Breath

Narpati Jayacaryā

The medieval encyclopedia of svara applied to war, march and question — the eight name-svaras, the twenty svara-cakras, the eighty-four diagrams and the eighty-four grounds — and the text that names the seven Yāmalas.

The Narpati Jayacaryā Svarodaya — "Narapati's Treatise on Victory-Conduct by the Rising of the Breath" — is the great medieval encyclopedia of svara-śāstra applied to war, journey and question. It is also the text that preserves the seven-Yāmala citation on which the whole cross-stream picture rests.

Author, place, patron

The author names only himself. At the second verse he says he is "known in the world under the name Narapati", and that the work is called the Narapati-Jayacaryā. Everything else comes from the commentary, whose praise of the poet is the only biography the tradition preserves: his father was Naradeva — the form Nṛdeva also occurs — described as a knower of many āgamas, honoured by kings, expert in the fruits of svara, in the constitution of the body, in the science of omens and in tantra and mantra, and a master of calculation. The family's seat is given as Dhārāpurī in the Mālava country — Dhārā, the capital of the Paramāras. The composition itself, however, is placed elsewhere: at the city of Āsāvallī, in the reign of Śrī Ajayapāla.

Both places carry weight. Dhārā under the Paramāras was one of the great learned courts of the subcontinent, and its most famous king, Bhojadeva — who reigned in the first half of the eleventh century — was himself the author of works on poetics, architecture and Śaiva doctrine, the Tattvaprakāśa among them, which makes him a figure of the Śaiva Āgama as well as of Mālava politics. A family honoured at that court and expert in āgama, omens and calculation is exactly the kind of family this book comes from. Āsāvallī, where the writing is placed, lay on the Sābarmatī in Gujarat; it was refounded as Ahmedabad in 1411 and its earlier name went out of use, which is part of why the reference has been read carelessly.

The governing thesis is stated at the outset and never abandoned. An army complete in all four arms — foot, horse, elephant and king — is broken all the same if its king is hīna-svarodayī, deficient in the rising of the breath (8). A victory won without a knower of svara is ghuṇākṣara, the letters a wood-worm makes by accident (10). A kingdom with no master of this science is a plantain trunk, hollow through (11). And then the maxim the tradition quotes above all others:

The seven Yāmalasसप्त-यामल

At the third verse Narapati names his sources, and the passage from which the whole cross-stream picture derives is the first half of it:

The list runs on for three more verses, through the Svarārṇava, the Svarabhairava-paṭala, a Raṇa-tantra, a Jaya-paddhati and a dozen more, most of them now lost; and it closes with the author declaring that having seen the essence of all these śāstras he will draw out that essence sarva-sattvānukampayā, out of compassion for all beings (7). Narapati does not name the seven Yāmalas themselves — that is the Subodhinī commentary's contribution, and it names them Brahma, Viṣṇu, Rudra, Ādi, Skanda, Kūrma and Devī. Between them they open the Śaiva, Śākta, Vaiṣṇava and Kaumāra streams, so that the streams are held together by the tradition's own citation rather than by a comparison assembled afterwards. The work's colophons return the compliment, calling it a Yāmalīya Svarodaya — a svarodaya of the Yāmala kind.

The eight name-svarasनाम-स्वर

Narapati's most distinctive apparatus is that a person, an army or a king can be reduced to a vowel. Five vowels do all the work — a, i, u, e, o, numbered one to five — and the reduction is made in eight independent ways, so that any party to a contest carries eight svaras at once. The warrant is stated as metaphysics rather than technique: nothing can be named or uttered without the mātṛkā, the alphabet-mother, so the sounded world is pervaded by her, and therefore all fortune and misfortune arises from the svara (2.5). That is why a name — not a birth-moment — can be the primary datum.

Mātrā-svaraमात्रा

The vowel of the name's first syllable, reduced to the five. The text defines "name" functionally and rather beautifully: the sound by which a sleeping man is woken, and by which, when called, he comes. It is the calling-name that counts, not the formal one.

Varṇa-svaraवर्ण

The name's first consonant, looked up in a grid of thirty-five cells — the five vowels as column-heads, the thirty consonants written across in rows. A name beginning with a conjunct takes its first member, a rule the text ascribes explicitly to the Brahmayāmala. The commentary holds this svara to be supreme over all the others.

Graha-svaraग्रह

The svara of the lord of one's rāśi. The twelve signs are distributed among the five vowels and the sign's ruling planet inherits the column. Note that this distribution is not the same as the one used for the Rāśi-svara; the two maps must not be conflated.

Jīva-svaraजीव

The first genuinely arithmetical form. Every letter of the name, vowel and consonant alike, is given a number by its place in its varga; the numbers are summed and divided by five, and the remainder is the svara.

