Thread by @shrikanth_krish

It is Navaratri season

While there is a strong association of the festival with Shri Rāmachandra, the primary theme of the festival in much of India is the worship of the feminine power - the Goddess

Shaktism is of course a major tradition in Hinduism where the highest metaphysical reality is feminine and represented by a wide range of Goddesses

But it is also a much misunderstood theological tradition

There is a tendency to view "Shakta" traditions with a regional lens

While it is true that individuals who exclusively regard themselves as "Shakta" are concentrated in Eastern India today, the broader tradition of worshipping the feminine covers all of Hindu society

There is another tendency to react to Shakta traditions with puritan distaste

Hey...this isn't "high brow". It can't be "Vedic". This isn't mainstream

These are medieval corruptions etc

Reactions that is mostly ill-informed

Such a reaction greatly underestimates the deep roots of Shaktism and more broadly Devi worship in India

Roots that are very much in Vedic literature

It is also a reaction that does not bake in the very large mass of theological and paUrANika works dedicated to the Devi

Works ranging from Devīmāhātmyam in Markandeya Purana
to Lalitha Sahasranāmam in Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa

From Devī Bhāgavatapurāṇa in the early middle ages to the mass of commentarial work on Shri Vidya by Bhāskararāya Makhin in 18th century

Clearly this wasn't the pre-occupation of a few communities on the margin

But a major intellectual movement that some of the finest theologians engaged in, for nearly two millennia

The assertion that Shakta traditions are somehow non-Vedic / medieval in origin does not hold water

Revering the feminine is very much present in the Vedas

As evidenced by the Devīsūkta , the 125th sukta in Mandala 10, Rig Veda

The Sukta is unequivocal in declaring the omnipotence of the feminine power

"He who eats food, he who sees, who breathes, who hears the spoken word does so through me alone. Even the non-perceivers of you dwell near me. Hear me! he who is capable of hearing me!"

So the worship of the Devi is something that dates back to the earliest layers of our history

It is not a new fangled thing, nor something subaltern that is lacking in legitimacy

The translation of the above verse is sourced from this link - which also includes a word-to-word translation of the Devīsūktam

ecs.umass.edu/ece/janaswamy/…

The feminine power is acknowledged in Upanishadic literature

Most notably in the Kena Upanishad wherein Indra approaches a Yaksha, that disappears only to be replaced by Uma

Elsewhere in the MunDaka Upanishad, the "Kali" features for the first time possibly in Indian literature

Not as a goddess, but as one of the seven flaming tongues

Translation

"Kali, Karali,Manojava,and Sulohita and that which is Sudhumravarna, as also Sphulingini, and the shining Visvaruci –these are the seven flaming tongues"

Adi Shankara adds in his bhashya that these tongues are meant for devouring clarified butter offered as oblation

In the two great itihAsas (RamayaNa and MahAbhArata), which have a strong Vaishnavite orientation, the worship of the feminine is very much present in the background

The most notable example being the worship of Durga by Yudhishtira in Virata Parva and Arjuna in Bhishma Parva

Link to Arjuna's invocation of Durga on the eve of the battle is below (Kisari Mohun Ganguly's translation of the epic)

Note the invocation

sacred-texts.com/hin/m06/m06023…

But it is with the Devi Mahatmyam in Markandeya Purana (roughly dating to 400 CE), that we clearly see the maturation of a theological tendency present since early Vedic period

An unequivocal worship of the Goddess as the Supreme spirit

But the Devi Mahatmyam surely isn't something that would have arisen in isolation

The worship of Durga in the epics does suggest that the Markandeya Purana represents the maturation of a tradition, not its incipience

The Devīmāhātmyam comprises of some 700 verses, and is one of the earliest sources of legend on the Goddess, primarily Durga

The centerpiece legend is that of Durga leading the battle against the buffalo Demon - Mahishasura

A legend deeply ingrained in Indian culture

The city of Mysore today derives its name from the Mahishasura legend

But this is no doubt a pan Indian legend, with its appeal going way beyond pockets in Eastern or Southern India

With the ascendance of Vaishnavism in the past 1000 years, perhaps the Goddess worship is less strong than it was at one point in the Northern plains

But archeological record does suggest that legends like Mahishasura-slaying were pan Indian in their appeal

Here's a 12th century depiction of Durga slaying Mahisha the demon from Himachal Pradesh - now found in the Metropolitan Museum in NYC

It's interesting as we don't associate Himachal with the Devi legends today as a top-of-mind recall

The Devimahatmyam is not just a collection of legends

It has a theological mooring where the feminine power is the principal creative force

The text incorporates Sankhya philosophy wherein the Devi embodies all three Gunas - Sattva, Rajas and Tamas (latter represented by Kali)

Not an expert here

But in my view this is a somewhat stark contrast to Vaishnavite traditions where we tend to associate the divine with the Sattva Guna (the attribute that epitomizes balance, harmony, purity, serenity)

In the Shakta traditions, we see the divine representing all forms of existence and types of attributes, and not merely a sanitized Sattva mode

Moving away from Devi Mahatmyam, we have the perennially popular Lalitha SahasranAmam - a paen to the mother goddess, containing her 1000 names

The Lalitha Sahasranama is not, again, an isolated Stotra. But a part of the much larger BrahmANDa purANa (dating to 1st millennium CE)

Along with VishNu Sahasranama, the Lalitha Sahasranama has to be one of the most widely recited Sanskrit texts in the country

