Janamejaya wanted the rest of a story. Vyasa had once mentioned a supreme light that appeared on the summit of Himalaya, and the king asked him now to tell it in full, for what wise man turns away from the nectar of the Devi’s story? “Those who drink amrita may still die,” he said. “The one who drinks this nectar does not.” Vyasa answered that the king was blessed and fortunate, taught by great souls, which was why his devotion to the Bhagavati had no guile in it; and he began an old tale. Sati’s body had burned in the fire. Shiva, distraught, wandered here and there, and at last he stopped in some place and sat; the world went out of his awareness, his mind passed into samadhi, and he spent a long time there meditating on the form of the Bhagavati. With that the three worlds were left without good fortune. The whole world, with its oceans, its islands and its mountains, lost its strength. The joy that flows in every heart dried up; all beings grew worn with anxiety, sank into sorrow and fell sick; and because Sati was gone the planets, the gods, the powers within the elements and the powers above them all began to act against their own natures, and every creature slipped from the bounds that had held it.
At that time a great asura named Taraka rose. He had won a boon from Brahma and made himself ruler of the three worlds, and the death Brahma had written for him read to him like a promise of safety: “The son born of Shankara’s own body will be your slayer.” Shankara had no such son and no wife to bear one, and Taraka, knowing it, roared and bellowed without fear. The gods left their stations and fled, and their fear had a plain shape: Shiva had no wife, so how would a son be born, and how would the work of the unfortunate ever be done? In that trouble they all went to Vaikuntha and told Vishnu everything in private, and he gave them the remedy. “Why this worry? The Bhagavati is a wish-granting tree, and Bhuvaneshvari, who dwells in Manidvipa, is always awake. If she has turned away from us, the fault is ours alone; Jagadamba has done it to teach us. A mother, whether she fondles her child or scolds him, never treats him without mercy, and so is the Mother of the World, who governs merit and fault. A son offends at every step; apart from the mother, who else in the world could bear it? Go at once, with guileless minds, to the refuge of that supreme Mother. She will surely accomplish your task.”
Having taught them so, Vishnu set out at once with Lakshmi beside him, and the gods followed him to Himalaya, king of mountains. There every one of them took up the disciplined rite of purashcharana; those who knew the way of it performed the Amba-yajna; and all of them took up vows. Some sat in samadhi, some were lost in japa of the Bhagavati’s name, some recited the suktas, some kept the hard krichchhra fasts, some performed the inner sacrifice, and some, with full attention, worshiped the supreme Shakti with the seed-mantra Hrillekha. Many years passed this way. Then on the ninth day of the bright half of Chaitra, on a Friday, a great light appeared before them all without warning, the light the shrutis declare, and the four Vedas, embodied, stood in the four directions praising it. It shone like crores of suns, held the coolness of crores of moons and the red glow of crores of lightnings; it was neither above nor across nor in the middle, for it filled every side; it had no beginning and no end, no hands and no limbs, and it was neither in a woman’s form nor in a man’s nor in both. Its brilliance closed the gods’ eyes. When they took courage and looked again, that radiance stood before them as a woman most beautiful of limb, in fresh youth, a maiden. Her anklets and girdle rang; gold earrings chimed against her lotus face; her forehead was the eighth-day moon, her eyes red lotuses, her teeth kunda buds; she wore a pearl garland and a jeweled crown with the crescent moon for its ornament, mallika and malati flowers in her braid, a saffron bindi on her brow. She had three eyes, and in her four hands the noose, the goad and the two mudras that grant boons and take away fear; her garments were red and her body glowed like the pomegranate flower. So the gods saw Jagadamba herself, her lotus face softly smiling, the very image of compassion. They bowed, and their throats were so choked with tears of joy that none of them could speak. Then, somehow finding courage, their heads bowed, they began to praise her.
The Word That Came Down to Himalaya’s House
“Namah to the Devi,” they sang, “to Mahadevi, to Shiva, always; to Prakriti and to Bhadra. We take refuge in Bhagavati Durga, fire-colored, blazing with tapas; namah to her who carries us over the sea of samsara.” They hailed her as Vak, the speech every creature speaks, who gives food and strength like Kamadhenu; as Kalaratri praised by the Vedas; as Vaishnavi, Skandamata and Sarasvati, the shaktis of Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma; as Aditi, mother of the gods, and as Daksha’s daughter Sati. In the measure of the Gayatri they said, “We know Mahalakshmi; we meditate on her who is every shakti; may that Devi impel us.” They bowed to her whose forms are Virat, Sutratma and Avyakta, whose form is Brahman; to her who, unknown, lets the world appear as a snake or a garland appears in a rope, and who, known, ends the delusion; to her who is the implied sense of “tat”, sole consciousness, undivided bliss; to her beyond the five sheaths, witness of the three states, the implied sense of “tvam”, the inner self; to her whose form is the Pranava, Om, and whose body is the syllable Hrim. So praised, the Bhagavati who dwells in Manidvipa spoke, and her voice was as sweet as an intoxicated koel’s. “Tell me the work for which you have gathered. Always giving boons, I am the kalpavriksha that fulfills my devotees’ desires. While I am here, what worry can you have? I lift my devotees out of this sorrowful sea of samsara; know that this vow of mine is true.”
