The Three Cities

There is a problem at the centre of the Sri Vidya tradition’s name for its Goddess.

Her most common name is Tripurasundari - the Beautiful Lady of the Three Cities. The name has been repeated, in songs and prayers and meditation manuals and household worship, for at least twelve hundred years. It is the name on the Sri Yantra plates families buy when they begin their morning worship. It is the name the Lalita Sahasranama points to when it places, near the beginning of the thousand, the name Tripureshi - Ruler of the Three Cities. It is the name the Saundarya Lahari assumes when it composes its hundred verses to her. It is the name the Tripura Upanishad announces in its very title.

What are the three cities?

The tradition has answered this question for fifteen hundred years and has not given a single answer. It has given a structured family of answers. Each answer is a different doorway into what the tradition takes the Goddess to be. None of the answers contradicts the others. None of them, alone, completes the figure. The whole point of having three cities and not one and not two and not four is that the structure itself - the triad - is what is being pointed to, and the cities the triad gets read into are the various levels of the cosmos that have triadic structure.

This is what Chapter 2 is about. The doctrine of Tripura. The texts that hold it. The classical readings the tradition has given of what the three cities are. The lineage-specific emphases on which reading matters most.

The texts first.

The texts that carry it

The two principal Sanskrit sources that treat the Tripura doctrine directly, as a doctrine, are the Tripura Upanishad and the Tripura Rahasya. They are different kinds of text. The Tripura Upanishad is short - sixteen verses in its standard form - and is classified among the Shakta Upanishads, the eight Upanishads of the Muktika anthology dedicated to the Goddess (Sita, Tripuratapini, Devi, Tripura, Bhavana, Saubhagyalakshmi, Sarasvati-rahasya, Bahvricha). The Tripura Rahasya is long - over twelve thousand verses claimed, of which roughly nine thousand survive - and is classified as a Shakta Tantric text in dialogue form, a conversation between Dattatreya and Parashurama recorded by a third sage named Haritayana.

The two texts are differently weighted across the Sri Vidya lineages. The Saubhagya-Kadi lineage gives the Tripura Upanishad particular weight because Bhaskararaya wrote a commentary on it. The Hadi-Lopamudra lineage gives somewhat more weight to the Tripura Rahasya, particularly to its Jnana Khanda, because the dialogue between Dattatreya and Parashurama is read as the source of the Hadi-lineage’s own transmission chain (Parashurama is treated as a key Hadi-lineage figure in Kerala). The Tamil Siddha lineage gives weight to neither in particular; the Tripura doctrine for Tirumular is encoded in the Tirumantiram’s own verses on the goddess’s three states of consciousness rather than in either of these Sanskrit texts. The Kashmir Shaiva successor lineages give weight to the Tripura Rahasya’s Jnana Khanda and to the Vamakeshvara Tantra - which is functionally a third primary text on the Tripura doctrine, though it is classified as a Tantra rather than an Upanishad.

What the historians found

These are texts the dating of which the historians have spent more than a century working on, and the answers they have produced sit at some distance from the tradition’s own claims.

The Tripura Upanishad has survived in two recensions - one attached to the Rigveda, the other to the Atharvaveda - which is itself an indication that the text moved between Vedic schools rather than originating in any one of them. Modern scholarship places it in the medieval period. The Indian-British scholar Denise Cush dates the Shakta Upanishads as a group between the 12th and 15th centuries CE. The German scholar Gudrun Buhnemann places the Tripura Upanishad itself, more narrowly, after the 15th century CE. The American scholar Douglas Brooks, whose work in The Secret of the Three Cities (University of Chicago Press, 1990) is the most extended Western academic treatment of the Tripura doctrine, treats the text as medieval Shakta Tantric material framed in Upanishadic style. The tradition holds the Tripura Upanishad as part of the eternal shruti canon, with no human author and no historical date. The historians treat it as a 12th-to-15th-century composition by Shakta Tantric authors who chose to present their material in the Upanishadic genre to ground it in the Vedic canon. Both positions are held inside the living tradition. The Sringeri matha, for instance, accepts the Tripura Upanishad as Upanishadic in the technical sense - as part of the shruti - and chants it as such; the academic Sri Vidya scholars accept the dating without rejecting the canonical status.

