Lalita Sahasranama

Three chapters and three hundred and twenty verses, of which the middle chapter is the one everybody knows.

What it is

A thousand names of the goddess Lalita Tripurasundari, set in anushtubh metre, sitting in the Uttara Khanda of the Brahmanda Purana in the same Hayagriva-to-Agastya dialogue that carries the Lalitopakhyana alongside it. The three chapters are an introductory one, the names themselves, and a phala chapter on the fruits of recitation. The forty chapters of the Lalitopakhyana and these three are neighbours, and they are separate works.

The text names its own ritual apparatus, which is unusual and useful. The rishis are Vasini and the other seven goddesses of speech, the Vagdevis, who compose the names on the Goddess’s own command. The metre is anushtubh. The deity is Tripurasundari. A practitioner performing nyasa assigns them to head, mouth and heart before beginning.

Why the first ten names matter

The litany opens Srimata, holy mother; Srimaharajni, great empress; Srimat Simhasaneshvari, empress on the lion-throne; Chidagni kunda sambhuta, born from the fire-pit of pure awareness; Devakarya samudyata, risen for the work of the gods.

That is not a general invocation. It is the emergence scene of the Lalitopakhyana compressed into five formulae: the gods besieged, the fire, the goddess rising from it for their sake and taking the throne. Anyone reciting the opening of the Sahasranama is reciting a precis of the narrative next door, whether or not they have read it.

The commentary

Bhaskararaya’s Saubhagya Bhaskara, completed in 1728 at Benares, is the commentary that opened the text, and it is the earliest on the Sahasranama that can be securely dated. It runs past a thousand pages in modern editions and is built in twelve sections, each named for a kala, a digit of the sun, mirroring its author’s solar name.

It is not the only one. Manuscript catalogues register about a dozen Sanskrit commentaries on the thousand names, among them the Jayamangala of Bhattanarayana, which survives in manuscripts from Baroda to Travancore and has been printed, and the Cidvilasa of Vimarshanandanatha. None of them has been dated. Sastry, who catalogued them at the Adyar Library and whose list every later account repeats, was careful about this: “We do not know how many commentaries were written before this.” Whether any of them is older than Bhaskararaya is genuinely open.

Editions

Vasudev Lakshman Sharma Pansikar’s Nirnaya Sagar Press edition prints the text with the Saubhagya Bhaskara and with the Bhaskaravilasam, the 113-verse verse biography of Bhaskararaya by his disciple Jagannatha. R. Ananthakrishna Sastry translated the text and the commentary into English for the Theosophical Society’s Adyar Library, and that volume has been reprinted continuously since the 1920s. It remains the standard English route into the commentary.