Markandeya began. Hear now of Savarni, son of the Sun, the one who is called the eighth Manu, and hear the whole account of how he came to be, told out at its full length. It was the power of Mahamaya, and that power alone, that lifted this great Savarni to the lordship of an entire manvantara. Hold on to that one name. Mahamaya stands at the center of everything that follows, and with this single word the key of the whole text is set.

Long ago, in the age of the Svarochisha Manu, a king named Suratha, born of the line of Chaitra, held the whole circle of the earth under one scepter. He guarded his people as a father guards the sons of his own body, and even so a confederacy of hostile kings, the Kolavidhvansis, rose against him. Goodness by itself shields no one from attack. The armies met. Suratha commanded the heavier force and the enemy came on with fewer men, and still, on that field, the fewer men broke him.

He rode home to his own city. The man who had ruled the whole earth was now the lord of a single country, and even that patch of ground lay ringed by the enemies who had beaten him. Splendor contracts in a single stroke. The foe pressed from beyond the walls, and then, inside them, his own ministers turned. Strong men, corrupt men, rotten to the soul and quick to prey on weakness, they stripped the failing king of his treasury and his army, and they did it in the heart of his own capital.

His sovereignty gone, the king put out word of a hunt, mounted a single horse, and rode alone into deep forest. No companions, no retinue, one rider passing under the trees. Here was the first seed of a turning away that the king could not yet name in himself. Deeper in, he came on the hermitage of Medha, finest of brahmins, a clearing where even the beasts of prey lay quiet with their old enmities set aside, and where the sage’s disciples moved at their tasks. Medha received him with honor, and the king stayed on for a time, walking here and there through that gracious hermitage.

Yet the welcome he found outside could not still the man inside. His mind, hauled along by the grip of mine-ness, kept turning on a single thought. That city my fathers held, the city that now stands without me, is it being kept in dharma by those faithless servants of mine, or is it not. Here lies the seed of the whole story. Let a man renounce a thing, and worry for that very thing refuses to leave his mind.

He kept turning it over. My chief war-elephant, that great tusker always wild with rut, what comforts can he be finding now in the hands of my foes. The men who came to me day after day for favor and riches and food have surely bowed themselves by now before other kings. And the treasury I gathered coin by hard coin, bled without a pause by men who spend past all measure, must already be wasting down toward nothing.

These thoughts, and others like them, ran in the king without rest. And here the story turns. Close by the brahmin’s hermitage he caught sight of a merchant standing alone. One grieving heart knows another at a glance. The king went to him. Who are you, he asked, and what has brought you to this place, and why do you stand there looking so struck down with sorrow. At these words, offered in plain kindness, the merchant bowed low and began to answer.

The merchant answered. My name is Samadhi, and I am a trader, born into a house of wealth. My own sons and my wife, made dishonest by their hunger for that wealth, drove me out of my home. They took my money and left me stripped of riches and of family both, and even the kinsmen I trusted turned their faces away, so I came grieving into this forest. Now I sit here and cannot so much as learn whether my sons and my people and my wife are faring well or ill.

The questions kept rising in him, one after another. Is there well-being in that house now, or ruin. How do they get on. Are my sons living good lives or bad. The king heard him out, then asked the thing that cut closest. Those grasping people, the very wife and sons who threw you out for the sake of money, why does your heart stay tied to them in love. He saw his own wound plainly in the merchant, and he asked all the same, as though he were putting the question to himself.

It is exactly as you say, the merchant replied, your words sit squarely on my case. But what am I to do. My mind will not close its hand around hardness. They put a father’s love aside, they let greed for wealth eat even the affection they owed their own blood, they cast me out, and still my heart comes to rest on those very people. Here is the deepest riddle of the mind. The intellect grants that the love is spent to no purpose, and the mind cannot turn that judgment into stone.

He pressed on. O large-minded one, do I not know all this already, and knowing it, do I somehow still not know it, that the heart keeps spending its love on kin who hold not one virtue between them. For their sake my breath goes out in sighs and my spirits fall into gloom. What am I to do. My mind will not turn relentless even toward people whose every act toward me was unkind. So the king and the merchant stood on the very same ground, each one straining to harden his heart, and each one failing.