The Tripura Rahasya’s situation is similar in shape and different in detail. Its authorship is attributed to Sumedha Haritayana, son of Harita, who narrated it (in the text’s own framing) to the sage Narada, recording what Dattatreya had taught Parashurama, who had been initiated into the Goddess’s worship after his own austerities at the Malaya Hill in South India. The colophon attaches the text to the broader tradition that traces back to Shiva instructing Vishnu, Vishnu incarnating as Dattatreya, Dattatreya teaching Parashurama, Parashurama teaching Haritayana. The scholar Antonio Rigopoulos, in Dattatreya: The Immortal Guru, Yogin, and Avatara (SUNY Press, 1998), places Haritayana plausibly in the 10th century CE in southern India. The text claims three sections totalling twelve thousand verses: the Mahatmya Khanda (Section on the Greatness of the Goddess, roughly 6,687 verses), the Jnana Khanda (Section on Supreme Wisdom, 2,163 verses), and the Carya Khanda (Section on Conduct, claimed at over four thousand verses). The first two survive. The third has been untraceable for centuries. No manuscript of the Carya Khanda has been recovered. What practice the section described - what specific carya, what specific ritual conduct, what specific operational manual the tradition once had at the centre of its self-description - has been lost.

This is the second textual disappearance the Sri Vidya tradition has carried. The first was Ishvarashiva’s Rasamahodadhi in 9th-century Kashmir, traced in Chapter 1, which survived only through Jayaratha’s disapproving citation. The second is the Carya Khanda of the Tripura Rahasya - gone in a different way, more comprehensively, with no surviving citation that tells us what it specifically contained. The Saubhagya lineage has reconstructed the practice from the Mahatmya Khanda, from Parashurama’s other surviving work the Parasurama Kalpasutra, and from the parallel ritual manuals in the Vamakeshvara Tantra and the Yogini Hridaya. The Hadi-Lopamudra lineage has reconstructed differently, drawing more heavily on the Vamakeshvara Tantra directly and on the Kerala commentaries - Shivananda’s Rjuvimarsini (15th c.) and Vidyananda’s Artharatnavali (around the same time) - which gave the Hadi reading of the same source material that the Saubhagya tradition was reading through Bhaskararaya’s later synthesis. The reconstructions are functional. They are not the original. The Tripura Rahasya’s third section is silent.

The reading turns inward

Bhaskararaya wrote commentaries on both Upanishadic texts.

His commentary on the Tripura Upanishad survives. It is the standard reference inside the Saubhagya tradition for how the sixteen-verse Upanishad should be read. He treats the text not as primarily about cosmology but as primarily about what the Goddess is and how the practitioner returns to her - which Brooks summarises, drawing from Bhaskararaya, as the tradition’s understanding that “Devi within each human being is a means to know and attain one’s own real nature.” Personal liberation, in this reading, is a process of reintegration. The journey is not outward toward a deity who lives elsewhere. The journey is inward, toward the structure of one’s own awareness, which is what the Goddess turns out to have been all along.

Bhaskararaya also wrote a commentary on the Bhavana Upanishad, a parallel Shakta Upanishad in 37 verses that walks the practitioner through the meditation (bhavana) of seeing the Sri Yantra inside the body and the body inside the Sri Yantra. Bhaskararaya’s reading of the Tripura Upanishad and his reading of the Bhavana Upanishad are continuous. Both treat the doctrine of the three cities as ultimately a doctrine about the practitioner’s own consciousness, not as a doctrine about an external cosmology that the practitioner is meant to map onto a divine figure.

This is the orientation the tradition’s classical readings of Tripura will all share. The cities are not, primarily, places. They are levels. (Lakshmidhara, in his Samaya reading, would agree with this orientation strongly - internal-only worship is precisely what the Tripura Upanishad teaches in his reading. The disagreement between Lakshmidhara’s Samaya lineage and Bhaskararaya’s Kaula lineage is not about whether the cities are internal levels; both agree they are. The disagreement is about whether external worship is therefore unnecessary, which Chapter 5 will take up.)

The five classical readings

There are five classical readings the tradition has given of what the three cities are. Each is attested in a specific textual source. Each is held by specific lineages. Each is, in the tradition’s self-understanding, a different doorway into the same structure.

The first reading is the three states of consciousness - jagrat (waking), svapna (dreaming), sushupti (deep sleep). This is the reading most directly attested in the Tripura Rahasya’s Jnana Khanda, which states in so many words that the three cities are the three states and that the underlying consciousness of all three, the substrate that persists across waking and dreaming and deep sleep, is the Goddess. The fourth state - turiya - the awareness that is neither asleep nor dreaming nor awake but is the witness of all three, is Lalita herself. The three states are the cities. The fourth, beyond them, is the figure to whom the cities belong. This is the reading most strongly emphasized by both the Saubhagya-Kadi and Hadi-Lopamudra lineages, and by the Kashmir Shaiva successor traditions, which all hold the Tripura Rahasya as authoritative on this point.