Rāśi-svaraराशि

The rāśi again, but distributed at navāṃśa resolution, so that three of the twelve signs straddle two vowels and are split by ninth-part.

Nakṣatra-svaraभं

The birth-asterism, the twenty-seven grouped seven and then five, five, five, five — and counted from Revatī, not from Aśvinī, which is one of the marks of this literature.

Piṇḍa-svaraपिण्ड

The numeric values of the Varṇa- and Mātrā-svaras added into a piṇḍa, a lump, and divided by five for the remainder.

Yoga-svaraयोग

The capstone: the seven preceding values summed and again divided by five. It is the single figure into which the whole apparatus resolves.

Four of the eight need nothing but the name; the other four need the birth-asterism, or, in a question, the Moon of the moment. The verdict is then read by contest. The odd vowels a, u, o are oja, male, and beat the even i, e, which are yugma, female; where the class is the same, the tie is broken by the avasthā, the age at which each svara is standing — Yuva over Kumāra over Bāla over Vṛddha over Mṛta — and where even that is level the reading is sama, and the counsel is treaty rather than battle. The rule of engagement follows: strike when the enemy stands in his dead svara and you in your young one.

The twenty svara-cakras

The eight name-svaras are the first eight of a set of twenty, and the remaining twelve are made not of names but of time and place. Every unit of the calendar is assigned its own vowel, so that a moment can be described as a stack of svaras from the widest cycle down to the instant.

The working order is hierarchical rather than democratic: the time-svaras set the frame, the name-svara and its avasthā resolve the contest within it, and the nostril actually running at the moment of action casts the deciding vote — with the Varṇa-svara held supreme across every time-frame.

The Cakrādhyāya and the eighty-four diagrams

The third chapter is the book's centre and its most demanding part: the construction and reading of eighty-four cakras, diagrams on which a question or an engagement is judged. Narapati catalogues them by name in his opening chapter (20–32) and then builds them one by one.

Diagrams of this family are not Narapati's invention. Grids on which the letters of the alphabet, the asterisms and the signs are laid out and then read by vedha are common property of the timing literature, and they go on being used in it long after him — the standard muhūrta compendium, Rāma Daivajña's Muhūrta Cintāmaṇi of 1600, works with apparatus of the same kind. What is distinctive in the Jayacaryā is the scale of the collection and the use to which it is put.

The head of the series is the Sarvatobhadra, the ekāśīti-pada or eighty-one-celled square, and it alone runs to a hundred and eleven verses. Ten lines each way make the eighty-one cells; the sixteen vowels are set four times round from the north-east, the twenty-eight asterisms seven to a side beginning in the east, the consonant-groups to the four quarters, the twelve signs three to a direction, and the five classes of lunar day with their planetary lords at the centre. It is then read by vedha, piercing: each planet casts three glances — left, front and right — assigned by its motion, a retrograde planet glancing right, a swift one left, a mean one straight ahead; a cell so struck is viddha, and the planet's strength in the sign it occupies determines how hard. What follows is a long series of further diagrams — the Śatapada of a hundred and eight cells, the Kūrma cakras that lay the earth out on the cosmic tortoise, the Padma with its nine continental divisions, the seven Kālānala or time-fire cakras, the eight Koṭa or fortress cakras distinguished by shape, three Mātṛkā cakras, and the army and weapon cakras of elephant, horse, chariot and array, spear, sword, knife and bow.

The eighty-four groundsभूमि-चक्र

The fourth chapter, the Bhūbalādhyāya, is the one for which the book was most consulted. A bhū-bala is the "strength of the ground": each of the eighty-four bhūmis is a Yoginī or Śakti conceived as standing in one of the directions and rotating through them at a fixed rate — by month, fortnight, day, watch, half-watch, muhūrta or ghaṭikā. The verdict is positional. A bhūmi standing behind and to the right gives victory; standing to the left and facing it breaks the one who marches — with certain bhūmis reversing that polarity, which is why the list must be known and not merely counted.

The count is eighty-four, stated in the opening chapter and confirmed at the close of the fourth — and the attribution is explicit:

The names that follow are the Śākta geography itself. The list opens with the four great seats — Auḍrī for Oḍḍiyāna, Jālandharī, Pūrṇā for Pūrṇagiri, Kāmā for Kāmākhyā — and runs on through the fierce protectresses, Mahāmārī, Kṣetrapālī, Caṇḍī, Bhairavī, Kālī, Mātaṅgī, then the victory-grounds Jayalakṣmī, Mahālakṣmī, Jayā, Vijayā, Trailokyavijayā, and the descriptive ones, Khecarī the sky-goer, Bhūcarī the earth-goer, Vaḍavā the submarine mare. A text of cremation-ground goddess worship thus underwrites a medieval science of military movement, which is a fair measure of how far this material travelled — and the Brahmayāmala is named for it by name.

