GOD WITHOUT HIS GODDESS

To say that Shakti is simply a goddess with several names attributed to her would be pointless, for she is the very essence of all the gods put together, writes P RAJA

Adi Shankara was once passing through a street in Varanasi. He saw a corpse lying on the wayside and a woman weeping by its side. He took pity on the woman and said to the people nearby to remove the dead body.

“Why don’t you ask the body itself to move away?” the weeping woman asked. Shankara stood stunned for a minute, before he managed to ask her, “What dead body has the power to move on its own?” The woman smiled amidst her tears and said, “If it is not possible for a tiny body like that of my husband’s to move without power, what makes you hold the view that this whole universe moves without a power behind it?”

Realisation dawned upon Shankara and he understood for the first time that there is such a thing called Shakti, the Divine Power, and the world is Her sport. This incident prompted Shankara to sing: “If Shiv is joined with Shakti, he is able to create. If not, God is incapable of any movement”, which forms the first verse of his famous Saundarya Lahari.

Ramakrishna Paramhans explains this verse in his following lines: “The Brahmn is actionless. When it is engaged in creation, preservation and dissolution, it is called Adyashakti, the Primal Power. This power must be propitiated.”

No wonder that Sri Ramakrishna’s disciple, Swami Vivekananda, said: “No nation can rise without the worship of Shakti.” It was not only saints but also heroes like Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and Guru Gobind Singh, poets and writers like Subramania Bharati and Bankim Chandra, and saint philosophers like Sri Aurobindo worshipped Shakti. The worshippers of Shakti invariably believe that Shiv is the changing Consciousness and Shakti is its changing power appearing as mind and matter. Shiv-Shakti is, therefore, consciousness and its power. The former is God as He is, and the latter is God as he appears to us. And this explains the doctrine of the dual aspects of Brahmn acting through its threefold powers of will, knowledge and action.

To say that Shakti is simply a goddess with several names attributed to her by different people of our country would be pointless, for she is the very essence of all the gods put together. She is Sharada, the giver of the essence, the juice. She has two sets of forms — a set of gentle forms in which she is beautiful beyond the catch of words and another set of terrible forms in which she is very fearful, a sight only to dream of and not to tell. A siddha or a yogi should be able to see her in both. If bhakta is one who tries to see God, siddha is one who has already realised God.

Shakti is both Maya and Mahamaya. As Maya she binds and as Mahamaya she liberates when pleaded. As Avidya Shakti, ignorance, she spreads a net to trap us and as Vidya Shakti, knowledge, she frees us from such traps. She is in all manifestations, but she is more manifested in female forms. She is famous as ten Mahavidyas — Kali, Tara, Tripurasundari, Bhuvaneshvari, Bhairavi, Chinnamasta, Dhumavati, Bagalamukhi, Matangi and Kamala — and is said to reside in fifty-one peethas, holy places, scattered all over present day countries of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and Pakistan, in different forms.

Like Krishn in the Bhagwad Gita, Mother also promises to incarnate when vices prevail. ‘Whenever there is trouble of this kind caused by demons, I shall incarnate myself and destroy the enemies,’ she says as Chandi, the fiery, destructive power of Shakti. The whole concept of Nava Shakti, the nine manifestations of the Goddess is based on this very idea of incarnation. ■

Navratra begin on September 26