Lalita Tripura Sundari

The Vedas do not know Lalita. There is no hymn to her and no goddess of that name. The Shri Vidya teachers find her there all the same: the eighteenth-century scholar Bhaskararaya reads a verse of the Rigveda (5.47.4) as hiding her sixteen-syllable mantra. That is their reading. What the texts show is a goddess who comes into view late, in Tantric and Puranic works of the second half of the first millennium and after, and who gathers into herself the power, Shakti, that the Vedic hymns to Vac and Aditi had begun to praise.

Her story belongs to the Lalitopakhyana, the closing book of the Brahmanda Purana, translated into English by G. V. Tagare in 1958. Ludo Rocher reckons that the Purana reached its present shape about 1000 CE and was revised after that; the Lalitopakhyana has no firmer date of its own. It names Kanchi as the place where Agastya met his teacher, and it closes with chapters on the glory of Kamakshi there.

The Lalita Sahasranama, which tradition places in the same Purana, was explained by Bhaskararaya, a Shri Vidya scholar born in Hyderabad who settled in Tamil Nadu. He finished his commentary, the Saubhagya Bhaskara, in 1728. Douglas Renfrew Brooks, the modern scholar of Shri Vidya, calls him an encyclopedic writer.

The Saundarya Lahari, a hundred verses on the beauty of Tripura Sundari, is attributed to Adi Shankara. It has more than thirty-six Sanskrit commentaries, Lakshmidhara's of the sixteenth century the best known, and W. Norman Brown translated it for the Harvard Oriental Series in 1958.

In stone, the Kamakshi temple at Kanchipuram may go back to the Pallava kings and was rebuilt in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries; tradition says Adi Shankara set up the Shri Chakra before her. At Udaipur in Tripura, Maharaja Dhanya Manikya built her shrine about 1501, on a hill shaped like a tortoise's back, and it is counted among the fifty-one Shakti Pithas, where the right foot of Sati fell.