The Sri Yantra as the Goddess Herself, Not Her Image

The Shri Vidya tradition of Shakta tantra holds that the Sri Yantra is not a picture of the goddess Lalita Tripurasundari but is identical with her, a form she takes rather than a symbol standing in her place. The diagram is built from nine interlocking triangles, four apex upward read as Shiva and five apex downward read as Shakti, whose overlap generates forty three smaller triangles taken together as the yantra's own subtle body. Andre Padoux's study of the concept of the word in Hindu tantras traces how this geometry is understood to encode a cosmogony in miniature, the goddess's own becoming of the world rendered as pure form rather than told as a story. Surrounding rings of eight and sixteen lotus petals, three circles and a bordering square gated on four sides, the bhupura, complete a structure the tradition reads outward toward the center as the goddess's descent into manifestation and inward toward the edge as the worshipper's own return to her. Douglas Brooks's study of Hindu Shakta tantrism describes worship of the yantra as proceeding through a sequence transmitted only under initiation, so this entry states the geometry and its meaning in full while leaving the sequence by which an initiate is brought to approach it in worship exactly where the tradition keeps it, unpublished and unreconstructed.