Place · coastal goddess tirtha · India
Kanyākumārī
Also known as Kanyakumari, Kanyākumārī
The three-ocean cape at the southern tip of the Indian peninsula where the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean meet. The Kumari Amman temple on the shore worships Devi as the eternally unmarried virgin — Sati's spinal cord or back in different Pitha lists. The cape is named in the Mahabharata and in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The Vivekananda Rock Memorial 400 metres offshore marks the rock where Swami Vivekananda meditated for three days in December 1892 — the trip from which he went on to the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago. The 133-foot Thiruvalluvar statue stands beside it.
- Periods
- Classical and Puranic Age
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Early goddess-place lists; popular pitha tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 8.088, 77.538
Worth knowing
The Bhagavathy Amman temple, a Shakti Pitha, celebrates the Goddess as a young unmarried form of Devi. Kanyakumari is named after this virgin goddess, who is believed to be a form of Parvati. According to Hindu legends, to defeat the demon Banasura, who could only be killed by a virgin, the goddess remained unmarried after a divine trick disrupted her wedding to Lord Shiva.
Connections (3)
- Pilgrimage spanUdupi
Scholars record that the swami of an Udupi matha, before taking his turn at the paryāya, tours the subcontinent from Kanyākumārī to Badrīnāth gathering blessings and donations. The circuit makes a Dvaita monastery's two-yearly succession a matter of walking the whole country, tying a Tulu-coast temple to the land's northern and southern ends.
- Parivrajaka legPandharpūr
A leg of Vivekananda's five years of wandering, 1888 to 1893, which took him from Vārānasī and Ayodhyā through Vrindāvan, Pandharpūr and the Deccan to Kanyākumārī, where he swam to the rock and sat three days. He left for Chicago from the far south, having walked most of the country first.
- Site adjacencyVivekānanda Rock Memorial
The rock lies a few hundred metres off the Kanyākumārī shore, so the goddess at the land's end and the meditation rock are within sight of each other. The memorial built on it in 1970 is the reason the rock is now a destination in its own right rather than a stone in the strait.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kanyakumari”. D.C. Sircar, The Śākta Pīṭhas (1948, rev. 1973), and the pīṭha lists of the Devī Bhāgavata and the Pīṭhanirṇaya.
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