The Demon in the Fire

Before any of the commentators - before Bhaskararaya at Bhaskararajapuram in 1728, before Vidyaranya at Sringeri in 1380, before Adi Shankaracharya at the library door in the 8th century, before Jayaratha in Kashmir in the 13th, before Ishvarashiva at Shura Matha in the 9th - there is a story the Brahmanda Purana tells about how the Goddess came to be present in the universe at all.

The text beneath the tradition

The story is the centre of the Lalitopakhyana - the section of the Brahmanda Purana’s Uttara Khanda that comprises chapters 5 through 44. The Lalitopakhyana is the textual ground on which all subsequent Sri Vidya thought is built. The Lalita Sahasranama sits inside it. The Lalita Trishati - the three hundred names of the Goddess - sits inside it. The descriptions of the city of Sripura, the geometry of the Sri Yantra, the inventory of the Goddess’s retinue, the mantras to be used in her worship - all sit inside it. To understand why the Sri Vidya tradition holds the texts and rituals it holds, one has to understand what the Lalitopakhyana says happened.

What it says happened begins, paradoxically, with desire and its destruction.

The asura born from ashes

In an earlier kalpa - an earlier cycle of cosmic time - Shiva was in deep meditation, and the gods, threatened by a demon called Tarakasura who could be killed only by Shiva’s son, needed Shiva to awaken, marry Parvati, and beget Kartikeya. The gods sent Kamadeva, the god of love - also called Manmatha, the Churner of the Mind - to fire one of his five flower-arrows at Shiva to stir him toward Parvati. Kamadeva did. The arrow struck. Shiva opened his eyes, looked at what had struck him, and opened his third eye. Kamadeva was incinerated. Only ashes remained where the god of desire had stood.

The ashes did not remain ashes for long. Chitrakarma, one of Shiva’s pramatha ganas - in the version preserved in the Brahmanda Purana - came upon the heap of ashes and, in play, gave them human shape. Shiva, seeing the form, found it pleasing and granted it life. The figure of ashes stood up. He had been formed from the residue of desire, and so he carried, in his being, an absolute hunger that nothing could satisfy.

Brahma, looking at this newborn, said the Sanskrit word bhand - “well done.” The name stuck. The being became Bhandasura. The Asura Whose Name Means Well Done.

Bhandasura performed long penance for Shiva. Shiva, who had created him, was disposed to bless him. The boons Bhandasura asked for and received included a transfer of half the strength of every god he faced in battle into Bhandasura himself, and the mastery of maya - illusion. With these, Bhandasura conquered the three worlds. He subdued Indra and the Devas. He established his capital city, Shunyaka - the City of Emptiness - and ruled from it for sixty thousand years. The cosmos was, in effect, under the rule of a being who had been formed from incinerated desire and granted invincibility by the very god who had incinerated him.

The gods had a problem.

She emerges from the fire

In the Lalitopakhyana’s telling, they did what gods in such situations do. They performed a great sacrificial fire. They called it the Maha Yagna, the Great Sacrifice. They poured oblations into it. They invoked, by mantra and meditation, the highest power they could conceive of - Parashakti, the Supreme Power - to manifest from the fire and resolve the situation.

From the fire she emerged.

The text describes her with a level of specificity that the Sri Vidya tradition has spent twelve hundred years meditating on. She was the colour of the rising sun. She had four arms. In her hands she held a noose, a goad, a sugarcane bow, and five flower-arrows - the same flower-arrows, the tradition notes, that Kamadeva had once carried, returned now to the hand that had originated them. She wore red garments. She was seated on a throne. The throne was not on the ground. The throne rested on the bodies of the five great gods - Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra, Ishvara, and Sadashiva - each of whom held one of the five cosmic functions of creation, preservation, dissolution, concealment, and grace. The throne, in other words, was the cosmos itself. And the figure seated on it was the Goddess to whom the cosmos itself was the seat.

She is called, in the Lalitopakhyana, by many names. The first is Lalita - She Who Plays. The Padma Purana explains the name with the gloss: “Having passed beyond the worlds, she plays; hence she is called Lalita.” The second is Tripura Sundari - The Beautiful Lady of the Three Cities. The “three cities” have been read by the tradition as the three realms (earth, atmosphere, heaven), the three states of consciousness (waking, dreaming, deep sleep), the three bodies (gross, subtle, causal), and ultimately the three modes of any cognition (knower, known, knowing). She is the beauty that comprehends all three. The third name is Rajarajeshvari - Empress of Emperors. The fourth is Mahatripurasundari - The Great Beautiful Lady of the Three Cities. There are nine hundred and ninety-six more.

Her army of emanations

She did not battle Bhandasura alone. The Lalitopakhyana describes her army with a forensic specificity that has provided source material for centuries of iconography and ritual. From her own person she emanated other goddesses. From her heart emerged Bala Tripurasundari - the Young Tripurasundari, a girl-goddess who, in the eventual battle, would kill all thirty of Bhandasura’s sons. From her kundalini - the coiled energy at the base of the spine in the tantric anatomy - emerged Gayatri. From her ego emerged Varahi, also called Dandini, with the head of a boar, who would command Lalita’s armies as commander-in-chief. From her intellect emerged Matangi, also called Mantrini or Shyamala, who would serve as prime minister. From the goad in her hand emerged Sampatkari, mounted on an elephant. From the noose emerged Ashvaroodha, mounted on a horse. Others followed - Nakuleshvari, Jvalamalini, the Nityas, the eight Vagdevis (Vasini, Kameshvari, Aruna, Vimala, Jayani, Modini, Sarveshvari, Kaulini) who would later compose the Lalita Sahasranama on her command. Shiva himself manifested at her side as Kameshvara - the Lord of Desire - assuming the role of her consort, the masculine counterpart to her feminine totality. The army that gathered around Lalita was not an army of separate beings. It was the Goddess in her many-formed completeness, each form differentiated from the central form for a specific function.

