The question came from Janamejaya, the king in whose hearing Vyasa was telling the whole Purana, and Suta repeated it to the munis later exactly as it had been asked. The shruti, the king said, makes the worship of Shakti a standing duty for every dvija, at the three sandhyas of the day and at other hours besides. Why then do the twice-born leave Bhagavati and worship other gods? Some worship Vishnu and some Ganapati; some are Kapalikas, some follow the path called China, some wear bark, some go naked as Digambaras; there are Bauddhas and Charvakas, and a great many people have no faith in the Vedas at all, clever pandits among them, men skilled in every kind of argument. No one knowingly throws away his own good. Why do they? And Manidvipa, the Devi’s highest dwelling, which Vyasa had spoken of before: what is that place like? A pleased guru, the king added, reveals even secrets. Vyasa called the question excellent and timely, the question of a man wise and faithful to the Vedas, and he began his answer with a story. Long ago the danavas, mad with pride, fought the gods for a hundred years. That war, thick with weapons of every kind and with maya laid over maya, was ruin for the world. In the end, by the grace of Parashakti Bhagavati, the gods beat the daityas, and the daityas gave up the earth and svarga together and went down to Patala.
The victory went to their heads. Overjoyed, and through that joy deluded, the gods began to speak of their own valor wherever two of them met. “Why should we not win? Our glory is the highest of all. Where are these base, powerless daityas, and where are we, the famous gods who create, preserve and destroy the worlds! What are helpless daityas before us?” They had never known the power of Parashakti, and that was the whole of their delusion.
Then, out of grace toward them, the compassionate Jagadamba appeared in the form of a yaksha. A splendor hung in the air before the gods such as none of them had ever seen: bright as ten million suns and cool as ten million moons, with the glare of ten million lightnings in it, and no hands, no feet, no limbs at all. They stared, and they said to one another, “What is this! What is this! Some scheme of the daityas, or some powerful maya? Who has made a maya that amazes even the gods?” Then they took counsel and resolved: go near the yaksha and ask it who it is; learn its strength and its weakness first; only then do anything about it.
The humbling of Agni and Vayu
Indra called Agni. “Agnideva, go. You are our best mouth, the one through whom every offering reaches us; go there and find out who this yaksha is.” Agni heard his own prowess spoken by the thousand-eyed king and set out at speed, and stood before the yaksha within moments. “Who are you?” the yaksha asked. “What prowess is in you? Tell me all of it.” “I am Agni. I am Jataveda. The power to burn the whole universe is in me.” The yaksha, radiant beyond anything the god had seen, set a single blade of grass before him. “If the power to reduce the universe to ash is in you, burn this.” Agni gathered his whole strength against that one dry blade and could not scorch it. He went back to the gods ashamed, and when they asked what had happened he told them everything, and ended, “Our pride in being lords of all is wholly vain.”
Then Indra, the slayer of Vritra, called Vayu, and the summons itself was a garland of praise. “The whole world is pervaded by you and moves by your movement. As prana you carry every power into every creature. Go and find out who this yaksha is; no one else can know a yaksha of such radiance.” Vayu swelled with the honor of it and went quickly to the place. The yaksha said in a sweet voice, “Who are you? What power is in you? Tell it all before me.” Vayu answered proudly, “I am Matarishva. I am Vayu. The power to move all things and to seize all things is in me; the whole world carries on its business by my motion.” The yaksha said, “Move this blade of grass placed before you as you wish. Otherwise give up this pride and go back to Indra ashamed.” Vayu threw his whole strength at it, and the blade did not stir from its place. He went back to Indra with his pride gone, told the whole humbling story, and said, “We who hold false pride and arrogance cannot know this yaksha. A yaksha of such fierce tejas seems to belong to no world of ours.”
Indra takes refuge
Then the gods turned to Indra. “You are lord of the gods. Now go yourself and learn exactly what this yaksha is.” Indra went, and he went in great pride. The moment he arrived, that supreme tejas in its yaksha form vanished. Nothing stood there, and nothing had spoken to him. The king of the gods was ashamed, and because the yaksha had thought him worth no word at all, he began to think himself small. He stood alone with that thought. He could not walk into the assembly of the gods now; what would he say to them about his own smallness? Better to give up the body. Honor is the wealth of great men, and when honor is gone, living is the same as death. With that resolve the pride left him, and Indra took refuge in the very Parashakti whose lila had just played itself out in front of him.
