Part 9 - Srikula: Family of Sri

Sri Lalita-Tripurasundari enthroned with his left foot on Sri Chakra, holding their traditional symbols, bow of sugar cane, arrows of flowers, rope and sting.

The tradition of Srikula (Sri's family) (sampradaya) focuses on Devi worship in the form of the goddess Lalita-Tripurasundari, who is considered the Great Goddess (Mahadevi). Rooted in Kashmir during the first millennium, Srikula became a force in South India before the seventh century and is now the main form of shaktism practiced in the southern regions of India such as Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka.

The best known is Srividya Srikula School, "one of the most influential and theologically sophisticated movements of Shakta Tantrism. Its central symbol, Sri Chakra, is probably the most famous visual image of the entire Hindu tantric tradition. His literature and practice may be more.

The Srividya paramparas can be subdivided into two streams, the Kaula (a practice of vamamarga) and Samaya (a practice of dakshinamarga). The Kaula or Kaulachara, first appeared as a coherent ritual system in the eighth century in central India, and its most revered theorist is the eighteenth-century Bhaskararaya philosopher, widely regarded as "the best exponent of the Shakta philosophy ".¹

Samaya or Samayacharya has its roots in the work of commentator Lakshmidhara of the sixteenth century, and is "fiercely puritanical [in their] Tantric practical reform attempts to align the norms of high caste Brahmins". Many Samaya practitioners explicitly deny to be Shakta or Tantric, although researchers claim that their worship remains on the technical level at the same time. The marks of the Samaya-Kaula division "an old dispute in Hindu Tantrism" and a debate with force only until today.