The gods were glad at her loving words, and without fear they told her their sorrow. “Nothing in the three worlds is unknown to you. The asura king Taraka torments us day and night. Brahma has fixed his death at the hands of Shiva’s own son, and you know that Shiva has no wife. That you take a body and come down among us is the whole of our petition. And keep a second thing in mind: may our devotion to your lotus feet never waver. That is our second request, and the chief one.” The Bhagavati answered, “My shakti named Gauri will appear in Himalaya’s house. Strive so that she is given to Shiva; that Gauri will accomplish your task. And may your devotion to my lotus feet remain always. Himalaya too worships me with deep devotion and a whole mind, and so I have held birth in his house dear.” Himalaya was there among the gods. At her words his throat closed and his eyes filled, and he spoke to the great queen. “Whom you favor, you make great; otherwise where am I, inert and unmoving, and where are you, whose form is being and consciousness? No merit of horse-sacrifices through hundreds of births could make anyone your father. Now people will say, ‘Ah, the Mother of the World herself is born as the daughter of this Himalaya; he is blessed and fortunate.’ She in whose belly crores of universes rest is born as his daughter: who on earth can equal him? I cannot think what excellent place has been made ready for my ancestors, in whose line one so fortunate as I was born. As you have granted that I be Gauri’s father, tell me now your own nature, the settled conclusion of all Vedanta. Teach me the knowledge, the devotion and the yoga the Veda sanctions, by which I may attain your form.” Her lotus face bloomed with joy, and she began to lay open the secret hidden in the shrutis.
Maya, Forever Our Companion
“Let all the gods hear what I say,” the Devi began, “for one who hears it attains my form. Himalaya, before all this, only I was, and nothing else. My form then was called chit, samvit, Parabrahman. No reasoning reaches it, no finger can point it out as this or thus, it has no likeness, and no change touches it.” Then she spoke of her power. The Bhagavati has a shakti, self-established, famed as maya. It is neither sat nor asat, and since the two exclude each other it cannot be both; maya is some other thing. “As heat is always in fire, as light is in the sun and moonlight in the moon, so this maya is surely always my companion.” As in deep sleep every dealing ends, so at the pralaya all jivas, time itself and the karmas of the jivas merge without distinction into her. By union with that shakti she took the form of the seed, and creatorship arose in her; through the veil of maya that rests on her as its support, her consciousness was hidden. Joined to consciousness she is the efficient cause of the world, and since the world is her own transformation, born of her and dissolving in her, she is its material cause as well. Some call that shakti tapas, some tamas, some jada, the inert; others call it jnana, maya, pradhana, prakriti, shakti, aja; the Shaiva sages call it vimarsha, and those who know the truth of the Veda call it avidya. It is called jada because it is merely a thing seen, and asat because knowledge destroys it; consciousness itself is never seen, and whatever is seen is inert. Consciousness is self-luminous, and like a lamp it lights the sun and everything else; in waking, in dream and in sleep its absence is never experienced, only the absence of the states, and if its absence were ever experienced, the witness of that absence would itself be consciousness. It is the object of supreme love, and so it is also bliss. “I never was absent,” she said. “I was in every self as love.” That self, joined with desire and with the unseen fruit of karma, by its maya, grows desirous of creating; and that, she told Himalaya, is the order of creation, which no deliberate intellect planned. The form she had described, supernal, avyakta, dappled with maya, is the cause of causes, the witness of all actions, the seat of the powers of will, knowledge and action, the meaning of the mantra Hrim, the first principle.