Four days at Shunyaka

The army moved on Shunyaka. The battle is described as taking four days. Hundreds of akshauhinis of demons - each akshauhini comprising 21,870 chariots, 21,870 elephants, 65,610 cavalry, and 109,350 infantry, the standard Mahabharata-era count - defended the city under Bhandasura’s brothers Vishukra and Vishanga and his thirty sons. Lalita rode into battle on a chariot. The chariot was the Sri Chakra - the Chakraraja Ratha, the Royal Chariot Wheel - the same geometric diagram that the entire Sri Vidya tradition would later worship as the Goddess’s subtle form. The diagram was, in the founding myth, a vehicle.

The battle’s specific moments have been kept in the tradition. Bala Tripurasundari killed Bhandasura’s thirty sons. Matangi killed Vishanga. Varahi killed Vishukra. Before he died, Vishukra placed on the battlefield a jaya-vighna-yantra - a diagram designed to paralyse - and the entire army of Lalita froze, except for Lalita herself, Bala, Kameshvara, Matangi, and Varahi. Lalita united with Kameshvara, and from their union emerged Maha Ganapati - the Great Ganesha - who removed Vishukra’s obstacle-yantra and revived the army. Bhandasura, finally facing Lalita alone, hurled at her a great darkness called Andhatamisraka. Lalita neutralised it with Mahatarani, the Great Sun. Bhandasura then deployed weapon after weapon. Lalita, in the text’s account, deployed against him a single mantra - the Kameshvara astra, the Weapon of the Lord of Desire - which she had received from Shiva. The mantra reduced Bhandasura to ash. His city of Shunyaka was reduced to ash with him. The text preserves, in the Lalita Sahasranama’s 269th name, the line “Kameshvarastra nirdagdha sa Bhandasura Shunyaka” - She by whose Kameshvara weapon Bhandasura and Shunyaka were burned to ashes.

After the battle, the gods asked Lalita for one further boon. Kamadeva - the god of desire whose incineration had begun this entire sequence - had been ash for the duration. Could Lalita restore him? She could and did. Kamadeva was reborn. The cycle that had begun with Shiva burning the god of desire ended with the Goddess restoring him. And - in a detail the tradition has held particular weight - Kamadeva, restored, became the first promulgator of Sri Vidya. The mantra of the Goddess, the geometry of her Sri Chakra, the worship of her three cities - these were given by Lalita to Kamadeva, who taught them to twelve great teachers including the sage Agastya and the sage Lopamudra. The two principal mantra-traditions of Sri Vidya - Kadi (descending from Manmatha-Kamadeva) and Hadi (descending from Lopamudra) - descend from this transmission. The fifteen-syllable mantra called Panchadashi, which is the core mantra of Sri Vidya, originates here.

The myth read as practice

This is what the Lalitopakhyana says. It is, on its face, a mythological narrative about a battle. Read structurally, it is something else.

It is the tradition’s account of its own origin as a practice. The Goddess does not exist for the Sri Vidya tradition as a goddess one approaches with prayers. She exists as the figure who emerged from a sacrificial fire to defeat a demon who could not be defeated otherwise, who restored the god of desire after his destruction, and who handed to that restored god the entire architecture of the practice that bears her name. The Sri Vidya practitioner does not, in the tradition’s self-understanding, invent worship of the Goddess. The worship was given. It was given by the Goddess herself, to Kamadeva, in the moment after the battle, as the closing gesture of the founding event. Every subsequent text in the tradition - the Vamakeshvara Tantra, the Yogini Hridaya, the Tripura Rahasya, the Tantraraja Tantra, the Saundarya Lahari, the Parasurama Kalpasutra, the Saubhagya Bhaskara - is, in this framing, a transmission from that primordial moment, mediated through specific teachers who received it and passed it on.

The Goddess as source, not object

This is also why the relationship between the Goddess and the practitioner, in Sri Vidya, has the shape it has. The Goddess is not the object of the practice. She is the source of the practice. The practitioner does not approach her. The practice itself, properly performed, is her gift returning to her. The Bahvricha Upanishad, one of the Shakta Upanishads, states this directly: “sa atma” - She is the Self. “Tam upasita” - Worship her. “Aham eva sarvam” - I alone am everything. The “I” in the third sentence is the Goddess speaking. The practitioner who has progressed through the practice eventually arrives at the realisation that the practitioner is the Goddess - that the seeking and the sought were never separate, that the Lalitopakhyana’s battle between Lalita and Bhandasura is occurring inside the practitioner’s own consciousness between awareness and the ego, between the Goddess and the inflated self.

The next chapter takes up what happened to this material once it became a tradition with commentators. The Lalita Sahasranama was waiting, in the 8th century, when Adi Shankaracharya was refused at the library door. It would wait eleven more centuries before Bhaskararaya wrote the Saubhagya Bhaskara. But it did not wait alone. A second great text of the tradition - the Saundarya Lahari, the Waves of Beauty - would attract its own commentaries earlier, beginning with one extraordinary 16th-century reader from Andhra Pradesh who would draw a line through the middle of the Sri Vidya tradition and divide it into two camps that have argued with each other ever since.