Four in the Morning

Somewhere in South India, at about four in the morning, a woman lights a small oil lamp.

The room is small. She has been here, in this hour, on most mornings of her adult life. The lamp she lights is brass. The oil is sesame. The wick is cotton, twisted by her own hand the previous evening. The light it gives is small and yellow and steady. By it she can see, on a low wooden seat in front of her, a Sri Chakra. The plate is copper. The geometry is etched, not painted. The nine triangles interpenetrate to produce the forty-three small triangles, the eight-petalled lotus, the sixteen-petalled lotus, the triple square enclosure with its four cardinal gates. At the centre, the bindu - the point at which the geometry terminates and the Goddess sits - has a small smear of last night’s kumkum, dried and fading. She will renew it this morning.

She sits. She places her hands in the Yoni Mudra - the gesture in which the right hand cradles the left and the fingers form the triangular sign of the Goddess’s own emergence. She begins.

The sequence she has done ten thousand times

What she begins is a sequence she has performed approximately ten thousand times. The achamana - the three sips of water that mark the threshold between the householder’s world and the worshipper’s. The sankalpa - the formal declaration of the intention of this morning’s puja, naming the date and the place and the practitioner in the Sanskrit grammar that has named such moments for forty centuries. The guru pranam - the bow to the line of teachers whose names she knows and whose names she does not, descending from her own diksha guru through their teachers through their teachers’ teachers to the Goddess herself.

The thousand names

Then the names. The Lalita Sahasranama. The thousand names of the Goddess. She knows them by heart. She has known them for thirty years. She begins with Srimata - Holy Mother - and proceeds through Srimaharajni - Great Empress - through Srimat Simhasaneshvari - Empress on the Lion-Throne - through eight hundred more names that describe the Goddess from her crown to the soles of her feet, that name her cosmic functions, that name her relationship to time, to space, to consciousness, to the practitioner herself. She arrives at Lalitambika - the playful Mother - and stops. The thousand has been recited.

Everyone in the thread did this

What this woman is doing has been done, in slight variations, by every person who has appeared in this thread.

It was done by Ishvarashiva at Shura Matha in 9th-century Kashmir, drawing his Sri Yantra on the floor of a monastery on the banks of the Vitasta. It was done by Thirumoolar at Tiruvavaduthurai under the peepal tree, in the Tamil that became the Tirumantiram. It was done by Adi Shankaracharya at the library door, by Vidyaranya at Sringeri, by Lakshmidhara at the Gajapati court in Cuttack, by Bhaskararaya at Bhaskararajapuram on the Cauvery, by Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati at Devipuram, by the Mahaperiyava at Kanchipuram, by every Adheenakarthar at Tiruvavaduthurai and Dharmapuram and Thiruppanandhal, by every Nair grandmother in North Kerala lighting the lamp at the family kavu, by every Smarta father initiating his son into the Panchadashi mantra at the age of twenty-five in the small back room of a house in Andhra or Karnataka or Tamil Nadu.

A chain twelve centuries long

The thousand names she is reciting were composed, in the Lalitopakhyana’s account, by the eight Vagdevis - Vasini, Kameshvari, Aruna, Vimala, Jayani, Modini, Sarveshvari, Kaulini - on the direct command of the Goddess herself, in the moment after Bhandasura was reduced to ashes by the Kameshvara weapon and the city of Shunyaka burned with him. The text she is reciting was given by Hayagriva to Agastya. It was transcribed into the Brahmanda Purana. It was waited on, for eleven centuries, by the Goddess who refused Adi Shankaracharya at the library door. It was finally commented on by Bhaskararaya in 1728, in the Saubhagya Bhaskara, whose twelve sections are named for the twelve digits of the sun her commentator’s name carried. It was published by Pansikar at Nirnaya Sagar Press in the late 19th century. It was translated by R. Ananthakrishna Sastry at the Theosophical Society’s Adyar Library and reprinted continuously since the 1920s. It is in her hands, in the form of a small printed book that she sometimes opens to check a name she has uncertainly remembered, though usually she does not need to.