The second reading is the three bodies - sthula (gross), sukshma (subtle), karana (causal). This is the Vedantic reading, picked up by Shankaracharya in the Vivekachudamani and used by Bhaskararaya in his commentary on the Tripura Upanishad to map the three cities onto the layered architecture of the human person. The gross body is the physical body the senses inhabit. The subtle body is the energetic body the mind inhabits, with its nadis and chakras and breath patterns. The causal body is the seed-body in which the karmic patterns of the individual self are held, the body that persists through cycles of waking and dreaming and across lifetimes. Lalita is the consciousness that is awake in all three. She is the Goddess of the three bodies. This reading is particularly emphasized in the Samaya lineage’s reading of Sri Vidya, where the internal-only worship the Samaya doctrine permits is mapped onto the three bodies as the operational sites of the worship.

The third reading is the three modes of cognition - jnatri (the knower), jneya (the known), jnana (the act of knowing). This is the reading directly stated in the Tripura Upanishad as preserved in the Sanskrit Documents recension, and the reading Bhaskararaya develops at greatest length in his commentary on that text. The triad is the structure of any cognitive act. To know anything is to be a knower, of a known, by way of an act of knowing. The three are inseparable. The three together constitute one cognitive event. The Goddess is the unity that holds the three together - the integrated cognitive act, not divided into its constituent moments. When the tradition speaks of Lalita as Chiti - pure awareness - and as Vimarsha - the self-reflective movement of awareness - it is speaking of her as the figure who comprehends the three modes of cognition within herself without splitting them into knower-and-known-and-knowing. This reading is the Kashmir Shaiva precursor’s particular contribution to the Sri Vidya doctrine; the Pratyabhijna (“Recognition”) philosophy of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, which is the Trika tradition’s philosophical core, reads the three modes of cognition as the operational structure the goddess’s vimarsha differentiates into.

The fourth reading is the three powers - iccha-shakti (the power of will), jnana-shakti (the power of knowledge), kriya-shakti (the power of action). This reading appears in the Tripura Upanishad and is developed extensively in the broader Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, where the three powers are foundational to the metaphysical structure of how the cosmos unfolds from the undifferentiated Absolute. Will gives rise to knowledge gives rise to action. The three together constitute any unfolding event. The Goddess is the source from which all three flow. When the Sri Yantra is read iconographically in the Kashmir Shaiva manner, the three rings of triangles within the figure are read as the three shaktis, with Lalita at the bindu as the source of all three. The Trika tradition’s three principal goddesses - Para (the higher), Parapara (the medium), Apara (the lower) - map onto these three powers, with Para as the source of iccha, Parapara as the field of jnana, Apara as the operation of kriya. The Sri Vidya tradition’s reception of this framework is what carried Trika categories into the South Indian Tantric vocabulary.

The fifth reading is the three paths - karma-marga (work), bhakti-marga (devotion), jnana-marga (knowledge). This is the Tripura Upanishad’s own reading, as the scholar T.M.P. Mahadevan summarised it: the three cities as the three roads of work, worship, and wisdom, the three modes of human religious life that the Goddess governs and through which the practitioner can approach her. This reading positions Lalita not as the goal at the end of any one path but as the principle that makes all three paths possible. This is the reading most often cited by the orthodox Shankaracharya mathas and by the Samaya tradition in dialogues with non-Tantric Hindu traditions - it presents Sri Vidya as continuous with the broader Hindu spiritual landscape rather than as a specialised Tantric path.

These are the five classical readings. There are others. The tradition has, at various points, mapped the three cities onto the three Vedas (Rig, Yajur, Sama), onto the three guna-s (sattva, rajas, tamas), onto the three svaras (udatta, anudatta, svarita - the three Vedic recitation tones), onto the three principal goddesses (Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati, Mahakali) who are sometimes treated as Lalita’s three operational forms. The cataloguing could continue. The principle the cataloguing demonstrates is what matters. The tradition reads the Tripura of Tripurasundari as wherever in the cosmos the triadic structure appears, and the Goddess is, in each appearance, the unity that the triad differentiates into.

There is a sixth reading, important enough to deserve its own paragraph, which has a different status from the other five. The Tripura of Tripurasundari has, in one strand of the tradition, been read as the three cities the demon brothers Tarakaksha, Vidyunmali, and Kamalaksha built in the Mahabharata and the Shiva Purana - the three impregnable cities of iron, silver, and gold that Mayasura constructed for them, which Shiva destroyed with a single arrow when the three cities came into momentary alignment. In this reading, Lalita is Tripurasundari because she is the Goddess who is beautiful even to the destroyer of the three cities - Tripurantaka, Shiva in his form as the destroyer of Tripura - and her name carries the trace of that mythological event. This reading exists, particularly in the broader Shaiva tradition outside Sri Vidya proper, but inside Sri Vidya it has always been treated as secondary. The Goddess is not named for a battle Shiva won. She is named for the structure of the cosmos itself.