From that first principle came akasha, carrying the subtle element of sound; from akasha, vayu, carrying touch; from vayu, tejas, carrying form; then water with taste and earth with smell, so that akasha has one quality, vayu two, tejas three, water four and earth all five. From these subtle elements arose the great pervading thread called the linga, the subtle body of the Paramatman; that in which the world rests as a seed is the avyakta, its causal body; and by panchikarana, the mixing of each element with a share of the other four, the five gross elements arose, and what is made of them is the Virat, its gross body. From the sattva portions of the five came the five organs of knowledge and the one inner organ, which is four by its functions: with doubt and resolve it is manas, with certainty buddhi, with recollection chitta, with the making of “I” ahankara; from the rajas portions came the five organs of action and the five pranas. Five organs of knowledge, five of action, five pranas, and mind with buddhi: these seventeen parts are her subtle body. Prakriti, she said, is of two kinds. With pure sattva dominant it is maya; with impure sattva dominant it is avidya. The reflection of the Paramatman in that pure-sattva maya is called Ishvara, supreme, omniscient, all-doing, gracious to every being. The reflection of the Paramatman in avidya is the jiva, and because avidya veils the portion of it that is bliss, the jiva is the seat of every sorrow. Both have three bodies and three names: the jiva, as owner of the causal body, is prajna, of the subtle body taijasa, of the gross body vishva, and Ishvara in the same way is Isha, Sutra and Virat. The jiva is the single, Parameshvara the aggregate. “That lord of all, impelled by my maya-shakti and wishing to favor the jivas, creates worlds full of enjoyments. Subject to my shakti, that Ishvara is ever imagined in me, who am Brahman, as a snake is imagined in a rope.” The whole world, moving and unmoving, arose from her maya alone, and from the highest view that maya is in no way separate from her. Having created the world she enters it, putting the pranas before her, together with maya and karma; otherwise how would the world’s work go on? As space is one and yet is spoken of as the space in a pot, so she, one, differs through her adjuncts; as the sun lights good things and bad alike and is never soiled, so she is never stained by their faults. As the great space is imagined to differ from the space in a pot because of the pot, so the jiva’s difference from Ishvara is imagined by maya through the adjunct of ignorance, and there is no real difference; jivas seem many only through maya, and Ishvara’s variety appears through maya and never by his nature.
The Cosmic Form That Made the Gods Tremble
“This whole world is woven in me, Himalaya. I am Ishvara, I am Sutratma, I am the Virat self. I am Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra, and I am also Gauri, Brahmi and Vaishnavi. I am the sun, the moon and the stars. The beasts and the birds are my form. The chandala, the thief, the hunter, the doer of cruel acts, the doer of good acts, the great man: all of them are I. I am woman, I am man, and I am the one who is neither; of this there is no doubt. Whatever is seen or heard anywhere, inside or outside, I pervade it and abide in it always. Nothing that moves or stands still is without me; a thing void of me would be as impossible as a barren woman’s son. As one rope is taken by error for a snake or a garland, so I appear as Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesha and the rest. An imagined thing has no being apart from its ground, and the world has being only by my being.” Himalaya heard her out and asked for more than words. “If you have grace on me, I wish to see that aggregate Virat form of yours, just as you have described it.” All the gods, Vishnu among them, were glad at this and approved his request.
Then the Devi, Kamadhenu of her devotees, knowing what the gods wished, showed her form, and they beheld the supreme Virat form of Mahadevi. The sky was her head, the moon and sun her eyes, the directions her ears, the Vedas her speech, the wind her breath; the universe was her heart and the earth her loins; the firmament her navel, the wheel of lights her chest, the upper worlds her neck, mouth and forehead; Indra and the gods her arms; fire her mouth; day and night her eyelashes; Yama her fangs. Maya was her laughter and creation the casting of her side-glance; modesty her upper lip, greed her lower lip, the road of adharma her back. The oceans were her belly, the mountains her bones, the rivers her nadis, the trees her hair; childhood, youth and old age her gait; the clouds the hair of her head, and the two sandhyas, dawn and dusk, her two garments. The moon was her mind, Hari her power of discernment, Rudra her inner organ, and every world from Atala down to Patala lay below her hips. And that form blazed with thousands of flames. It licked its lips again and again, ground its teeth with a crunching sound, vomited fire from its eyes, bore weapon upon weapon, and ate Brahmins and kshatriyas for its food; it had a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet; it shone like crores of suns and crores of lightnings, a terror to heart and eye. The gods cried out, their hearts shook, they fell in a deep swoon, and even the memory that this was Bhagavati Jagadamba left them. The Vedas, standing in the four directions, revived them. Taking courage, their eyes full of tears and their throats choked, they praised her in faltering words. “Amba, forgive our offenses and protect your poor children. Calm your anger, for we are frightened at the sight of this form. What praise can dull-witted gods give? You yourself do not know the extent of your own might; how could it be known to us, who were born afterward?” They bowed to Bhuvaneshvari, whose self is the Pranava and whose form is the syllable Hrim, and they hailed her as sarvatma, the self of all, from whom came fire, sun and moon, gods and beasts and men, rice and barley, tapas and truth, the seven worlds, the sacrifice itself and the three Vedas. “Mother, namah to you before and behind, on both sides, above and below, in all four directions. Now hide this supernal form and show us that most beautiful one.” Jagadamba, ocean of mercy, saw that they were afraid. She drew the dreadful form back into herself and showed her lovely form, with the noose, the goad and the mudras of boon and fearlessness, every limb tender, her eyes full of compassion, her lotus face gently smiling, and the gods, freed from fear and calm of mind, bowed to her in choked and joyful voices.
