Jajpur stands on the Baitarani in northern Odisha, and the stotra names it eleventh under the name Oddyana. The shrine is Biraja — Viraja in Sanskrit, Biraja in Odia, one name and not two — where the goddess is worshipped as a two-armed Mahishamardini, spearing the buffalo, which is itself unusual: the form is normally eight- or ten-armed. Two things make this entry worth reading slowly. The first is that the place-name in the verse is one of the most argued-over words in Indian sacred geography. Oddiyana is one of the four seats of early tantra, and where it lies has been disputed for a century: the older consensus, built on Chinese pilgrim accounts, puts it in the Swat valley in what is now Pakistan, while a body of Odishan scholarship argues from archaeology and from the Odia associations of the siddha king Indrabhuti that it lay in the north-east instead. The second is that Jajpur is the navel of the Gaya triad — Nabhi Gaya, to Pithapuram's Pada Gaya and Bihar's Siro Gaya — and Pithapuram is the name immediately before this one in the hymn. Two consecutive members of the eighteen are two thirds of an entirely different enumeration.

Claims, and where they come from

• Jajpur is one of the eighteen Shakti Peethas of the recited enumeration, named eleventh, and the goddess there is Girija. — Aṣṭādaśa Śakti Pīṭha Stotra (traditionally attributed to Śaṅkarācārya) — Third verse, second line — ōḍhyāyāṁ girijādēvī, māṇikyā dakṣavāṭikē — pairing Jajpur with Draksharamam, which is the next member and also in this corpus. The attribution of the hymn to Shankaracharya is traditional; this corpus writes attributed to rather than composed by
• Where Oddiyana lies is a live scholarly dispute, with the older consensus placing it in the Swat valley and a body of Odishan scholarship placing it in the north-east. — Modern scholarship on the tantric pithas — The Swat identification rests on Chinese pilgrim accounts — Faxian, Xuanzang and Tang-period annals — that place a kingdom of Udyana there. The north-eastern case argues from archaeology in Odisha and from the Odia associations of Indrabhuti, whom the siddha literature calls king of Odivisha and whose Jnanasiddhi opens by invoking Jagannatha. This corpus takes no side. It records the argument because a reader who meets the word Oddyana in this verse will also meet it attached to a valley in Pakistan, and deserves to know why — and because the argument is about a tantric toponym, not about which shrine at Jajpur the eighteen mean, which is not contested
• No limb of Sati is assigned to this site by the enumeration that names it. — The structure of the stotra itself — The eighteen carry no limb assignments. Jajpur is the one member where the convention's limb is hard to separate from the place-name: oddyana is read as the ornament a woman wears at the navel, and the navel is what the fifty-one-peetha tradition assigns here, so name and limb explain each other. That is reported and still not asserted — the verse names a place and a goddess and stops, and the corpus does not know which of the name and the limb came first
• Jajpur is Nabhi Gaya, the navel of the Gayasura triad whose head is Gaya in Bihar and whose feet are at Pithapuram. — Sthala tradition, carried at both Jajpur and Pithapuram — Carried as tradition. No passage naming all three towns as the three parts was reached from this session. All three points of the triad are members of this eighteen — Gaya is the sixteenth, under the goddess Mangala Gauri — and two of the three, Pithapuram and Jajpur, sit next to each other in the hymn. That is a structural relation between two lists and is left as that. (Corrected 2026-08-23, increment 5d: this reference previously said "both of the Indian points", which miscounted a triad whose three towns are all in India and implied Gaya was outside the eighteen.)
• The goddess at Biraja is worshipped in a two-armed Mahishamardini form. — The image in the shrine — An observable fact about the icon rather than a textual claim, and worth recording because the form is uncommon: Mahishamardini is normally shown with eight or ten arms. The dating of the present image and of the temple fabric is not asserted here; accounts differ and none reached from this session rests on an inscription

Counted among

• The Shakti Peethas — Sati's body fell across the subcontinent — and the tradition has never agreed on how many pieces, or on how many shrines.

Questions to explore

• Scholars have argued for a century about whether Oddiyana is in Odisha or in the Swat valley. If the name in this verse turned out to belong somewhere else, would the peetha at Jajpur be any less of one?
• The name Oddyana means the ornament worn at the navel, and the navel is the limb the larger lists assign here. Did the name come from the limb, or the limb from the name?
• Jajpur is the navel and Pithapuram the foot of one demon, and the hymn names them one after the other. Is the eighteen borrowing from an older map?