qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
You are the house that every good quality lives in, and you are beautiful. You rose out of the ocean of milk, the day it was churned like a butter churn.
The fourteen treasures that came up out of that sea — without you, nobody gets a single one of them.
The samudra-manthana, the churning of the ocean, is one of the great set-pieces of Purāṇic literature: Mount Mandara as the churning-stick, the serpent Vāsuki as the rope, devas hauling on one end and asuras on the other, and out of the churned milk-sea, one after another, the fourteen ratnas the Purāṇas most often count — the moon, the wish-granting cow, the celestial physician with the pot of amṛta, and among them Śrī, who rises on a lotus and chooses Viṣṇu.
Two things in that story are doing work here.
The first is that she surfaces through the effort of opponents. The devas alone could not churn the ocean; they needed the asuras on the other end of the rope. Abundance, in this telling, does not descend from a clear sky. It is what surfaces when something gets worked long enough and hard enough, by people who were not cooperating willingly.
The second is the ordering. She is herself one of the fourteen, which lets the line be heard a second way: that the rest arrive only where she does. This is the same logic as the verse about the yajña: she is not the prize at the end of the list, she is the condition for the list.
One more phrase: śubha-guṇa mandira, "temple of auspicious qualities." A mandira is where something is housed. The good qualities are not hers to hand out; they live in her, and this is the second time the aarti has used the image of a dwelling. Verse 4 asked her into the house. Here she is the house.
What is something good that only happened after a lot of boring work?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made