The Path of Knowledge: From Action to Renunciation
“Where are you ill-fated gods, and where this wondrous form of mine?” the Devi said. “Still, out of love for my devotees I have shown it to you. Except by my grace this form of mine cannot be seen by any means, by Veda-study, by yoga, by giving, by tapas or by sacrifice.” Then she returned to the earlier subject, brahmavidya. The Paramatman, by the difference of its adjuncts, takes the name jiva, and agency and the rest come into it. It does karma of many kinds, the cause of dharma and adharma, is born in womb after womb accordingly, and enjoys pleasure and pain; by the force of the impressions those enjoyments leave it acts again, takes body after body, and like a ghatiyantra, the wheel of pots that fills and empties and never once stops, the jiva finds no rest. Ignorance is its cause; from ignorance comes desire, and from desire action. So a man should strive firmly to destroy ignorance, for that destruction is the success of a life; when ignorance is destroyed the aims of life are finished and jivanmukti, freedom while the body still lives, is gained. Vidya alone can destroy ignorance. Action arises from ignorance, and so action does not oppose it. Some say that since the shruti commands “kurvann eveha karmani”, do your works here, action is needed, while kaivalya comes from knowledge alone, so that moksha needs a combination of the two; yet knowledge and action oppose each other, and so that cannot be. Knowledge splits the knot of the heart; action arises in that very knot; being opposed, the two cannot stay in one place, as darkness and light cannot be together. Therefore the Vedic rites, which exist to purify the mind, should be done with care, and they are needed only until shama, dama, titiksha and vairagya have arisen and sattva has risen with them, and no longer.
Then the knower should become a sannyasi. Let him take refuge with a guru who is shrotriya and brahmanishtha, learned in the Veda and established in Brahman; let him hear Vedanta daily with guileless devotion, and daily reflect on the meaning of sentences such as “tattvamasi”, which teach that the jiva and Brahman are one. “When that oneness is known, a man becomes fearless and becomes my form.” The direct sense of “tat” is she herself; the direct sense of “tvam” is the jiva; and “asi”, the wise say, declares the two to be one. Taken in their direct senses the two contradict each other, the one all-knowing and the other knowing little; so bhaga-tyaga-lakshana, the implication that gives up a part, drops those qualifiers and keeps only the consciousness they share, as “this is that Devadatta” needs implication before the man standing here is known for the man once seen there. When the jiva stops laying itself over the gross and the other bodies, the jiva becomes Brahman. The gross body, built of the five quintuplicated elements, subject to age and disease, made of maya and unreal though it seems real, is the first adjunct of her self; the subtle body of seventeen parts, which knows pleasure and pain, is the second; the causal body, beginningless, indescribable, rooted in ignorance, is the third. When the three adjuncts dissolve, only the self remains. Within the three bodies the five sheaths abide, and one who gives up the five sheaths stands in Brahman, addressed by the shruti with words such as “neti neti”, and is called her form. “This self is never born and never dies. Having been, it does not come to be again; unborn, eternal, everlasting, ancient, it is not killed when the body is killed. If the slayer thinks that he slays and the slain thinks himself slain, both of them fail to know; it neither slays nor is slain. Subtler than the atom and greater than the great, it is set in the cave of the heart of the jiva, and the one free of willing and grief sees its greatness by the grace of the Lord.” Know the jiva as the lord of the chariot, the body as the chariot, buddhi as the charioteer and the mind as the reins; the senses are the horses and the objects the roads they roam. One who is always ignorant, uncontrolled and impure does not reach that state and comes back into samsara; one who is always knowing, controlled and pure reaches the state from which there is no rebirth. “The man whose charioteer is a discerning buddhi, with the reins of the mind in his hand, reaches my supreme state beyond the road of samsara.” So, having settled his true nature by hearing and reflection, he should meditate on her through the three letters of the mantra called the Devi-pranava: Ha is the gross body, Ra the subtle body, I the causal body, and Hrim, the fourth, is she herself. In a cave or some silent place, free of desire, making prana and apana equal within the nostrils, with eyes closed, he should merge Ha into Ra, Ra into I, and I into Hrim, and contemplate in the crown of the head the undivided sat-chit-ananda, beyond word and meaning, free of all duality. “By such meditation the best of men realizes me and becomes my form; the seeker destroys his ignorance at once, and his karma with it.”
