Lalita Tripurasundari, the beautiful one of the three cities, is the supreme goddess of the Shri Vidya tradition, one of the most important streams of goddess-centred (Shakta) worship in the south of India and beyond. What is distinctive about her worship is that she is adored less through an image than through a sacred diagram: the Shri Yantra or Shri Chakra, a figure of nine interlocking triangles arranged around a central point, understood as the goddess herself made visible in geometric form and as a map of the unfolding of the cosmos out of the single point of the divine. Lalita is imagined as radiantly beautiful and red in colour, seated on a throne whose legs are the great gods, holding a noose, a goad, a bow of sugarcane and flowered arrows, attributes that mark her as the queen who binds and draws all things by desire and delight. She is praised in the Lalita Sahasranama, the thousand names of Lalita, one of the most widely recited hymns to the Goddess, which unfolds her nature name by name.
Shri Vidya is a sophisticated Tantric tradition with its own mantras, initiation and contemplative practice, in which the worship of the Shri Yantra and the recitation of the goddess's names lead the practitioner from the beautiful form of Lalita toward the formless absolute she embodies. She is honoured as the highest reality conceived as a gracious and beautiful queen.