Markandeya said: after this, O brahmin, the two of them went together to the sage, the merchant Samadhi and that best of kings. The hour of a man’s deepest need is the hour he draws near to a teacher, and now both men drew near. They paid the sage the full courtesy that was his due, then settled beside him and fell into talk, unhurried, with nothing forced in it, each heart lying open.

Then the king spoke. Revered one, there is a thing I wish to ask you, and I beg you to tell it. This is what holds my mind in pain. I have no command over my own heart. The kingdom is lost, and still my sense of mine clings to every limb and organ of it, and though I know all this for what it is, I keep acting like a man who knows nothing at all. Best of sages, what is this. The distance between knowing a thing and living by it is the sharpest question a person can hold.

And this merchant beside me, the king went on, shamed by his own sons, abandoned by wife and servants, cut off outright by his kin, still carries a heart full to the brim with love for them. So here we stand, he and I, two men sunk in the deepest grief, our minds hauled by attachment toward the very thing whose faults our own eyes have already counted. Tell me, blessed one, how does such delusion take hold of two men who know better, until, blind to all discernment, we go on behaving as fools.

The rishi answered. Every creature that lives, blessed one, holds some knowledge of whatever its senses can reach, and the objects of sense arrive at each creature by a different road. Some are blind through the day, some are blind through the night, and some look on day and night alike with steady eyes. Human beings know, that is true, and the knowing is not theirs alone, for cattle and birds and the wild deer all carry it, each kind after its own fashion.

What a human being knows, the beast and the bird know too, and what they know, the human knows as well, and in far more than this the two run level. And even with all that knowing, the rishi said, look at these birds. Hunger wrings their own bodies, and still, caught in the same delusion, they drop grain after grain into the open beaks of their young. And these very men and women, best of men, hold their children close out of greed, each one reckoning on the day the favor comes back to him. Do you not see it.

And for all that, every one of these creatures is flung into the whirlpool of mine-ness, down into the pit of delusion, and the force that flings them is Mahamaya herself, she who holds the whole standing order of this world in place. So there is nothing here to wonder at. This sleep is the yoga-nidra of Hari, lord of the world, and it is his Great Illusion, and by her the entire world is held under a spell. That same goddess, Bhagavati, reaches even into the minds of the wise, drags them out by main force, and gives them over to delusion. Here is the marrow of the chapter.

That same Devi casts forth this entire universe, all that moves and all that stands still, and when she is pleased she becomes the giver of boons and hands human beings their liberation. She is the supreme vidya, the eternal cause of moksha, and she is at the same time the cause of every bond that holds a soul to samsara. She is the Ishvari who reigns over every other lord. One and the same shakti forges the chain and strikes it off, and it is inside that single paradox that her greatness lies hidden.

At this the king asked. Revered one, who is this goddess you name Mahamaya. How did she come to be, twice-born sage, and what is the work that is hers. What is her nature, what is her form, and out of what does she arise. All of it, O best among the knowers of Brahman, I long to hear from you.

The rishi said. That goddess is eternal. This whole world is her own form, and there is nothing she does not pervade. Even so, the manner of her coming forth is told in many ways, and you shall hear it from me. When she shows herself to bring the work of the gods to its end, the world says that she has been born, though she is eternal the whole while.

Now the rishi opened the tale that gave this chapter its name. At the close of a kalpa, when the whole world had melted into a single unbroken ocean, the lord Vishnu spread the serpent Shesha out for a bed and sank down upon it into yoga-nidra, the sleep of deep contemplation. In that same hour two dreadful asuras, Madhu and Kaitabha, sprung from the wax at the roots of Vishnu’s ears, rose up with one purpose, to kill Brahma.

Brahma the Prajapati was seated on the lotus that rose from Vishnu’s navel. He saw the two savage asuras closing on him, he saw Janardana drowned in sleep, and holding his heart to that one point he began to praise the yoga-nidra herself. His aim was single. The sleep that had made its dwelling in Hari’s eyes must loosen its hold, and the lord must wake. From here comes the hymn of Brahma, the summit of this chapter, weighted like mantra.