The Method of Yoga and the Waking of the Kundalini
Himalaya asked next for yoga, the yoga that gives knowledge, in all its limbs, so that he might become fit to see the truth. The Devi said, “This yoga is not in the sky, nor on the surface of the earth, nor down in rasatala. Those who know yoga call the oneness of jiva and atman yoga.” Six faults obstruct it: desire, anger, greed, delusion, pride and envy, and the yogi cuts through them with the limbs of yoga, which are eight: yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana and samadhi. The yamas are ten: ahimsa, satya, asteya, brahmacharya, daya, arjava, kshama, dhriti, measured food and shaucha. The niyamas are ten as well: tapas, santosha, astikya, dana, the worship of God, the hearing of the shastras’ conclusions, lajja, mati, japa and havana. The asanas are five: padmasana, with both soles on the thighs and the hands, taken around the back, holding the big toes; svastikasana, with the soles between thigh and knee; bhadrasana, with the heels on either side of the seam of the body; vajrasana, with the feet on the thighs and the hands below the knees; and virasana, with one foot under and the other thigh over it. Pranayama draws the outside air in through ida, the left nostril, for the time of sixteen Pranavas, holds it in the middle of the sushumna for sixty-four, and releases it slowly through pingala, the right nostril, for thirty-two, and the measure grows with practice. With japa and dhyana of one’s deity it is sagarbha; without them, vigarbha. The body reports its own progress: sweat is the lowest sign, trembling the middle one, and rising from the ground the highest. Pratyahara is the forcible withdrawal of the senses from the objects they roam among. Dharana holds the prana by rule in twelve places, from the big toe and the heel up through the navel, the heart and the throat to the middle of the brows and the head. Dhyana is the constant contemplation within of the chosen deity, the mind fixed in the conscious self and made one-pointed. And samadhi, the sages say, is the constant sense of sameness between jivatma and paramatma. “These are the marks of the eightfold yoga. Now I tell you the excellent mantra-yoga.”
“This body of five elements is called vishva,” she said. “Joined with the light of moon, sun and fire, the jiva and Brahman become one.” In this body run three and a half crore nadis. Ten of them are chief, and of the ten three are principal, set in the spinal column: on the left the white, moon-formed ida, full of nectar; on the right pingala, the sun’s image; and between them, all-radiant and fire-formed, the sushumna. Within the sushumna is the nadi named Vichitra, and within that stands the svayambhu-linga, bright as crores of suns; above it the maya-seed Hrim, made of Ha, Ra and I with bindu and nada; and above that the kundalini, red-bodied, in the shape of a flame. “Himalaya, she is called devyatmika, and she is not different from me.” Around her the yogi meditates on the lotuses in their order: the golden four-petaled muladhara; the six-petaled svadhishthana, fiery and diamond-bright; at the navel the ten-petaled manipura, like cloud and lightning, where Vishnu presides; the twelve-petaled anahata, like the rising sun, with the banalinga in its midst, where sound arises without any striking; the sixteen-petaled vishuddha, smoke-colored, carrying the sixteen vowels, where the jiva is purified by seeing the Paramatman as the hamsa; the two-petaled ajna, through which the Paramatman’s command passes; above it the chakras called Kailasa and Rodhini; and higher than all the thousand-petaled sahasrara, seat of the bindu. Then the practice. With the in-breath the yogi fixes his mind in the muladhara; between the anus and the genital he gathers the kundalini shakti with the breath and wakes her; piercing the lingas in order, he leads her up to the sahasrara, and there meditates on that supreme shakti in union with Parameshvara Shambhu. There he lets her drink the nectar that rises like melted lac, and with that stream of nectar he satisfies the deities of the six chakras; then the wise seeker brings the kundalini back by the same path to the muladhara. Practiced daily, this perfects every mantra, even a flawed one; the seeker is freed from old age, from death and from the bond of becoming, and every quality that is in her, the Mother of the World, arises in him too. Then she told the yoga called dharana: fixing the mind in her, who is bounded by no place and no time, the seeker soon becomes one with that; and if success is slow because the mind is impure, he fixes the mind on her sweet hands, her feet and the rest one by one, and when it is purified, on her whole form. Until the mind dissolves in her, who is knowledge, the one who repeats the mantra keeps at his japa and homa. “Without yoga the mantra does not succeed; without the mantra, yoga does not succeed; the practice of both is the way to Brahman. As a pot in a dark house is seen by lamplight, so the self veiled by maya is seen by the mantra. This yoga is known only through the guru’s teaching; otherwise it cannot be had even through crores of shastras.”