Here's a rendering of the Lalitha Sahasranama on youtube. With over 3MM views

The Lalita Sahasranama has attracted a great deal of commentarial attention over centuries

With a notable commentary being that of Bhaskara-raya the great Marathi Tantra expert from the Tamil country in the 18th century

Another work from the 1st millennium, that retains its popularity in much of modern India today, way beyond Shakta circles, is the text - "Soundarya Lahari"
Commonly attributed to Adi Shankara

An important Shakta text that appeals to numerous Non Shaktas

So clearly the Shakta tradition was well developed by the middle of the 1st millennium

And many of the texts from that period remain with us today, as living texts

With Devi mahatmyam being the foremost among them

As we move to the second millennium the tradition that got its big impetus with Devi mahatmyam continued with new texts being composed in the same vein

Devi Bhagavata Purana being the preeminent text that adds more detail to much of the theology in the older Devi mahatmyam

At some point in these crowded centuries, you get the concept of Mahavidya from Tantra literature- where you depict the goddess in ten forms

All varied and distinct

Kali, Tara, Tripura Sundari, Bhuvaneshvari, Bhairavi, Chhinnamasta, Dhumavati, Bagalamukhi, Matangi and Kamala

The range here is remarkable

Kali is the one Mahavidya form that is most controversial and problematic to some modern sensibilities

Terrifying and dark

On the other hand, you have the musically inclined, green-complexioned Matangi - also a Mahavidya form

I find it interesting that Durga does not find mention among these ten Mahavidya forms, though she is the primary Goddess whose legends are narrated in Devi Mahatmyam

Maybe someone can fill in on why that's the case

One of the foremost Mahavidya forms is of course Tripura-Sundari

The deity worshipped in many temples across India - including the famous Kanchi Kamakshi temple

Within the Tantric fold concerning the Mother goddess, there is a division of sorts between two traditions -

The Srikula traditions focused on Tripura Sundari / Lalita Devi. Predominant in Southern India

The Kali-kula traditions of Eastern India focused on Durga / Kali

The textual orientations are very different for these two traditions -

The principal texts for the Srikula traditions are Lalitha Sahasranama, and Saundarya Lahari, which we have touched upon

While the Kali-kula tradition focuses more on Devi mahatmya (a.k.a. Chandi-Patha)

The Sri-kula tradition is also known by the name "Shri Vidya" - a major school in Southern India

One of its major doyens being the brilliant Bhaskara-raya, a theologian with over 40 works to his credit

Bhaskara-raya Makhin was a Maharashtrian who lived all his life in Tamil country

What marks him out is his theological range

He has written commentaries on Sri-kula texts like the Lalitha Sahasranama, as well as on Devi Mahatmya

But he was also a major Tantra exponent - the author of Sethubandha, a treatise on Tantra worship focused on Tripura Sundari

One way in which the Lalitha / Tripura Sundari tradition differs from the Eastern Durga-centric traditions is in the mode of worship

While the northern traditions focus more on the lore and the icons, the southern traditions are focused more on Sri-Yantra - a geometric figure

The Sri-Yantra is very intriguing

A diagram of 9 triangles combine to form 43 smaller triangles as shown below

It might be intriguing to read Bhaskara-raya expound on Sri-Yantra

Something that I haven't done

But curious to hear from anyone who might have read Sethu-bandha, his major work

Bhaskara-raya was perhaps the last major figure in the intellectual history of Shaktism

But even in our own times, in the 20th century, the tradition has continued to evolve

Most notably in the 1970s, a Bollywood movie titled "Santoshi Ma" gave a fillip to "mother goddess" worship in the North Indian plains - a region where Goddess worship traditionally has been relatively less developed and prevalent compared to the East or South

In modern India, the worship of the feminine receives a major fillip during the Navaratri period

But individuals who regard themselves as "Shaktas" exclusively are for the most part in Eastern India, though mother goddess worship is pan-Indian

Some of the greatest Bengali hindu figures of the 19th century were born in Shakta families -

Notably Ramakrishna Paramahansa, and Swami Vivekananda

But Vivekananda in his own writings wrote more on Vedanta than on Tantra

Shakta worship and Tantra have, on the other hand, fascinated Westerners

An interesting figure being John Woodroffe (1865-1936), a major western scholar on Shakta tradition

His works include The Serpent Power, Hymns to the Goddess, Shakti and Shâkta

So that brings us to the thread's conclusion -

The worship of the feminine in varied forms has occupied the Indian mind, starting with the Rig Veda Mandala 10 to Santoshi Mata in our times

It's been a tradition constantly worked upon. Not ossified in 1-2 texts.

A tradition that is pan-Indian yet not homogenous

And a tradition that continues to challenge us in ways that some of the other traditions don't.

We will end on that note

Post-script : One may wonder

Is the worship of the feminine something abjured in Vaishnava traditions

Of course not, but that would require a separate thread. Starting perhaps with Sri-Suktam in RV, and discussing the Maha Lakshmi and her centrality in Sri-Vaishnava theology

Post-script 2: The extracts from Kena and Mundaka Upanishad in the thread are sourced from this very fine resource hosted by IITK -

upanishads.iitk.ac.in

Post-script 3: The thread briefly touched upon Sri Vidya tradition and Sri-Yantra

Here's a more in-depth look at the tradition from @subhashkak1 I came across today

swarajyamag.com/culture/the-gr…