Shri Vidya ritual carried, from its early Tantric sources, two competing modes of practice. The left hand mode, vamachara, made ritual use of substances, including meat, wine and sexual union, that orthodox Brahminical society regarded as impure or transgressive, understood within the tradition as a deliberate transcendence of ordinary caste and purity distinctions in the presence of the goddess. The right hand mode, dakshinachara, substituted symbolic or vegetarian equivalents for these elements, allowing the same underlying ritual structure to be performed within the bounds of orthodox practice.
The eighteenth century scholar Bhaskararaya, working chiefly in South India, produced influential commentaries, notably the Saubhagyabhaskara on the Lalita Sahasranama, that argued at length for reading the tradition's more transgressive elements symbolically, easing Shri Vidya's acceptance among orthodox Smarta Brahmins who might otherwise have kept it at arm's length. Largely through this accommodation, Shri Vidya became closely associated with the Smarta tradition's own monastic institutions, above all the Shankaracharya lineages seated at Sringeri and Kanchipuram, which remain its most prominent institutional homes in South India today, sustaining the worship of Lalita Tripurasundari and study of her Sri Yantra as a living, actively practised tradition rather than a historical curiosity.