She is in a chain. The chain is twelve centuries long. The chain has held.

Not one chain but several

What this thread has shown is that the chain is not one chain but several, that the several have crossed and uncrossed and almost merged and stayed parallel, that the Kashmir source almost broke, that the Tamil source almost was lost in the destruction of Vijayanagara, that the public face was almost suppressed in the 19th century, that the synthesis Vidyaranya might have made at Sringeri in 1380 he did not make, that the line Lakshmidhara drew in the 16th century has not closed in the five centuries since. The thread has shown that there are at least three classical sampradayas - Anandabhairava, Dakshinamurti, Hayagriva - and a fourth integrative line in Dattatreya, and that within each of these run further distinctions of Kaula and Samaya and Kadi and Hadi and Sadi. The thread has shown that the institutional mathas, the Tamil Siddha adheenams, the Bhaskararaya parampara at Kadi and Bhaskararajapuram, the Kerala Shakta lineages at Meppad, the Devipuram lineage in Andhra and New York, the household initiations across South India - these are not a single tradition but a confluence whose unity is the Goddess and whose plurality is the path.

The woman with the lamp does not need to know any of this. She is reciting the names. The names know themselves. They have been the names for as long as the language she is reciting them in has been a language. They will be the names after she stops reciting them this morning. They will be the names when her granddaughter, twenty years from now, picks up the same printed book in the same small room and lights the same brass lamp.

The lineages do not need the thread

That this thread has tried to map the lineages does not mean the lineages need the thread. They do not. The Goddess does not need this thread. She did not need the Saubhagya Bhaskara. She did not need Vidyaranya. She did not need the Mahaperiyava. She does not need any commentator, any teacher, any matha, any text. She did not need them in the Lalitopakhyana when she emerged from the fire to fight Bhandasura. She does not need them now.

What the thread tried to do

What the thread has tried to do is something smaller. It has tried to show the reader that a tradition exists, that it has a history, that the history is documented, that the documentation runs through specific people who made specific decisions at specific moments - Avantivarman in 855 endowing Shura Matha, Jayaratha around 1200 writing a disapproving citation, Sekkilar in 1139 transcribing the cowherd story, Vidyaranya in 1380 choosing what to include in the Srividyarnava, Lakshmidhara in 1530 drawing a line, Bhaskararaya in 1728 refusing the line, Amritananda Natha in 1985 opening the door. The history is not pretty. It has gaps. It has political accidents. It has the texture of every real history, which is that things almost did not survive and that what did survive survived through chains so thin that any of a hundred small mishaps would have broken them.

The thread has tried to honour the survival. It has not tried to describe what the woman with the lamp experiences when she sits in front of the Sri Chakra at four in the morning and begins to say the names. That is not in the scope of an introductory thread. The descriptions of that experience, when the tradition has tried to give them, are found in the Bahvricha Upanishad’s declaration that the Goddess is the Self, in the Saundarya Lahari’s verses on the kundalini ascending the spine, in the Tripura Rahasya’s dialogue between Dattatreya and Parashurama on the nature of awareness, in the Tirumantiram’s verse 2104 with its three Tamil words anbe sivam - Love is Shiva - that the Tamil tradition has held for fifteen centuries as the highest aphorism in its canon. The descriptions exist. They are available to anyone who reads.

Where the reading stops

What is not available to anyone who reads, and what no thread can supply, is the part of the practice that begins when the reading stops.

The woman with the lamp finishes the Sahasranama. She closes her eyes. She does not see her room. What she sees, by the inner light of the practice, is not the subject of this thread.

The next thread, the second of seven, takes up the Goddess herself. Lalita Tripurasundari. Who she is, what her three cities are, why her body has the form it has, why her consort is Kameshvara, why she rides the Sri Chakra into battle, why her name means She Who Plays.