ललितासहस्रनाम Lalitā Priyadīpikā
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A commentary on the thousand names

Lalitā Priyadīpikā ललिताप्रियदीपिका

Splendours of the World Mother — the word-by-word meaning of each name, the stanza it stands in, and then the manifold nature of the name itself, worked out by synthesis.

The thousand names occur in the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, as a teaching given by Hayagrīva to the sage Agastya. They are the core of the Vēda, of Tantra and of Śrī Vidyā at once — which is why the same names read three different ways here: as recitation, as anatomy of a person, and as the figure standing on the Śrī Cakra page.

Prelude — Bhaṇḍāsura tortured the dēvās, who begged the Mother to kill him; she began a fire ritual and offered herself into it, to be reborn as the slayer. The hidden side: Bhaṇḍāsura is the personification of the material attachments that eat a man at every instant of his otherwise divine existence, and the dēvās are the conscious principles working as hunger, sight, touch, breath. When consciousness with all its emanations surrenders to the universal self, the lord descends to destroy those attachments.

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Commentary still to be written — {{ bl.pendingNote }}. The pattern is set: paragraphs of exposition, a closing “Thus…” line, a diagram where the reading calls for one, and the locus in the figure where the name names a part of it.

The rest of the thousand

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Names 1 to 111 are set out; 112 to 1000 follow. Each takes the same shape — the name, the word-by-word split, the commentary, the closing line, and the enclosure of the Śrī Cakra it belongs to.

Locus in the figure

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Opening the cakra will light this enclosure in the figure and show what sits in it — its presiding deity, the yoginī group, the mudrā, the bīja and the seats counted clockwise from the top.

Open the cakra ›