A point, and nine triangles
At the centre is a point, the bindu. Around it nine triangles interlock, four pointing up and five pointing down. Where they cross, the classical drawing counts forty-three smaller triangles. Then come eight petals, then sixteen, then circles, and last a square with four gates.
This is the Sri Yantra, also called the Sri Chakra: the principal ritual diagram of Shri Vidya, the tradition of the goddess Tripurasundari, who is also called Lalita. She is worshipped in the bindu. In the Shakta reading the five downward triangles are Shakti and the four upward are Shiva, and the whole figure begins and ends in their union at the centre.
Its nine-level form is written down in Sanskrit texts by about the eleventh century, roughly a thousand years ago. The oldest that survives, the Vamakeshvarimata, lays the diagram out before the name Śrīcakra appears. Its layout, one scholar observes, has stayed essentially the same ever since.
The Saundarya Lahari, a hymn attributed to Adi Shankara, counts its parts in a single verse: four triangles of Shiva, five of Shakti, eight petals and sixteen, three circles, three lines. Sringeri tradition says Adi Shankara carved a Sri Chakra into a rock there, and that the goddess Sharada’s sandalwood image was set above it.
We know of no older tradition of Sri Yantra carpets. Yantras are drawn on the ground or on paper, or cut in stone and metal. Carpet 004 is a new rendering, in silk.
Nine enclosures, from the outside in
Read from the square inward, the figure is called the way of enfoldment; read from the bindu outward, the way of unfoldment.
- A square with four gates bhūpura
- Sixteen petals
- Eight petals aṣṭa-dala-padma
- Fourteen triangles catur-daśāra
- Ten triangles, the outer ring bahir-daśāra
- Ten triangles, the inner ring antar-daśāra
- Eight triangles aṣṭa-koṇa
- One triangle, pointing down
- The bindu
Three circles usually lie between the square and the sixteen petals.
Carpet 004
The yantra on this page is drawn from carpet 004’s loom master, measured from the design the founder supplied. It keeps his proportions, not a textbook’s.
- A deep navy round. There is no square and there are no gates.
- Sixteen outer petals, and eight larger inner petals.
- Two gold circles, where the classical figure has three.
- Nine triangles, four up and five down, outlined in antique gold seven millimetres wide.
- The classical figure counts 43 triangles. Here the lines divide the circle into 78 fields, 66 in colour and 12 in navy.
- The bindu is not woven as a dot. On this page a small gold point marks it, inside the innermost triangle.
Ten silk colours, as the loom master shows them:
- Deep Navy
- Antique Gold
- Crimson Red
- Violet
- Burnt Orange
- Teal
- Royal Blue
- Periwinkle
- Olive Green
- Saffron Yellow
The record
- Carpet
- Khard Hridaya Carpet 004
- Name
- Sri Yantra (working name)
- Size
- 1.5 m round
- Material
- Hand-knotted mulberry silk
- Knots
- 150 per square inch, about 410,900 in all
- Origin
- India, Nepal
- Status
- Waiting for its master
- Weaver
- To be named when the loom starts
- Internet Archive item
- khard-hridaya-masterpiece-004
Not a token. Not a medical device.
How to sit with this carpet
Om Aim Hrim Shrim Tripurasundaryai Namah,100 times while the gaze rests on the bindu.
Sources
- Anna A. Golovkova, A Goddess for the Second Millennium: Transgression and Transformation in the Hindu Tantric Worship of Tripurasundarī, PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2017. ecommons.cornell.edu
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “yantra”. britannica.com/topic/yantra
- S. K. Ramachandra Rao, The Tantra of Śrī-Chakra (Bhāvanopaniṣat), Bangalore: Sharada Prakashana, 1983, introduction, pp. x–xiii. archive.org
- Saundarya Lahari, verse 11, Sanskrit text and gloss. manblunder.com
- W. Norman Brown (ed., tr.), The Saundaryalaharī or Flood of Beauty, Traditionally Ascribed to Śaṅkarācārya, Harvard Oriental Series 43, 1958. review listing, cambridge.org
- Sri Sringeri Sharada Peetham, “Sri Sharadamba”. sringeri.net
- Khard Hridaya, carpet 004 loom master HRIDAYA-GTC-004 and its loom notes, 2026.