Lalita Sahasranama

The Lalita Sahasranama comes wrapped in its own account of how it came to be. In the Lalitopakhyana, the narrative of Lalita embedded in the Brahmanda Purana, the horse headed sage Hayagriva teaches Agastya the story of the goddess's manifestation from the fire of consciousness, her defeat of the demon Bhandasura, and her enthronement as sovereign of the three worlds, and then, as the teaching's crown, transmits her thousand names. The frame story within the frame says that Lalita herself commanded the eight Vagdevatas, the goddesses of speech who attend her, to compose her praise, so the litany presents itself as the goddess praised in words authored by speech itself.

The names unfold in a deliberate order. They open with Shri Mata, the auspicious Mother, and the great Queen on her lion throne, pass through a head to foot description of her beauty, recount her war and victory, and rise into her metaphysical identities, supreme power, pure consciousness, the kundalini ascending through the six centres, beyond thought and full of bliss. Tradition celebrates the composition's formal perfection, a thousand names in smooth anushtubh metre with, it is claimed, no name repeated and no padding syllables, the litany itself offered as evidence of its more than human authorship. The text's date, like most Puranic material, cannot be fixed with precision.

The Lalita Sahasranama is the central recited text of Shri Vidya, the South Indian tantric tradition of the goddess as Tripurasundari, and its greatest interpreter was Bhaskararaya Makhin, the eighteenth century polymath whose commentary, the Saubhagya Bhaskara, reads the litany as a complete map of the tradition's theology. Under his reading the names encode the Sri Chakra, the goddess's geometric form, the stages of the kundalini's ascent, and the identity of the worshipper's own consciousness with the goddess, so that reciting the names is not description but participation.

R. Ananthakrishna Sastry's English rendering of text and commentary, published through the Adyar Library in 1899, carried the work into world scholarship. Recitation is a living mass practice. The Sahasranama is chanted in the great goddess temples of South India, at Kanchipuram, Madurai and countless others, in household worship on Fridays and full moon days, and in the namavali form of archana, each name offered with kumkum before the image. Devotional custom holds Friday recitation especially dear to the goddess, and organized group chanting, including large women's recitation circles, has carried the practice through the diaspora. Few Sanskrit texts of any period are recited by more people on any given week, a tantric litany become a household prayer.