The Bow of the Upanishad and the Debt to the Guru
Seated so, in the posture she had just taught, the seeker was to meditate on her, the Bhagavati whose form is Brahman, with a devotion that kept nothing back. What the Devi gave Himalaya next were the Upanishad’s own verses, spoken in her own voice. That luminous one, she said, is the nearest thing of all; it is called guhachara because it moves in the cave of the heart, and everything that moves, everything that breathes, everything that opens and shuts its eyes is imagined within it. It stands higher than sat, which is maya, the cause, and higher than asat, which is this world, the effect; it lies beyond the reach of creatures’ knowing, subtler than the subtle, and every world with every being in it rests there. That imperishable one is the prana of all; it is speech, it is mind, it is the supreme truth and it is immortal. “Himalaya, pierce that target.” Take up the great bow of the Upanishad and set on it the arrow that worship has sharpened; draw it with a mind pulled back from objects and steeped in the thought of God, and strike the akshara Brahman. “Pranava is the bow, the jivatman the arrow, Brahman the target. Pierce it without heedlessness, and become one with it as the arrow does.” Heaven and earth and the region between them, the mind and all the pranas are woven into that one; know it, and let other talk go, for it is the bridge to immortality. In the heart, where the nadis meet like spokes gathered in the hub of a chariot wheel, that Brahman moves, taking birth in many forms. “Meditate on the Paramatman with Om and cross the sea of samsara. May it be well with you.” Wholly beyond darkness, it is set in the divine space of the heart, which is Brahmaloka.
She told him what the one who strikes the mark sees. That Brahman is made of mind; it rules the prana and the body; it is set in every heart and established in this body built of food, and the wise see it by vijnana, blissful, immortal, shining on every side. When it is seen, cause and effect together, the knot of the heart splits, every doubt is cut and every karma wanes. Partless and stainless, the light of lights, it rests in the golden highest sheath, the anandamaya. “There the sun does not shine, nor moon and stars, nor these lightnings; how then this fire? When it shines, all things shine after it, and by its light all this is lit.” Brahman in front and Brahman behind, Brahman to the right and to the left, spread above and below: this whole world is the supreme Brahman. The one who knows it so is fulfilled; he has reached Brahman, he is always glad, and he neither grieves nor desires. Fear is born from a second, she said, and where there is no second there is no fear. “I am never apart from that knower, nor he from me. Himalaya, know this for certain: I am he, and he is my form, and wherever the knower is, there he sees me. I dwell in no tirtha, nor on Kailasa, nor in Vaikuntha; I dwell only in the heart-lotus of my knowing devotee, and one worship from such a devotee gives the fruit of crores of worships of me.” The man whose mind is absorbed in Brahman purifies his whole family; his mother is fulfilled in him, and the earth is made holy by bearing him.
“I have told you all you asked of brahmajnana. Nothing remains.” Then she set a guard on it. He was to teach it to an eldest son, or to a disciple of devotion and good conduct, and to no one else, for these secret meanings light up only the heart of the great soul whose devotion to the guru is the equal of his devotion to God. The one who teaches this brahmavidya is God himself. The teaching can never be repaid, so the disciple stays forever in the guru’s debt. The guru who gives birth into Brahman stands higher than mother and father: the life that comes from parents ends, and the birth that comes from the guru has no end. The Veda itself says of him, tasmai na druhyet, do not betray him, and so the shastras conclude that the guru who gives brahmajnana is the highest of all. “When Shiva is angry the guru can protect; when the guru is angry, not even Shankara can.” So the disciple keeps the guru content, devoted to him in body, mind and speech; the one who fails in this is kritaghna, the ungrateful, and for the ungrateful there is no redemption.
She closed with the price once paid for this knowledge. Long ago the sage Atharvana asked Indra for brahmavidya, and Indra taught it to him on one condition. “If you tell anyone else, I will cut off your head.” Then the Ashvins came to the sage and asked, and he taught them, and Indra, the wielder of the vajra, struck off the sage’s head. The two Ashvins, the best physicians among the gods, set a horse’s head upon the sage in its place. “Himalaya, the one who has gained brahmavidya, won with hardship such as this, is blessed and fulfilled.”
