The Soundarya Lahari, the wave of beauty, is a Sanskrit hymn of one hundred verses to the Goddess, which tradition attributes to Adi Shankaracharya. The forty-one verses that open it are known as the Ananda Lahari, the wave of bliss; tradition holds that they came to Adi Shankaracharya at Kailasa, and that he composed the remaining fifty-nine himself.
Its opening verse holds that Shiva, joined with Shakti, is able to create, and without her cannot so much as stir — so how, it asks, could anyone without merit praise her whom Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma themselves worship? Later verses place her on Manidvipa, the island of jewels in an ocean of nectar, and describe the Sri Chakra as nine figures, four of Shiva and five of Shakti. From the forty-second verse the hymn turns to her form, from the crown on her head to her feet, and it ends by offering itself back to her: a hymn made of her own words, it says, is like waving a lamp before the sun, or bringing the ocean its own water.
More than thirty-six commentaries on it exist in Sanskrit, among them Lakshmidhara's; it was put into Tamil around the twelfth century, and W. Norman Brown's English translation appeared in the Harvard Oriental Series in 1958. In this collection, Kamakshi of Kanchipuram is held to be celebrated in the hymn, and Adi Shankaracharya is remembered at Kollur, where he is held to have consecrated Mookambika, and at Sringeri, where tradition holds he founded the Sharada Peetham.