Rudram — in parts, over several pages
The popular claimThe Namakam bows to Rudra three hundred times. The Camakam asks for three hundred things. This is the map.
Śrī Rudram is what the priests are chanting through the abhiṣeka at a Śiva temple — the long, rolling text with the word namaḥ on every second beat. It is one of the oldest continuous liturgies in the world, and it is not one text but two.
The two halves
Namakam — the namaḥ chapter — is Taittirīya Saṁhitā 4.5, eleven anuvākas (sections). It is the Śatarudriya, the hymn of a hundred Rudras, so called because it addresses Rudra by hundreds of names and in hundreds of places: as the archer, as the lord of thieves, as the one in the trees and the rivers, as the potter and the smith, as the dust and the dwelling, as the one who is in the dog-keepers and the dogs. Nearly every clause is namaḥ — obeisance — to Rudra as something.
Camakam — the ca me chapter — is Taittirīya Saṁhitā 4.7, also eleven anuvākas. Each clause is [something] ca me — and [this] for me. It is a request-list of almost everything: breath and speech and sight, strength and the body, grain of every named kind, cattle of every kind, the numbers one to thirty-three in odd sequence and four to forty-eight in fours, the sacrifices and their parts. Where the Namakam bows, the Camakam asks.
They are chanted together because the Namakam is understood as propitiation and the Camakam as the petition that follows it.
The Namakam's build
The first anuvāka is different from the rest: it is addressed to Rudra as the archer and asks him to unstring the bow, to turn the arrow aside, to be śiva — gracious; the word appears there as an adjective, not a name. Anuvākas two to nine are the litany proper, each a run of namaḥ clauses, grouped by theme — the lord of places, the lord of trades, the lord of animals, the lord of the directions. The tenth returns to petition: do not harm our elders, our children, our cattle. The eleventh counts the Rudras by thousands in every direction and asks them to keep their bows unstrung.
Where the five syllables are
In the eighth anuvāka: namaḥ śivāya ca śivatarāya ca — obeisance to the gracious one, and to the more gracious one. The pañcākṣarī — namaḥ śivāya — is lifted from the middle of this clause, and the tradition holds it to be the heart of the Veda for that reason. A reader can find it: it is at the centre of the central section of the Namakam.
The Camakam's build
Anuvākas one to three are the body — its powers, its limbs, its life. Four is grain and food. Five is stones, earth, fire, the materials. Six is the gods' shares. Seven is the sacrifice and its instruments. Eight is the fires. Nine is the sacrifice's parts again, with the sacrificer's own body. Ten is the animals. Eleven is the numbers — ekā ca me tisraś ca me — one and three and five and so on to thirty-three, then four and eight to forty-eight, and the commentators explain the sequences as the odd numbers of the Vedic year and the even of the sacrificial fee. It ends with the wish that all these be for me through the sacrifice.
The recitations
One pass of Namakam plus one of Camakam is a Rudram. Eleven Namakams with one Camakam anuvāka after each is an Ekādaśa Rudram, or Rudraikādaśinī. Eleven of those — a hundred and twenty-one Namakams — is a Laghu Rudra. Eleven Laghu Rudras is a Mahā Rudra; eleven of those is an Ati Rudra, 14,641 Namakams, which takes many priests many days and is the largest liturgy in the tradition. The Rudrābhiṣeka at a temple is usually one Rudram or one Ekādaśinī, the water or milk poured for its length.
The other recension
The Śukla Yajurveda has its own Śatarudriya, Vājasaneyī Saṁhitā chapter sixteen, which is the same hymn in a somewhat different order. Northern temples on the Śukla side use it; the Taittirīya text is the southern and the common one.
The twenty-two pages
Each anuvāka of the Namakam has its own page in this section — Rudram, anuvāka 1 through anuvāka 11 — and each anuvāka of the Camakam likewise — Camakam, anuvāka 1 through 11 — with the Sanskrit, the words opened, and Sāyaṇa's reading of the harder names. This page is the map of the whole, so that a reader arriving at anuvāka five knows where it sits.
What this page does not say
It does not say that the Rudram's recitation yields anything, and it does not choose between Sāyaṇa's, Bhaṭṭabhāskara's and Abhinava Śaṅkara's readings where they differ, which they do on many names. It lays out what the two chapters are, how they are built, where the five syllables sit, and how the counts are made. The anuvāka pages will do the rest.
Source — Taittiriya Samhita 4.5 (Namakam, eleven anuvakas) and 4.7 (Camakam, eleven anuvakas), Krishna Yajurveda; Sayana's bhashya on the Taittiriya; the Shatarudriya in Vajasaneyi Samhita 16 for the Shukla recension; Abhinava Shankara's and Bhattabhaskara's commentaries on the Rudram
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