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Lalita Tripurasundari and the Sri Chakra

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Lalita Tripurasundari and the Sri Chakra

At the centre of Shri Vidya stands the goddess Lalita Tripurasundari, the beautiful one of the three cities, envisioned enthroned upon Shiva himself, who in this iconography takes the form of a couch beneath her, with a further deity, Kameshvara, as her consort. Where most Hindu deities receive worship through an anthropomorphic image, Lalita's primary ritual form is aniconic and geometric, the Sri Yantra, also called the Sri Chakra, a diagram of nine interlocking triangles, four pointing upward representing Shiva and five pointing downward representing Shakti, surrounding a central point, the bindu, understood as the goddess herself in her most concentrated, undifferentiated form.

Worship proceeds through graduated stages, from external puja offered to a physical yantra or image, through recitation of her most celebrated hymn, the Lalita Sahasranama, her thousand names, toward increasingly internalised visualisation, bhavana, in which the practitioner comes to identify the goddess's geometry with structures understood to exist within their own body. This progression from external ritual to internal realisation is characteristic of Tantric practice generally, but Shri Vidya elaborates it with unusual precision around the Sri Yantra's specific geometry, treating each ring of the diagram as a distinct stage on the path toward the goddess at its centre.

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