Their place in the system is precise. Where the name-svaras and the cakras leave the enemy equal or superior, victory is to be sought by choosing the ground (1.34). The bhūmis are the tie-breaker: the answer given when a king asks not whether he will win but how he might. Different theatres draw on different scales of bhūmi — the month-bhūmi for a sea engagement, the day-bhūmi for single combat, the watch-bhūmi for a siege, the finest of them for a pitched battle face to face.

The shape of the book

Narapati sets out his own plan in the opening chapter: six limbs — the svara-cakras, the cakras, the grounds, the remaining strengths, jyotiṣa and śakuna, the science of omens (1.16). Alongside it he names the five jewels a king should keep about him: a knower of svara, a knower of omens, an astrologer, a master of mantra, and one versed in the Kerala school of question-answering (1.15) — the svara-man placed first, the horoscoper third.

A colophon describes the work as ṣaḍaṅge saptādhyāye — six-limbed, in seven chapters — while the four named above are the ones the tradition ordinarily counts. The closing rites, which occupy a substantial run of the printed text, appear to make up the remaining three.

Svara and the planets

The relation to ordinary jyotiṣa is competitive in its rhetoric and cooperative in its practice. Narapati undertakes to expound the entire tri-skandha — calculation, mundane astrology and horoscopy — inside his own treatise (1.54), and the fifteen verses that follow run through planetary computation, dignity and aspect, the daśās, transit and vedha, the muhūrta apparatus, eclipses, shadow-astronomy, the divisional charts, and the omens of the twitching body with their appeasements. He closes the syllabus by calling jyotiṣa a lamp that dispels the dark of delusion.

The subordination is nonetheless real, and it is structural rather than polemical. Planetary positions enter the system chiefly as input: it is the planets' current asterisms, their motion and their dignity that generate the piercings read on the Sarvatobhadra and the rest of the eighty-four. Jyotiṣa supplies the data; svara supplies the verdict; the grounds supply the tie-breaker.

There was a long-established literature doing precisely this job without the breath, and it is the one Narapati is displacing. Vārāhamihira, in the sixth century, wrote the Yogayātrā and the Bṛhadyātrā — full treatises on the astrology of the military expedition, on when a king should march, how the army should be arrayed, and what the omens of the road mean — alongside the Bṛhat Saṃhitā and the Bṛhaj Jātaka that made his name. Bhaṭṭotpala commented on him in 966, and it is largely through that commentary that the earlier yātrā material stayed in circulation. Narapati's originality is not the subject; it is the substitution. Where Vārāhamihira reads the sky before a march, the Jayacaryā reads the vowel of a name and the nostril of the king — and then, having done so, expounds the whole of jyotiṣa anyway, in case the reader should need it.

The commentaries

Jayalakṣmīजयलक्ष्मी · Harivaṃśa Pāṭhaka

The Sanskrit commentary, named for one of the eighty-four grounds. Its author names himself in his own opening verses and again in the final colophon: having heard variously from his teachers, he composes the ṭīkā called Jayalakṣmī according to his understanding. No date for him is recoverable. It is not a paraphrase but a supplement, and repeatedly carries doctrine the root text omits — the placement of the steps on the Siṃhāsana cakra, for instance, is supplied entirely by the commentary at a point where the mūla says outright that it has not been stated.

Subodhinīसुबोधिनी · Gaṇeśa Datta Pāṭhaka

A modern Sanskrit-and-Hindi commentary, published at Varanasi in the Kashi Sanskrit Series in 1971, whose author names himself in an inserted benedictory verse. It is the source of much of what is usually quoted as the book's own — the identification of the seven Yāmalas, the completion of the eight name-svaras with the Nakṣatra-svara, the canonical list of the twenty svara-cakras, the full enumeration of the eighty-four, and the worked examples on the names Devadatta and Sadānanda by which the arithmetic is learned.

The text has been printed more than once — notably with the Jayalakṣmī at the Śrī Veṅkaṭeśvara press in Bombay, under the editorship of Khemarāja Śrīkṛṣṇadāsa, who put a great deal of the Purāṇic and tantric literature into cheap type in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; and with the Subodhinī at Varanasi in 1971. The two witnesses differ in readings often enough that a given verse may need both; and where they differ the mūla governs, except where the mūla is silent, in which case the commentary is all there is.

Neither printing is a critical edition, and no critical edition exists. No manuscripts of the Jayacaryā have been described in print, no collation published, no stemma proposed. The two commented editions are witnesses to a printing tradition rather than to a manuscript tradition, and where they agree that is evidence of a shared exemplar and not necessarily of a good reading. For the dating of the astronomical and astrological authors this book touches, and for the manuscript record behind them, the standard reference remains David Pingree's Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit, issued in five volumes between 1970 and 1994.