Sri Vidya

Sri Vidya, is the ritual activity and meditative practices associated with the Sri Yantra, which provides a diagram of a complete cosmology centred around the manifestations of the goddess Tripura Sundari in her union with the Lord Siva. As such, it belongs to the third degree of the Uttarakaulas and becomes part of their practices after that stage of initiation.

The origins of Sri Vidya are, in truth, lost in the mists of antiquity. Both Tantrikas and Vedantins claim these origins, and put the Yantra to different uses – the former in ritual practices and the latter for meditative visualizations – with some overlap into the other usage. The former is one form of Left Hand Tantra, or even ‘High Tantra’.

What seems most likely is that Sri Vidya developed out of the shamanistic practices of Kashmiri Shaivism and other Himalayan regions. It was transplanted to the Tamils of South India, where it’s practice was ‘Left Hand’ and like the Northern traditions was later absorbed into Aryan Vedic, and even Mogul (Mongal) practices, as Right Hand forms of meditation, after their invasions.

The Tibetan Bon shamanistic scripture known as the “Doctrine of the Six Lights”, which gave us the deities which attend the directions of the magick circle, or mandala before they acquired a Buddhist veneer: Vairochana, Ratnasambhava, Amoghasiddhi, Amitabha, Aksobhya and their Shaktis; Ganesh: and the Earth Mother, finds a dialect in the faces of Sadashiva in Kashmiri Shaivism. Four faces look out from lingam to the four directions, while one looks above. The sixth mouth is the yoni of the Devi in which the lingam stands. This gives rise to the six main Kaula clans of Kashmir, of which Uttara is that of the north face. The Bon Doctrine became “The Tantra of the Secret Union of Sun and Moon”, which in turn became “The Bardo Thodol” or “Tibetan Book of the Dead”