A Hundred Times

qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review

Here the text turns and speaks about itself, which is what a phala-śruti — a "fruit-hearing" — does: a closing stanza stating what comes to whoever recites the thing they have just been reciting.

Look first at what is being counted. Pāṭha is recitation, from paṭh, to read aloud; a pāṭha of a text is one complete run through it, start to finish. Sata is śata, a hundred. So the number is not a hundred repetitions of a line or a hundred days — it is a hundred complete passes through forty verses, and whatever else is uncertain about the stanza, the size of that is not.

Baṃdi is bondage, from bandh, to bind: confinement, the state of being held. The Chalisa does not say what the binding is, and printed commentaries fill it in differently — imprisonment in the literal sense, and the round of birth and death, are both standard readings and neither is forced. Chūṭahi is to be let go, to slip free, the ordinary verb for getting out of something.

What can be said with certainty about the sentence is which half of it is specified. The result is given in the broadest possible terms — released, great happiness — while the condition is given as an exact number. That asymmetry is the form's own habit: what it is precise about is the practice. The reward it leaves large.

It is worth noticing that a text willing to name a number here is a text that was already named after one. Cālīsā is from cālīs, forty, and the poem is called after its own length. Counting is native to it.