Bhakti, the Easiest Path and the Highest
Himalaya asked for her own devotion, the bhakti by which even the middling seeker, whose dispassion is not yet ripe, might gain knowledge with ease. “My three paths to moksha are famed,” she said, “karma-yoga, jnana-yoga and bhakti-yoga. Of the three, bhakti-yoga is the easiest to do, for it is easy to reach, it is done by the mind and needs no outer means, and it gives no pain to body or mind.” By the difference of men’s gunas, devotion is of three kinds. The one who worships with envy and anger in him, with hypocrisy, meaning to torment others: his devotion is tamasi. The one who keeps his desires always in his heart, wants fame, is greedy for enjoyment, harms no one, and worships her with much devotion only for his own good and the fruits he wants, dull-witted, holding her apart from himself: his devotion is rajasi. The one who offers his acts to the Supreme to wash away his sin, who has settled it in his mind that by the Veda’s command he must do this enjoined act daily, and who acts for her pleasure, keeping the sense of the one who serves and the one served: his devotion is sattviki. “This sattviki devotion leads to para-bhakti. The tamasi and the rajasi I described are no means to it.”
Then she described para-bhakti itself, in one long breath: to hear her qualities always and sing her name; to keep the mind on her, the treasury of jewel-like virtues, unbroken as a stream of oil; never to let a motive arise; to want none of the four liberations, neither samipya nor sarshti nor sayujya nor salokya; to think nothing higher than her service, and out of that high sense of server and served to desire not even moksha; to know her always as non-different from oneself; to see her form in every being and love others as oneself, and to see her even in the chandala; to bear ill will to none; with a mind stirred by love for her, hair on end, eyes full of tears and voice choked, to worship her, the cause of all causes, with undivided feeling; to keep her vows and long to see her festivals; free of ego and of the sense that one is the body, to dance singing her names aloud; and, since what prarabdha has set in motion will come to pass, to feel no anxiety even for the keeping of the body. “In whom such para-bhakti arises dissolves that very moment into my form of consciousness.” The farthest limit of devotion is called knowledge, and it is the limit of dispassion too. The devotee who, through his prarabdha, gains no such knowledge in this life goes to her abode Manidvipa, lives there unattached to its enjoyments, and gains at last full knowledge of her, for liberation comes from knowledge alone. Knowledge comes over many births, and human birth is rare, the Veda rarer, a good guru rarer still, so a man should strive for it with all he has. “Like ghee hidden in milk, vijnana is in every being. Churn it without pause with the churning-stick of the mind. This is the drum-beat of Vedanta.” Himalaya asked then which places on earth were holy and most dear to her, and which vows and festivals pleased her. “All visible places are mine,” she said, “all times are fit for vows, and festivals may be held at any time, for I am the all-form. Yet out of love for my devotees I will name a few.” Kolhapur, where Lakshmi always stays; Matripura, where Renuka presides; Vindhyavasini, best of the best; Annapurna’s Kanchipura; Guhyakali’s seat in Nepal; her own seat, Bhuvaneshvari’s, which is Manidvipa; and the Kamakhya-yoni-mandala, the jewel among the holy fields of the earth. No place on earth is better than that one: there each month the Bhagavati is in her menses, and then all the gods there become mountains, and the wise call the whole land the Devi’s form. She went on through place after place, Gayatri at Pushkara, Vishalakshi at Kashi and many more, and ended with the seat that needs no road: Parameshvari Hrillekha dwells in the heart-lotus of those who know. All these fields are also in Kashi; one who reads their names at dawn has his sins burnt at once, and one who reads them at a shraddha sets all his ancestors free. Then the vows, for women and men alike: the tritiya vows; the vows of Friday, of the dark fourteenth and of Tuesday; Pradosha, which is a Devi vow too, for on that evening Mahadeva seats Parvati on a seat of kusha grass and dances before her with the gods, so one fasts that day and worships at dusk, each fortnight; the Monday vow, which pleases her greatly; and the two Navaratras, of Chaitra and of Ashvina, very dear to her. At the vows the swing festival should be held, and her festivals of sleeping and waking, of the chariot and of the damana flower, and the Pavitra festival of Shravana; and then the devotee feeds, with love, the suvasinis, the kumaris and the batukas, married women, young girls and boys, seeing them as her own form. “One who does this every year with care and devotion soon becomes dear to me. Never reveal it to one who will not accept teaching, or who has no devotion to me.”
