Nudity implies purity

By SNV Sudhir

Visakhapatnam: Nudity is revered and worshipped in the Sri Meru Nilayam temple of Devipuram, which houses the world's largest Srichakra.
The unique temple, which is located 30km from here, has been attracting devotees from all over the world.
Sri Chakra is the most sacred and potent representation of the energy of the mother goddess in Hindu culture.
The three-storied temple is constructed in the exact form of a pyramidal Sri Chakra called Sri Meru. It was built on 108 square feet and soars up to 54 feet.
There are 108 life-sized icons of the goddesses of Khadgamala here. Devotees can sit in front of them and meditate, do archana or perform homan. Most of the deities are nude or "skyclad", implying that they are pure Shaktis. It is believed that the deities want the devotees to worship their nudity.
Sitting on top of the Meru is the thousand-eyed Lalita Devi called Sahasrakshi Rajarajeshwari, who is the presiding deity.
"The temple itself is the body of the mother goddess," says Swami Amritananda Natha Saraswathy, the man behind the magnificent structure. "Here you can learn about the Cosmos and your nature."
Amritananda, who is fondly called Guruji by the devotees, explains that nudity is a sign of having nothing to hide and being pure in nature.
"That is how God made us," he says. "This temple is a symbol of unity between thought, word and deed."
Symbolism is extended further in Kamakhya Peetham on the nearby hill and the Siva temple on top of hill. Kamakhya is the mother of all and has the shape of a female genital. In its centre is the Sri Chakra Meru, a symbol of the universe. A 12-foot Sri Chakra can also be seen on top of the Shiva Temple. This temple also allows devotees to perform puja to the Devi without distinction of caste.
Maha Meru, also called the Sri Chakra, is said to be the mother of all Mandalas. This geometrical form is said to have originated from the Himalayan masters and is revered in all eastern traditions. Amritananda was once a nuclear scientist named Dr Nishtala Prahlada Sastry. He graduated from the Andhra University and received his doctorate from the University of Bombay while working at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
Sastry spent 23 years in research at TIFR. Later, he worked as a teacher in Zambia for two years. But he had a deep spiritual yearning which took him from one temple to another. It was in 1977 that Shastry visited the Balaji temple in Hyderabad. As he prostrated before the lord, he felt a thrill passing through his body. Amritananda terms this an initiation from Balaji. This proved to be the turning point in his life.
After that incident, he immersed himself in spiritual practices. He performed a Devi Yagam in Visakhapatnam in 1983, when he received the hillock where the temple stands as a donation. On the slopes of that hillock, he noticed a formation very similar to that of the Kamakhya Peetham in Assam.
While meditating, he had a vision of himself lying on the Peetham, while four others performed a homam with the flames emanating from his body.
He dug up the very site and unearthed a Sri Chakra Maha Meru made of panchaloha. It was later discovered that a big yagna had been performed there 250 years ago. Later he saw the goddess of creativity, Kamakhya Devi, in a triangular pit formation in a rock boulder nearby. She showed him all the various deities who receive puja in Sri Chakra, and he made sculptures of them.
"The Goddess guided me during every step in the building of the present temple," he says. "It took 11 years to make the Sri Meru Nilayam temple a reality."The fame of the temple has reached far and wide. "Sri Chakra is considered to be the genetic code of the cosmos, mind and the atom," says Asa Dustin, a yoga teacher who is on a visit from New Jersey.