Shodashi

Shodashi, “the girl of sixteen”, is the third of the ten Mahavidyas. She is Tripurasundari, the beauty of the three cities, the same goddess who rules the Sri Vidya tradition as Lalita, the one the tradition plays with (“she who is sportive”): the profile of the third Vidya and the centre of the Shakta field are one figure seen from two doors.

Identity and Meaning

Her name means “the sixteenth”, and the tradition means it exactly. The fifteen syllables of the pancadashi mantra are arranged as speech, desire and power, the three faculties by which consciousness creates; the sixteenth syllable stands outside the phases altogether, the fullness that does not wax or wane. She is completeness confessed beyond its own forms: the most adorned, most royal, most erotic figure of the ten is the one whose name is the digit that is not a digit.

Her creative function in the encyclopedia’s carried map: beauty integrating the three puras (the three cities of waking, dreaming and deep sleep), nirguna Brahman read as ananda, the bliss-face of the absolute. What she does to a life, the tradition says, is to dissolve lack itself, the search for the missing sixteenth part.

Iconography

Everything in her iconography is completion. Her body is red as vermilion dawn; the young moon at its highest point is her crest; one hand holds the jewelled cup of nectar filled full, another the red lotus. Her four instruments requisition rather than abolish: the noose (desire), the goad (wrath), the flower-arrows (the five sense-fields), the sugar-cane bow (mind). She sits upon the pancapretasana, the throne of five corpses: the inert substrate (Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra, Ishvara, Sadashiva in the reading the Lalita Sahasranama carries at name 61) that consciousness alone animates, because nothing beneath consciousness can lift itself.

The Lalita Sahasranama opens with her story in five names: mother, empress, throne’s lady, born of the fire-pit of consciousness, risen for the work of the gods. The opening cluster is the profile in miniature.

Narrative

Her principal narrative is the Lalitopakhyana, carried inside the Brahmanda Purana: the demon Bandasura, the embodiment of delusion born of the ego’s shadow, oppresses the worlds; the gods kindle the fire of consciousness, and from the fire-pit rises Lalita, the sixteen-year-old empress, who marshals her armies (the shaktis of the alphabet among them), installs Ganesha and Bala before her, binds Bandasura with her noose and burns him with the great arrow of Kameshvara. The city she governs, Sripura, is built on the island of gems (Manidvipa) in the ocean of nectar, the geography the Saundarya Lahari sings.

The narrative’s decoded sense, as the tradition tells it: the demon is not killed once in the past; the assembly of the mind’s scattered forces under a single sovereign awareness is the event, and it recurs at every genuine recitation of her mantra.

Mantra and Worship

Her mantra-body is the pancadashi (fifteen syllables) and its fullness the shodashi (sixteen), arranged in three kutas (peaks): speech, desire, power. The Sri Vidya tradition, in the Kadi/Samaya line the encyclopedia adopts, practises her through the Sri Chakra, the nine-enclosure yantra whose central point (bindu) is herself, worship offered upon the diagram that maps her body and the practitioner’s body onto one another. The daily services, the pavamana of names, the navavarana (nine-enclosure) worship: all are recorded in the tradition’s manuals and formally require initiation; the encyclopedia describes their architecture and prints no operative detail.

She carries one honest caveat the profile states: in the gate-tables, she is barred as an opening Vidya for the scattered or inert mind-states, because her nectar-work presupposes a vessel.

Textual Sources

The Lalita Sahasranama (carried inside the Brahmanda Purana) is her thousand-name crown. The Saundarya Lahari, the hundred-verse hymn tradition attributes to Adi Shankara, is her wave of beauty, verse 8 describing her island of gems. The Tripura Upanishad and Tripuratapini Upanishad carry her Upanishadic register. The Tantraraja Tantra and Jnanarnava Tantra carry her yantra and ritual architectures. The Mundamala Tantra names her third among the ten, and the Todala Tantra enumerates her in the same place, giving Shiva as Kameshvara at her right side, the erotic-mystic pair whose union is the tradition’s image of consciousness and its power never having been separate.

Temples and Living Worship

Kamakhya in Assam holds her among the ten Mahavidya shrines. In the south, the Kanchipuram Kamakshi temple and the Madurai Meenakshi temple carry her Lalita register inside living temple liturgy, and the Sringeri Sharada seat of Shankara’s line keeps the Sri Chakra worship continuous since the acharya’s own installation. The tradition’s living centre, though, is not a single temple but the recitation-lineage itself: the Sahasranama and the navavarana service sung daily in households and maths across the Tamil country, Maharashtra, Kerala and the diaspora.

Sources

Distilled from The Dasa Mahavidya Encyclopedia, Book Seven: The Ten Vidyas, by ShriViral and ShreeVidhyaa. See also the entry Tripurasundari and the Sri Vidya tradition.