At that moment a voice spoke from the sky. “Indra, do japa of the maya-bija, and be happy by it.” He closed his eyes. Meditating on the Devi, taking no food, he repeated the supreme maya-bija for a hundred thousand years. Then one day, in the month of Chaitra, in the bright fortnight, on the ninth tithi, at midday, a great tejas broke out in that same place, and in the middle of that circle of light Indra saw her. She was new in her youth, a maiden, her body the red of the japa flower, the hibiscus, and shining like ten million suns at dawn. A crown like the moon of the second night sat on her hair, and a jasmine garland lay along her braid. She had three eyes. She had four hands, and they held the boon-giving gesture, the noose, the goad, and the hand raised against fear. Her limbs were tender as a creeper, her breast showed through her garment, ornaments covered her, and the light of her teeth turned the ground under her to ruby. Her face was gracious and smiling, lovely as ten million Kamadevas; she wore red, and red sandal was on her skin. Around her, in the four directions, stood the four Vedas in bodily form, praising her. She was a kalpavriksha to her devotees, the cause of all causes, compassion itself with no reason behind it: Jagadamba Haimavati, Bhagavati Shiva, famed by the name Uma. Indra’s heart overflowed with love.
Uma’s teaching
Indra fell at her feet like a staff, his eyes full of tears, his body thrilling, and praised her with hymn after hymn. Then, head bowed, he asked, “Who was that yaksha, and why did it appear? Tell me all of it.” Bhagavati, an ocean of compassion, answered him. “That was my own form. That is Brahman, the ground on which maya rests, the witness of all, changeless, the cause of all causes. The state which all the Vedas proclaim again and again, which every tapas declares, for which seekers keep brahmacharya: I will tell you its name. It is called ‘Om’, the one-syllable Brahman, and it is also ‘Hrim’. Hrim and Om are my two chief bijas. With these two parts I create the whole world. One part is called Sachchidananda; the second is called Maya-Prakriti. That Maya is the Para Shakti, and I am the Devi whose power rules the whole world.”
She went on, and what she told him was the shape of everything. This Maya abides in her always, as moonlight abides in the moon, with no difference between them; its nature is the state of balance, and even when the whole world dissolves it does not part from her. When the karma of beings ripens, what lay unmanifest becomes manifest again. Turned inward, that power is called Maya; turned outward it is called Tamas, and from that outward, tamas-formed Maya the beings are born; at the beginning of creation it stands as rajoguna. Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesha are made of the three gunas, rajas foremost in Brahma, sattva in Vishnu, tamas in Rudra, who is the form of all causes. Brahma has the gross body, Vishnu the subtle, Rudra the causal; and the state of balance that rules all three from within, the turiya, is she herself, and the formless Parabrahman above even that is also her form. Her form is twofold, nirguna without maya and saguna with it. Having made the whole world and entered it through and through, she drives each jiva on according to its karma and the shastra. She gives Brahma the impulse to create, Vishnu the impulse to preserve, Rudra the impulse to destroy. The wind blows from fear of her; the sun keeps to its course from fear of her; Indra, Agni and Yama do their work from fear of her, and that is why she is called supreme. Then she came to the gods themselves. “All of you won every victory by my grace alone. I make you dance like puppets. Sometimes I give victory to the gods, sometimes to the daityas. I am free, and by my own will I bring everything to pass according to the ripening of each one’s karma.”
“Your intellects were covered with ahankara. In your pride you forgot me, the Bhagavati who is the self of all, and you fell into painful delusion. So, to show you grace, my divine tejas came out of your own bodies and appeared as the yaksha. Now give up entirely the pride that is born of the body, and take refuge in me, the Bhagavati whose nature is Sachchidananda.” So she spoke, Vyasa told Janamejaya, the Mahadevi, Sarveshvari, Mula-Prakriti in her own form; and the gods worshiped her with devotion, and she vanished in that instant.
Then all the gods put down their pride and worshiped the lotus feet of Bhagavati with the full rite. At the three sandhyas they sat always at Gayatri japa, and every day they worshiped her with their shares of the yajna and the other offerings. So it was through the Satya Yuga: everyone was given to the japa of the Gayatri, and to the japa of the pranava and of the hrillekha, the Hrim she had named.
And here Vyasa gave the king his answer. Nowhere does the Veda call the worship of Vishnu, or diksha into Vishnu’s worship, a standing duty; nowhere does it say so of the worship or the diksha of Shiva. Gayatri worship is what every Veda calls nitya, and without it a Brahmin falls in every way. By Gayatri alone the dvija is fulfilled and needs no other means; set on her worship alone, he reaches moksha whether he does other things or leaves them undone, as Manu himself said. A vipra who worships Vishnu or Shiva and lets the Gayatri go arrives in naraka in every way. “Therefore in the Satya Yuga,” Vyasa said, “all the best of the dvijas kept constantly to Gayatri japa and to the worship of the lotus feet of Bhagavati.”
Source: Shrimad Devi Bhagavata Mahapurana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)