The Lalita Sahasranama, the thousand names of the Goddess Lalita, belongs to the closing part of the Brahmanda Purana, where Hayagriva, the horse-headed form of Vishnu, teaches it to Sage Agastya. Tradition places their meeting at Kanchipuram. The Purana tells that the Goddess herself called Vashini and the other goddesses of speech and asked them to compose the hymn, whose 182 and a half verses hold the thousand names; in the eighteenth century Bhaskararaya wrote a commentary on them, the Saubhagya Bhaskara.
The names open with Shri Mata, the Mother, and Shri Maharajni, the great queen, and tell how she rose from the fire-altar of consciousness to carry out the work of the gods. They describe her four hands, holding a noose, a goad, a sugarcane bow and five arrows — read in the names as desire, anger, the mind and the five subtle elements — her form from crown to feet, and her victory over the asura Bhandasura. Near the close she is the one who dwells in the Sri Chakra and whose form is the oneness of Shiva and Shakti, and the last name is Lalitambika, Mother Lalita.
The hymn is chanted through Navratri and by groups who meet to recite it together: on 2 January 2026, about 1,500 people chanted it eleven times over on Chamundi Hill above Mysuru. In this collection, the Lalita Devi temple at Prayagraj honours the Goddess by the name the hymn sings, and Kamakshi's temple at Kanchipuram, where tradition sets the teaching, is a living centre of Sri Vidya worship.