Brahma, lord of a splendor without equal, praised that Bhagavati who is Vishnu’s own sleep, queen of the universe, bearer of the world, the cause at once of its standing and its dissolving. You are Svaha, he said, and you are Svadha. You are the Vashatkara, and the soul of every sacred sound is yours. You are the nectar of the gods, the sudha. Imperishable, eternal, you abide as the three matras of the Pranava, the sacred syllable itself.

You are the eternal half-matra as well, the one that is never spoken aloud. You are Sandhya, the meeting of the day’s hours, you are Savitri, the mother-verse, and you, Devi, are the supreme mother of all that is. By you everything is held up, by you this world is brought into being, by you it is guarded, and at the end, Devi, it is you and always you who draw it back into yourself.

O you whose very substance is the world, in the sending forth you are the form of creation, in the sustaining you are the form of endurance, and at the ending of this world you are the form of dissolution. You are Mahavidya and Mahamaya, Mahamedha and Mahasmriti, you are Mahamoha, and you are Mahadevi and Maheshvari. You are the prakriti of all things, the one who stirs the three gunas into their play, and you are Kalaratri the dread night of dissolution, Maharatri the great night, and Moharatri the night of delusion.

You are Shri, the fortune of the world, you are Ishvari, you are Hri, and you are the buddhi whose very mark is understanding. Modesty and nourishment and contentment, peace and patient endurance, all of these are you. And you are the terrible one as well, bearing sword and spear and mace, discus and conch, carrying the bow, the arrow, the bhushundi, and the iron parigha.

You are gentle, gentler than every gentle thing there is, and beautiful beyond all measure. You stand above the higher and the lower both, Parameshvari, the supreme queen. Whatever exists anywhere at all, real or unreal, O soul of everything, the power at the heart of it is you. How then is anyone to frame a praise of you.

You drew even Vishnu down under the power of sleep, Vishnu who makes this world, holds it up, and swallows it again at the end. What lord anywhere could then stand equal to the task of praising you. It was you who gave Vishnu, and Brahma who is myself, and Ishana their very bodies to wear. After that, who is left with the strength to praise you.

So now, Devi, praised here through your own exalted powers, throw your spell across these two asuras no force can withstand, Madhu and Kaitabha. Wake Achyuta, the imperishable master of the world, and wake him quickly. Kindle in him the clear knowing that will drive him to destroy the two great asuras.

The rishi said: praised in this way by Brahma, the tamasi Devi, the goddess of darkness, came forth then and there to wake Vishnu and to set the killing of Madhu and Kaitabha moving. Out of Vishnu’s eyes and mouth and nostrils, out of his arms and heart and breast she came, and she stood in plain sight of Brahma, whose own birth no one can trace.

The moment the Devi let him go, Jagannatha Janardana rose from his serpent-couch in that one shoreless sea. And awake, he saw them, Madhu and Kaitabha, evil to the soul, towering in strength and daring, their eyes gone red with rage, braced to devour Brahma.

Then the lord Hari rose and closed with them. Five thousand years the mighty one fought, and his own two arms were the only weapons he carried. And the two asuras, drunk past reason on their own strength and held fast by the spell of Mahamaya, said to Keshava of their own accord, ask of us any boon you wish.

The lord answered. If the two of you are truly pleased with me, then grant me this, that you both meet your death at my hands. What need is there of any other boon. This much, and only this, is what I choose. The rishi said: caught now in their own trap, and looking out across a world that was nothing but water, the two spoke again to the lotus-eyed lord.

Kill us, they said, where the earth does not lie drowned under water. Your fighting has pleased us, and to take our death from hands as worthy of praise as yours is our good fortune. The rishi said: then the lord who bears the conch, the discus, and the mace answered, so be it, drew the two of them up onto his thighs, and with the discus struck their heads from their bodies.

The rishi said: so this Devi, whom Brahma himself drew forth by his praise, first came into the world in this form. Madhu and Kaitabha were destroyed, and the work of the gods was done. Now listen to what comes next, for I have more to tell you of this same goddess and her power.