Kamakshi Mantra

Who Kamakshi is

Kamakshi is the Goddess of the temple at Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, regarded as one of the three great seats of the Divine Mother alongside Madurai Meenakshi and Kashi Vishalakshi. Her name joins kama, desire or longing, with akshi, eye, so that she is she whose eyes are desire, or she who regards the devotee with the glance that fulfils. Iconographically she sits in the lotus posture, four-armed, bearing the goad, noose, sugarcane bow and flower-arrows of Sri Vidya’s Tripura Sundari, yet her particular presence is inseparable from the Kanchi soil. The Kamakoti Peetha tradition holds that Adi Shankaracharya established a Sri Chakra before her image, converting an earlier fierce aspect into the gracious form now worshipped. She is thus both the local amman of the Pallava and Chola country and a full embodiment of the transcendent Lalita whose glance orders the world.

Penance in the Mango Grove

Local tradition recorded in the Kamakshi Vilasa and in the sthalapuranas of Kanchipuram tells that the Goddess came to the earth in order to marry Shiva. She performed severe austerities in a mango grove at Kanchi, standing on a single needle or, in other tellings, on the tip of her toe, until Shiva was compelled to appear and accept her. In one version she fashioned a linga of sand and worshipped it; when the river flooded she protected it with her own body, and Shiva, moved by that devotion, granted her wish. Another strand links her to the re-establishment of dharma after a period when the gods had lost their power; her glance alone restored order. The temple image is understood to be self-manifest, and the Sri Chakra installed by Shankara is said to hold her power in a stable, benevolent form so that the same glance that once burned with tapas now rests as compassion upon the city and its surrounding country.

The mantra, in six scripts

The seed mantra, and the form most devotees chant daily. No initiation is required — it is open to anyone, including a parent chanting for a child.

The syllable people get wrong

The cluster kṣy in kāmakṣyai is a frequent stumbling point. Speakers commonly simplify it to a single kshi as in the modern pronunciation of the name, omitting the distinct y-glide that follows the retroflex ṣ. The traditional sound requires the tongue to strike for ṣ and then immediately release into y before the dative ai, yielding kṣyai rather than a flattened kshi.

When Kamakshi is chanted

Weekday. Friday

Festival. Brahmotsavam of the Kanchipuram Kamakshi temple

Questions