Kanchipuram is a seat of the goddess in two different senses, and the two have nothing to do with each other.
Kamakshi is named second in the recited eighteen, at Kanchi, and the shrine meant is the Kamakshi Amman temple in Big Kanchipuram in northern Tamil Nadu. What makes this entry unlike the others in the list is that the shrine's own self-understanding is not primarily a Sati story at all. In its own tradition Kamakshi is Lalita Tripurasundari, and Kanchi is the Kamakoti peetha — a seat of the Sri Vidya, the school whose worship centres on the Sri Chakra, the geometric form of the goddess. A Sri Vidya peetha is a seat of a mantra and its diagram; a Shakti Peetha in the Sati sense is a place a piece of her body is held to have fallen. Kanchi is called a peetha in both senses, by different literatures, and the two claims have nothing to do with one another. The temple is also unusual in Kanchipuram itself, a city of very many temples, in that it is the goddess shrine of the town and the one around which the city's Shakta life is organised.
No limb of Sati is assigned to this site by the enumeration that names it, and the assignments that circulate disagree with each other. — The structure of the stotra, read against the fifty-one-peetha literature — The eighteen carry no limb assignments. Three circulate for Kanchipuram — a navel, a skeleton and a back — of which the skeleton comes from an entry called Kanchi in the fifty-one-list literature. That entry's goddess and bhairava are the same pair attached to Kankalitala near Bolpur in Birbhum district, West Bengal, whose very name means the place of the skeleton. Whether the text meant the Tamil city or the Bengali village is not settled by anything consulted here, and this corpus does not settle it
In her own tradition Kamakshi is Lalita Tripurasundari, and Kanchi is a seat of the Sri Vidya centred on the Sri Chakra installed before the shrine. — Śrī Vidyā tradition carried at the shrine — The Lalitopakhyana, the closing portion of the Brahmanda Purana that carries the Lalita Sahasranama, is the textual anchor the tradition appeals to, and the localisation of its frame at Kanchi is carried by commentary and practice rather than demonstrated from the text here. The Sri Chakra before the sanctum is there to be seen; the tradition that Shankaracharya installed it, having found the goddess in a fierce aspect, is what the shrine tells about itself and is recorded as that. No dated inscription or independent early source for the installation was reached from this session
Kamakshi Vilasa is the sthala-mahatmya of the shrine. — Sthala-māhātmya, published in the shrine's own tradition — Commonly presented as an extract from the Brahmanda Purana. That framing is a traditional claim about the text's descent rather than an established one, and is recorded on that footing
Other temples of Kamakshi exist and are not this one. — Modern record — Kamakshi shrines at Mangadu and Saidapet near Chennai, an Adi Kamakshi temple within Kanchipuram itself, and the Bangaru Kamakshi at Thanjavur — traditionally an image taken from Kanchi during the disturbances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — are distinct shrines. None of them is advanced as the peetha, and none is a rival claimant to this line
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
Kanchi is called a peetha in two senses at once — a seat of the Sri Chakra, and a place a part of Sati fell. Did one of those claims attract the other, and which came first?
The fifty-one-list entry called Kanchi carries the same goddess and bhairava as a village in Birbhum whose name means the place of the skeleton. How would anyone tell which Kanchi a tantric text meant?
Kanchipuram is a city of very many temples and this is the one its goddess-worship is built around. What made Kamakshi the centre rather than one shrine among many?
