शिवप्रातःस्मरणस्तोत्रम्

Dawn in this literature is a threshold rather than a time. The word used is prātaḥ, which means early, at first light, and the hymns of this genre are placed there deliberately: before the day has been touched, before speech has been spent, at the point where a person is closest to having no position yet. The instruction that comes with them is usually to say them before rising, or immediately on rising, and the fourth verse of this hymn says exactly that.

What makes this one worth reading closely is that its three verses do not repeat each other. They change register, in order, and the change is the argument.

The first verse is entirely image. Bearer of the Gaṅgā, riding the bull, lord of Ambikā, the skull-topped club and the trident in his hands along with the two gestures that mean have this and do not be afraid. Every word of it is something you could draw. This is the god as he is seen.

The second verse drops the picture and gives function instead. Lord of the mountain, half his body the mountain's daughter, the cause of emission and maintenance and dissolution, the first god, the lord of all. Nothing here is visual except the half-body, which is doing different work: it says that the god being described is not complete without somebody else in him. This is the god as he operates.

The third verse takes both away. One, endless, primordial, to be known through Vedānta, spotless, the Person, great, free of distinctions beginning with name, empty of the six changes. That last phrase is a technical one and it is the sharpest thing in the hymn. The six changes are the six bhāva-vikāras, the six things that happen to anything that exists in time: it is born, it is, it grows, it alters, it wanes, it perishes. Vārṣyāyaṇi's list, quoted by Yāska in the Nirukta, and the standard Sanskrit account of what it means to be a thing at all. To be empty of the six is not to be a very long-lasting thing. It is to be outside the category.

So the hymn moves from the god you can picture, to the god who does things, to the god of whom nothing can be predicated. And then all three verses end on the same line, unchanged. Whatever register you are in, the claim is the same: this is the one medicine for the disease of being born, and there is no second one.

That medical figure is not the poet's invention, and it is much older than the hymn. Rudra in the Ṛgveda carries remedies; he is called jalāṣabheṣaja, the one whose medicines are cooling, and the Śrī Rudram addresses him as the best of physicians. The same god sends the fever and holds the cure, which is not a contradiction the tradition tries to resolve. It is the point. A god who is only kind is not much use against something that is coming for you anyway.

And saṃsāra is named as the disease, not as a condition or a fate. The word is from sam and √sṛ, to flow together, to run through: the running-around, the wandering from birth to birth. Calling it a roga puts it in the same category as an illness, which means it has a cause, a course and a cure, and it is a way of thinking that Indian religion shares with Indian medicine and with Buddhism, where the four truths are set out in exactly the shape of a diagnosis.

Who wrote it is another matter, and the honest answer is that nobody knows.

The ascription that circulates almost everywhere is to Ādi Śaṅkarācārya, and it should be treated with the suspicion any such ascription deserves. Śaṅkara is where short, memorable, broadly Advaitic hymns go when their author has been forgotten, and this one has the profile: three tight verses, a Vedāntic third verse, no internal signature, no colophon naming a poet.

A second name is in circulation, and it is more interesting. The Sanskrit Documents archive catalogues the hymn not under Śaṅkara but under Śrīdhara Veṅkaṭeśa, better known as Ayyāval, who was born in Mysore in 1635 and died in 1720. His father had been Diwan of Mysore; when the post came to him on his father's death he refused it and walked south instead, through the Śaiva temples of the Kāverī delta, and settled at Tiruviśanallūr in the Thanjavur Maratha country. He is remembered with Bodhendra Sarasvatī and Sadāśiva Brahmendra as one of the three figures the bhajana tradition of the south is built on.

The story attached to him is the one worth telling here. He gave away food that had been prepared for a śrāddha, the rite for the dead, to a starving man who came to the door. The orthodoxy of the village held that this had polluted him and that nothing short of bathing in the Gaṅgā would put it right, which was a demand to walk fifteen hundred miles. He did not go. He is said to have stood at the well of his own house and recited the Gaṅgāṣṭakam, and the Gaṅgā to have risen in the well. People still bathe there on the new moon of Kārttikai.

There is a resonance in that which is hard to miss and which should not be pushed too far. The first verse of this hymn calls Śiva gaṅgādhara, the one who holds the Gaṅgā in his hair. The tradition that remembers Ayyāval sings gaṅgādhara gaṅgādhara after his compositions, and means him. The epithet came back.

It would be a good ending if the attribution held. It does not, quite: the standard list of Ayyāval's twenty-odd works does not include this hymn, so the catalogue entry is an attribution and not a citation. What can be said is that the ascription to him is at least a specific claim about a specific man who wrote a great deal of Śaiva verse, while the ascription to Śaṅkara is what gets written when nothing is known. We print the traditional name, mark it as attributed, and record the other one here.