēdas, name the same learning. In the fruits of the hymn the brahmin who recites it is promised that he will come to know the Vēdānta.

The Vēdas (vēda means 'knowledge', from the root vid, 'to know') are the four oldest collections of sacred hymns and formulas: the Ṛgvēda of verses of praise, the Sāmavēda of chants, the Yajurvēda of sacrificial formulas and the Atharvavēda. Each has layers: the hymns themselves, the explanations of the rites, the forest texts and, at the end, the Upaniṣads, which are called the Vēdānta, 'the end of the Vēda'.

The tradition calls them śruti, 'what is heard', and holds that no person made them: the seers beheld them, and teachers passed them on by voice from one generation to the next, long before they were written. Vyāsa is traditionally the one who arranged them in four, which is why he is called Vēdavyāsa, and the invocations of the hymn honour him so. Learning the Vēdas has six limbs, one of which is the science of metre.

The Śrīvaiṣṇava teachers hold that the Vēdas are the Lord's own word, going forth from Him like a breath, and that all of them speak of Him. So the hymn calls Him the Vēda itself (vēdaḥ, name 130) and its Knower (vēdavit, names 131 and 134), the One whose limbs are the Vēdas (vēdāṅgaḥ, name 133) and the Knower of the four (caturvēdavit, name 780). To know the Vēdas truly, in this reading, is to know the aim to which all of them point.