Tripura Sundari: The Beauty of the Three Cities

After the cremation grounds, the throne room.

The treatise has spent two chapters in the dark, with Kali and Tara, among corpses and severed heads. The third Mahavidya turns the whole register over. She is beauty, and not beauty as decoration: beauty raised to the rank of a first principle, beauty as the highest name the absolute can be given. She is Tripura Sundari, the Beautiful One of the Three Cities, and where the Kalikula makes Kali the root of the ten, the Srikula, the family of Sri, makes her the supreme, the head of all the rest.

Three names, one goddess

She is called Tripura Sundari, Shodashi, and Lalita, and a reader should fix at once that these are one goddess, not three. Tripura is “three cities,” read variously as the three states of waking, dream and deep sleep, the three worlds, the three strands of nature, or the three points of her yantra; she is the beauty that pervades all triads. Shodashi means “the sixteen,” for the sixteen syllables of her highest mantra and the sixteen digits of the moon. Lalita means “she who plays,” the maker of the cosmic game. The Mahavidya lists use these names interchangeably, which is exactly why a careless count arrives at eleven goddesses instead of ten.

Beauty with a bow

Her dhyana shows her radiant red or rose-gold, “shining with the light of the rising sun,” a young woman of sixteen, luminous and serene. In her four hands she holds a bow of sugarcane and five arrows of flowers, a noose and a goad. The symbolism is precise and inward. The five flower-arrows are the five senses, or the objects of desire; the sugarcane bow is the sweet mind that looses them. The noose is attachment, the power that binds and captivates; the goad is the power that drives and controls. She holds desire and its mastery in the same two hands.

Her throne is the image the tradition loves most. She is seated on a couch whose four legs are the great gods, Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra and Ishvara, with Sadashiva himself as the plank of the seat, and the jewelled crowns of the gods are said to fall in worship at her feet. The whole divine order is the furniture of her chair. It is the Srikula’s claim made visible: she is the sovereign of all, not third among ten.

And her truest form is not a body at all. It is the Sri Yantra, the Sri Chakra, the figure of nine interlocking triangles radiating from a central point, the most famous diagram in all of Hindu sacred geometry. She is the goddess who resides in it, and its unfolding from the central bindu outward is the unfolding of the universe, while the meditator’s movement inward toward the point is the path home. The treatise on Sri Vidya in this library takes up that yantra in full; here it is enough to know that her supreme form is a pattern of pure relation, beauty as structure.

The names that open the hymn

Her great text of praise is the Lalita Sahasranama, the thousand names of Lalita, drawn from the Brahmanda Purana and carrying the towering eighteenth-century commentary of Bhaskararaya, brought into English in the public-domain edition of Ananthakrishna Sastry. The hymn opens by naming her Sri Mata, the auspicious Mother; Sri Maharajni, the great Queen; and Srimat Simhasaneshvari, the Empress enthroned on the lion-seat. Mother, queen, empress: the first three names already place her at the summit of tenderness and of sovereignty at once.

Her core mantras belong to Sri Vidya, the fifteen-syllable Panchadashi and the sixteen-syllable Shodashi, the most guarded formulas in the Shakta world. They are received only by initiation, and this treatise names the families and their syllable-counts exactly as the published scholarship does, and reproduces no operative mantra.

The queen who went to war

Beauty in this tradition is not passive. Her great narrative, the Lalitopakhyana of the Brahmanda Purana, is a war epic. The gods perform a cosmic fire-sacrifice, and from it Lalita arises, enthroned in her jewelled city within the Sri Chakra, to destroy the demon Bhandasura, who was born from the ashes of Kama, desire, after Shiva burned the love-god, and who embodies the ego grown monstrous. Lalita leads her armies, her commander-goddesses among them, and slays him, and in slaying the demon born of scorched desire she restores desire to its right place, as the sweet bow in her own hand. The most beautiful of the ten is also a conqueror.

Beauty as a metaphysics

What the tradition means by her is the hardest thing for a modern reader to take seriously, because we have learned to treat beauty as surface. The Srikula means the opposite. Her loveliness is saundarya raised to the rank of the real: being, consciousness and bliss, sat-chit-ananda, experienced as the irresistible attractiveness of what is ultimately true. The hymn attributed to Shankaracharya in her honour is called the Saundarya Lahari, the Wave of Beauty, and it treats her beauty as a flood that carries the worlds. To meet her is to discover that the deepest reality is unbearably beautiful, past merely true and merely good, and that the pull we feel toward beauty was always, secretly, the pull toward her.

She is worshipped most strongly in the South, at Kamakshi in Kanchipuram, through the Sri Vidya lineages carried in the Shankaracharya monastic tradition, and wherever the Lalita Sahasranama is chanted, which is everywhere in the Tamil and Telugu and Kannada and Malayalam-speaking lands.

Two chapters in the dark, and now a throne of the gods.

The next face is gentler still: the goddess whose body is the world.