The Secret of Worship, and the Goddess Departs
At the last Himalaya asked the method of her worship, and she told him what truly pleases Jagadamba. “My worship is of two kinds, outer and inner, and the outer is again of two kinds, Vaidiki and Tantriki.” The Vaidiki is for those with Vedic initiation and the Tantriki for those with Tantric initiation, and the ignorant man who does the reverse falls utterly. The first Vaidiki worship is of the great form with endless heads, eyes and feet that Himalaya had just seen with his own eyes: worship it daily, bow to it, meditate on it, remember it, calm, free of hypocrisy and ego. “Become my worshiper with undivided loving devotion; worship me by sacrifices and please me by tapas and gifts, and by my grace you will be freed from bondage. I am reached by meditation joined with action, or by knowledge full of devotion, and never by action alone.” From dharma arises bhakti, and from bhakti the knowledge of Parabrahman; what shruti and smriti teach is dharma, and what other shastras teach is only its semblance. The Veda arose from her, the all-knowing, and since there is no ignorance in her the shruti cannot be false; as a king’s command is never disregarded in the world, how could men abandon the shruti, which is the command of her who rules all? For the keeping of that command she created the Brahmin, the kshatriya and the other classes; whenever dharma declines and adharma grows she takes avatara after avatara; and for those who never practice those dharmas she has arranged many hells, fearful even to hear of, to teach them. The shastras that run against shruti and smriti, the Vama, the Kapalaka, the Kaulaka and the Bhairava agamas, are wholly tamasa, propounded by Shiva to delude. Shankara also composed the Shaiva, Vaishnava, Saura, Shakta and Ganapatya agamas, for the uplift of Brahmins burnt by the curses of Daksha, Bhrigu and Dadhichi, and a Vedic man takes from these whatever does not run against the Veda. That is the first worship. The second is of her form with qualities, in an image, on an altar, in the orbs of sun and moon, in water, in a banalinga, in a yantra, on a great painted cloth or in the lotus of the heart: full of compassion, young, ruddy as the dawn, grieved always by the grief of her devotees, the young moon and a peacock feather on her head, the noose, the goad and the two mudras in her hands; so meditating, one worships her with the offerings one’s wealth allows. This outer worship lasts until one gains the right to inner worship, and then the outer is left. “Inner worship is the dissolving of the mind in me, who am Brahman and knowledge. Knowledge free of adjuncts is my supreme form; so set the supportless mind on my form of knowledge, for apart from it this world made of maya is wholly unreal.” Then she gave the daily order of the outer worship. Rising at dawn the worshiper pictures a camphor-white lotus in the brahmarandhra at the crown of the head and on it Shri Guru with his shakti; he bows to him, meditates on the kundalini and on her, sat-chit-ananda, in the middle of that flame; he lays the Hrillekha on his body, Ha in the muladhara, Ra in the heart, I between the brows and Hrim on the head, and in the heart-lotus meditates on Mahadevi seated upon the five pretas, Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra, Ishvara and Sadashiva, who lie at her feet while she stands wholly beyond them. He invokes the image contemplated in the heart onto the outer seat, offers her bath and cloths and flowers, pleases her with the Sahasranama that Himalaya himself composed and with the Devi-kavacha, prays with his heart wet with love for the forgiveness of offenses, offers her everything daily, his body included, feeds Brahmins, suvasinis, batukas and the poor as the Devi’s form, and dismisses her in the reverse of the order in which he invoked her. For those who cannot worship daily, Friday is fixed. “Do all my worship with the Hrillekha, for Hrillekha is called the supreme leader of all mantras. I am ever reflected in the mirror of Hrillekha; so whatever is offered to me with Hrillekha counts as offered with all mantras.” For one who worships Bhuvanasundari so, nothing anywhere is hard to get; at death he surely reaches Manidvipa, and the gods bow to him daily as the Devi’s own form. “Never tell this Gita of mine to one who is not a true disciple, nor to one without devotion, nor to a cheat or a wicked man. Revealing it to the unfit is like baring one’s own mother’s breasts; keep it secret with care. Teach it only to a devoted disciple, or to an eldest son of good conduct who is devoted to the Devi.” And one who reads it near Brahmins at a shraddha sends all his ancestors, satisfied, to the highest state.
Having said this, the Bhagavati vanished on the spot, and the gods were glad beyond measure at having seen her. In time that Devi, Haimavati, was born in Himalaya’s house and became famed by the name Gauri; later she was given to Shankara; then Kartikeya was born, and he killed Tarakasura. And once before, Vyasa said, when many jewels had come up from the churning of the ocean, the gods had praised the Bhagavati with reverence so that Lakshmi might appear, and to favor them she herself had risen again from the ocean as Rama, and the gods gave that Lakshmi to Vishnu, and so he gained supreme peace. “Janamejaya, I have told you this excellent greatness of the Bhagavati. This episode of the origin of Gauri and of Lakshmi fulfills every desire. Do not tell this secret to another, for this secret Gita is always to be kept hidden with care. I have told you briefly all you asked. This divine episode is holy, and it purifies others. What more do you wish to hear?”
Source: Shrimad Devi Bhagavata Mahapurana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)