Ethnic tanjore arts, we are granted spiritual clarity, and intense love for Divine Mother. The chanting of the Lalita Sahashranama, the Thousand Names of Lalita Devi, brings us great fruit. The Chanter becomes a shining light in the darkness of night.
Tanjore paintings of Goddess Lalita Devi is the Divine Mother in the form of her power, Shakti. Lalita is the Goddess of Bliss, an epithet for Lord Shiva’s wife, Goddess Parvathi. ‘Lalita’ also means ‘She Who Plays,’ ‘spontaneous’ or ‘easy.’ Mother Goddess worship saw two major developments – Vedic and Tantrik. Both linked Mother Goddess to samsara, the manifest cycle of birth, death, rebirth; the material world and the realm of eternal change. Mother Goddess was the flow of energy, the substance that embodies the soul and gives form and identity.
She is called Tripura because she is identical with the that symbolizes the yoni and that forms her chakra see on the tanjore painting. She is also called Tripura because her mantra has three clusters of syllables. Here Tripura is identified with the alphabet, from which all sounds and words proceed and which is often understood to occupy a primordial place in tantric cosmology. She is three-fold, furthermore, because she expresses herself in Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva in her roles as creator, maintainer, and destroyer of the universe. She is threefold also because she represents the subject (maul), instrument (mina), and object (meya) of all things. Here again, she is identified with reality expressed in terms of speech, which involves a speaker, what is said, and objects to which the words refer.
She is Tripura because she is beyond the three Gunas. She dwells in the three worlds of manas, buddhi, and chitta. She is Trayi, the unified combination of the three gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. She is also known as Lalita (the graceful one) and Kameshwari (the desire principle of the Supreme)
As Shakti, Mother Goddess was supreme untameable universal energy. As Shree, she was the supreme domesticated goddess of fortune, She was also Maya, the supreme unfathomable delusion of existence. She was Prakriti, Mother Nature responsible for earthly existence. From Her came the worldly powers and illusions of arta and kama. Mother Goddess stood at the extreme end of the metaphysical spectrum with their male counterparts who stood more for the unmanifest reality or Pure Consciousness, the Self. Lord Shiva sought moksha, liberation from the material world while Lord Vishnu propounded the doctrine of dharma. But it was Mother Goddess that represented material reality to give life to spiritual reality
Worshipping lalitha Devi Tanjore painting with lalitha sahasranamam. A thousand names of the Hindu mother goddess Lalita. The names are organized in a hymns. It is the only saharanamam that does not repeat a single name. Further, in order to maintain the meter, sahasranamass use the artifice of adding words like tu, api, ca, and hi, which are conjunctions that do not necessarily add to the meaning of the name except in cases of interpretation. The Lalita sahasranama does not use any such auxiliary conjunctions and is unique in being an enumeration of holy names that meet the metrical, poetical and mystic requirements of a sahasranama by their order throughout the text.
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