Tripura Sundari is also known as Goddess Shodashi. As the name suggests Goddess Shodashi is the most beautiful in all three worlds. In Mahavidya, She represents Goddess Parvati or also known as Tantric Parvati.

Goddess Shodashi is also known as Lalita and Rajarajeshwari which means “the one who plays” and “queen of queens” respectively. Mahavidya is Tripurasundari, also known as Kamala. A form of Mahalakshmi, She symbolizes wealth.

According to the description in her dhyana mantra, Tripurasundari’s complexion shines with the light of the rising sun. This rosy color represents joy, compassion, and illumination.

She is shown with four arms in which she holds five arrows of flowers, a noose, a goad and sugarcane as a bow. The noose represents attachment, the goad represents repulsion, the sugarcane bow represents the mind and the arrows are the five sense objects.

In the Sakta Tantra, it is Mother who is supreme, and the gods are her instruments of expression. Through them, she presides over the creation, maintenance, and dissolution of the universe, as well as over the self-concealment and self-revelation that lie behind those three activities. Self-concealment is the precondition as well as the result of cosmic manifestation, and self-revelation causes the manifest universe to dissolve, disclosing the essential unity.

With this in mind, the eighteenth-century commentator Bhaskararaya proposed that the name Tripurasundari should be understood as “she whose beauty precedes the three worlds,” meaning that she is divinity in its transcendental glory. However, the name is usually taken in an immanent sense to mean “she who is beautiful in the three worlds.” Present here is the idea of a triad, a grouping of three that plays out in many different aspects of the phenomenal world.

Tripurasundari represents the state of awareness that is also called the sadasivatattva. It is characterized as “I am this” (aham idam). Cosmic evolution is the outward flow of consciousness (pravritti). Spiritual practice reverses that flow, so for the yogin, this stage is a very high level of attainment, close to final realization. It is an experience of the universe within the unity of consciousness.

Even in our ordinary state of consciousness, Tripurasundari is the beauty that we see in the world around us. Whatever we perceive externally as beautiful resonates deep within.

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