The Tamil Siddha tradition reads the Tripura doctrine through Tirumular’s three-fold framework of Sthula (gross - the visible body of the goddess), Sukshma (subtle - her mantra), and Para (transcendent - her yantra). Tirumular’s Tirumantiram explicitly states that the practitioner approaches the goddess through these three levels, with each level being a pura (city) in the sense that it is a complete habitation of the goddess at that level. The three are not three states of the practitioner; they are three forms of the goddess, and the practitioner approaches each through different operational means. This reading is parallel to the five Sanskrit-Tantric readings and does not contradict them, but it has its own architectural specificity that the Tamil Siddha lineage holds as distinct.

Carried in the geometry

The Sri Yantra carries the Tripura doctrine in its geometry.

The figure is, in its standard construction, triple in nature at every level. The two principal sets of triangles - four pointing upward (the Shiva triangles), five pointing downward (the Shakti triangles) - interpenetrate to form the nine that are visible. The nine subdivide into the forty-three smaller triangles the construction produces. The forty-three are arranged in three concentric rings around the central triangle - the manvasra (the fourteen-triangle outer ring), the two dasaras (the ten-triangle middle rings, outer and inner), the vasukona (the eight-triangle ring around the centre). The central triangle, the trikona, holds at its three vertices the three principal shaktis - iccha, jnana, kriya - with Lalita at the bindu inside the triangle as the source of all three. Bhaskararaya’s commentary on the Nityashodashikarnava notes explicitly that the Sri Yantra is triple in nature - trika-rupa - and that this triple nature is what makes it the geometric form of Tripurasundari rather than of any other goddess.

The Goddess’s own mantra - the Panchadashi, the fifteen-syllable mantra at the centre of Sri Vidya practice - is itself constructed in three sections. The three sections are called the three kutas - peaks. The first is the Vagbhava kuta - the peak of creative speech, mapping to Lalita’s head and to the goddess Saraswati’s domain. The second is the Kamaraja kuta - the peak of desire, mapping to Lalita’s torso between throat and hips, and to the goddess Lakshmi’s domain. The third is the Shakti kuta - the peak of power, mapping to Lalita’s body below the hips, and to the goddess Kali or Durga’s domain. The three together compose the goddess. The mantra spoken is the goddess in audible form. The mantra meditated upon is the goddess in subtle form. The mantra is triple in nature in the same way the Sri Yantra is triple in nature in the same way the cosmos is triple in nature in the same way the practitioner’s consciousness is triple in nature. The architecture is consistent down to the level of every component.

What the doctrine establishes

This is the doctrine of the three cities.

The Goddess is the one who comprehends the triadic structure of everything. Wherever the triad appears in the cosmos - in the three states of consciousness, in the three bodies, in the three modes of cognition, in the three powers, in the three paths, in the three sections of her mantra, in the three rings of her diagram - she is the integrating principle that holds the three together as one. The cities are the levels. The Goddess is what makes the levels into a single architecture rather than a heap of separate floors.

This is why the practitioner who sits down to worship the Sri Yantra in the morning is, in the tradition’s self-understanding, not approaching a goddess who lives in a remote city. The practitioner is approaching the consciousness that is presently aware that they have sat down to worship. The waking awareness in which the worship is being performed is one of the three cities. The Goddess is the figure to whom that city belongs.

What this chapter has established is that the Goddess’s name encodes a doctrine, that the doctrine has been carried in the Tripura Upanishad and expanded in the Tripura Rahasya (with its third section lost), that the textual heritage is differently weighted across the lineages - the Saubhagya-Kadi gives the Upanishad particular weight through Bhaskararaya’s commentary, the Hadi-Lopamudra gives the Rahasya’s Jnana Khanda and the Kerala commentaries on the Vamakeshvara Tantra particular weight, the Kashmir Shaiva successor lineages give Trika’s three-goddess framework particular weight, the Tamil Siddha lineage gives Tirumular’s Sthula-Sukshma-Para framework particular weight, and the Samaya tradition reads the entire doctrine through the lens of internal-only worship - that the doctrine is held across multiple readings, and that the readings are doorways rather than alternatives.

The next chapter walks the body the cities sit in.