Lalitopakhyana

Forty chapters on a goddess, attached to a Purana that had already finished, and numbered so that nobody would notice.

The stitch

The Brahmanda Purana is built in four sections, called padas. Prakriya has five chapters, Anusanga thirty-three, Upodghata seventy-four, and Upasamhara, the closing section on dissolution and recreation, has four. Four, and then the Purana is done.

The Lalitopakhyana begins at chapter five.

G.V. Tagare, who translated the whole Purana for Motilal Banarsidass, saw what that means and said so in his preface. The Lalita episode “starts with ch. 5, that is, in continuation of the ch. number of the Upasamhara, evidently to show that it was a part of Brahmanda Purana.” Somebody wanted this to read as original. Which is how the forty chapters come to be numbered five through forty-four, and why a citation to “Lalitopakhyana 43” means the forty-third chapter of a continuous count and the thirty-ninth chapter of the Lalitopakhyana proper.

Tagare gave three reasons for thinking it was added. The Lalita story opens with a fresh mangalacharana, a benediction, and a text does not bless itself twice in the middle. It drops the Purana’s frame and replaces it with a new pair of speakers, the horse-headed Hayagriva teaching the sage Agastya. And it stops without an epilogue, which a Purana section does not do. His conclusion: “it was quite an independent work which was added to the Brahmanda text.”

What it does not tell you

Nobody can date it. Tagare gives no date anywhere. The Brahmanda Purana’s own core is usually placed around the fourth century and its present structure around the year 1000, and the Lalitopakhyana sits at the end of that structure, but that is the container rather than the contents. Dates in circulation for this text, including a sixth century that appears in a good deal of writing about Sri Vidya, do not trace to a source. The honest answer is that it is undated.

What is in it

Bhandasura, formed from the ashes of the god of desire after Shiva burned him, ruling the three worlds for sixty thousand years. The gods offering themselves into the Maha Yagna fire, and Lalita Tripurasundari rising out of it with noose, goad, sugarcane bow and five flower-arrows, on a throne whose supports are the five cosmic functions. The army she generates from her own weapons, chapter eighteen, each commander emerging from a weapon rather than from an abstract quality: Sampatkari from the goad, Ashvaroodha from the noose, Matangi from the bow, Varahi from the arrows. Bala Tripurasundari, nine years old, from the heart, who kills Bhandasura’s thirty sons over the mother’s objection. Then the long architectural passages on Sripura, the goddess’s city, chamber by chamber, which are what the navavarana puja traverses in reverse.

The closing chapters turn from narrative to practice. In Tagare’s ordering, thirty-six and thirty-seven walk the inner apartments of the Cintamani chamber, thirty-eight the royal mantra, thirty-nine to forty-one the goddess Kamakshi, forty-two the mudras, forty-three the types of initiation and the true service of the preceptor, and forty-four meditation on the goddess.

One correction the record should carry

The figure who shapes the ashes into a man is Chitrakarma, a commander of the Rudra Ganas. Bhaskararaya glosses the name as “Ganesa, the skillful worker”, meaning lord of the ganas, and later abbreviated retellings have read that as Ganesha the elephant-headed son of Shiva. The canonical text says Chitrakarma.

The name of the section

The same section of the same Purana is called four things. Indian printed editions, including the Nirnaya Sagar text of 1918, call it the Uttara Khanda. Tagare’s preface calls it the Uttarabhaga, Part IV. The Motilal catalogue calls it the Upasamhara-pada. Others simply say the fourth section. They are all the same place, and a reader chasing a citation across editions should know it.

Editions

The Sanskrit text was printed at the Nirnaya Sagar Press in Bombay in 1918, edited by T.N.K. Tirumulpad, 464 pages, and is in the public domain. G.V. Tagare’s English translation runs across the last two volumes of the Motilal Banarsidass Brahmanda Purana, numbers twenty-five and twenty-six in the Ancient Indian Tradition and Mythology series, the first thirty chapters in one and the last ten in the other; it is in copyright and should be cited rather than quoted. R. Ananthakrishna Sastry’s Adyar Library edition carries the Hayagriva-Agastya material alongside the Lalita Sahasranama and Bhaskararaya’s commentary on it.

Where the thousand names are

The Lalita Sahasranama is not one of these forty chapters, which is why a reader who goes looking for it in Tagare will not find it. It is three chapters of its own, in the same Uttara Khanda and the same Hayagriva-to-Agastya dialogue: an introductory chapter, the names, and a phala chapter on what recitation is good for. R. Ananthakrishna Sastry gives the three together as 320 slokas. The forty chapters and the three are neighbours in the same section of the same Purana, and they are not the same work.