The Durga Story : Metaphors and Confusions

The Durga Story : Metaphors and Confusions

Sanjeev Kumar Nath

If you know how to tell a story, you will always have an audience because human beings love stories.

We have always been living with stories around us, with us, in us. Primitive humans told stories through the drawing on the caves they inhabited.

After a good hunt or some other adventure, our ancient forefathers told tales—true and false—to the admiring kin who were not present in the scene of action. 

After great battles came the story-tellers to recount the tales of bravery, cowardice, deceit, cunning, sacrifice. We have been telling stories since times immemorial. We are telling stories now, and will continue to tell stories in the future.

Contemporary social media is full of stories, many false, and some true. Ben Okri, a contemporary Nigerian author, says that stories are to humans what the ocean is to the fish living in the ocean. Stories make us human. We are stories.

The founders of religions told stories. Ancient Hindu, Buddhist, Jain scriptures are full of stories. Jesus taught through parables. Islam begins with the fascinating story of the Prophet being visited by the archangel, imparting wisdom to Him. The Sikhs tell the stories of the martyrdoms and the heroism of their gurus.

There are wonder tells of the Nath yogis, of Kabir the iconoclastic saint, of hundreds of thousands of revered men and women, and also of detested vermin, of gods, of demons, of love, of hatred, jealousy, ambition, victory, defeat…..Stories are endless.

            Some stories are supposed to be literal. They can be put to the test of truth. They either recount something that actually happened, or claim that something happened but the claim itself is doubtful or false. Some stories are parables or metaphors. It is these—the metaphorical stories—that have been used by great preachers, teachers, saints, sages, unknown authors to say things that cannot be easily said in a literal manner.

And the “truth” question is not always important and not always valid. The metaphors can indeed gesture towards some truths and they may contain great lessons for humanity, but to stretch the “truth” content in such a way that the story is seen as a literal recounting of actual events can create confusions.

Sometimes, of course, the teaching was secondary or not there at all; the entertainment was all that was there in the story. A joke could be such a story; but a joke could also be a very powerful lesson or an attack or an interrogation, a provocation to think. Stories can be of so many different kinds.

            One fascinating story concerning Sakta worship in Hinduism is the story of the Durga Saptashati, the “seven hundred verses to Durga” or the Chandi. Of course, it is not just one story, but several stories woven into a “story-within-a-story” structure. The stories are arranged with a specific design to accommodate prayers and hymns, all addressed to what the Saktas consider to be the primordial power of the universe, the Divine Mother.

One of the names of the Divine Mother is Chandi, and the text is also called Chandi, emphasizing the oneness of the two. If you have Chandi (the text) in your house, if you recite the Chandi with devotion, you have the Divine Mother with you, here and now, and she will deliver you from all fears. Is that very different from saying what the Vaisnava says—that if you have the Srimadbhagavatam in your house, if you read it with devotion, you have Krishna with you, here and now, and he will deliver your from all fears?

Is that very different from saying what the follower of Advaita Vedanta says—that through nididhyasana or deep meditation and contemplation on your innermost essence or pure consciousness, you will realize the Self or Atman here and now, and will be free from fear for ever? But do the Vaisnava bhaktas and the Advaitis and the Saktas ever stop quarrelling?

One way to end the quarrelling, and accept the essence of religion and leave the scum, is to explore the metaphors of the stories, rather than read them with blinkers on and see narrow doctrinal “truths” in them. The Durga Saptashati presents the ultimate reality or God as female, as a mother.

A devotee of the Divine Mother feels a great sense of reassurance in the fact that the primordial power, the cause of the creation, sustenance and destruction of the universe and of life is his Mother, and also the Mother of all. Devotion is about utilizing the power of our emotions in a positive manner. The loving attachment that a child feels for his mother—that is the emotion used here to worship the Divine Mother.

The frame story involves three people: 1) a king called Surath, who has been driven out of his kingdom by his flatterers who have now usurped the throne, 2) a trader called Samadhi who has been duped of his wealth by his kin, and 3) a sage called Medha in whose forest hermitage the dispossessed king and trader both take refuge.

            The two sorrowful men—the king and the trader—tell their stories to the sage who takes pity on them, and suggests that they should take refuge in the Divine Mother who alone can save them from their troubles. Both men desire to know about the Divine Mother and the sage tells them the stories of how the Divine Mother had caused the destruction of the two demons called Madhu and Kaitabha in the past, and how later she had saved the gods from the atrocities of the demons.

Madhu and Kaitabha were two demons that emerged from the ear-wax of Maha Vishnu when He was in yoga nidra. These two powerful demons attempted to kill Brahma who then appealed to Maha Maya, the Goddess to protect him. The Divine Mother caused Maha Vishnu to wake up and fight with the demons, while she deluded the demons to grant a boon the Vishnu : the boon to be killed at His hands.

Thus, Madhu and Kaitabha are killed by Lord Vishnu, and peace is restored. This story has been interpreted in various ways.

For instance, Madhu and Kaitabha have been taken to represent tamasic and rajasik propensities which need to be subdued for sattvik propensities (represented by Lord Brahma the Creator) to manifest fully.

The demons may also be taken to mean raga and dwesha, two opposite attitudes of the mind (desire/attachment and hatred/abhorrence) which become the cause of our becoming entangled in the world. Freedom from raga and dwesha is freedom from woe.

The state of mind of the sthitaprajna yogi (a person of steady wisdom) as described by Krishna in Chapter 2 of the Gita is the state of a person who has transcended raga and dwesha completely. The divinity within such a person has manifested itself by triumphing over the baser instincts.

 The sage Medha further tells the king and the trader about how Mahisasura, a terrible demon who had usurped the throne of Indra and driven the gods out of swargaloka was killed by the Mother. To kill Mahisasura, the Divine Mother manifests as the collected powers of the all the gods, wielding the weapons of all the gods.

Thus, she is the embodiment of all that is good in the universe, and Mahisasura of all that is evil. Then there is another story that the sage tells—the story of two other terrible demons, Shumbha and Nishumbha and their followers, Chanda, Munda, Raktabeeja and others, all destroyed by the Divine Mother. Once again, it is a story of good pitted against evil.

(But Why do good and evil exist? Why did God not make a world full of good alone? The ontology of evil is a subject that has provided multifarious explanations in the religious traditions of the world, but there is no explanation that is fully satisfactory in rational terms.)

            The war between the Divine Mother and the demons can be understood as a symbolic representation of the war between good and evil forces forever taking place in the world and in our minds, while the supreme power of the Mother is a strong assertion of the belief that Truth and Goodness always triumph over falsity and evil.

The battle between good and evil can be understood as occurring in the world outside, but also inside the mind of man. The same allegorical meanings can be read in the beginning of the Srimadbhagavad Gita, where the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna takes place right in the middle of the battlefield of Kurukshetra.

            Besides describing the Mother’s gory battles with the demons, the Durga Saptashati also shows how She triumphed over those terrible demons almost as if in play, not really having to apply force. This is to suggest how infinitely more powerful the Divine Mother is than anything else in the universe. Thus, she is the Maya of the Lord (as in Vedanta), or Prakriti (as in Sankhya) who, along with Purusha, make up all that there is.

As Maya, she is anivarchaniya—one who cannot be described and cannot be understood; as Prakriti she is the material manifestation of the universe. These dual entities (Maya-Brahman, Prakriti-Purusha) are inseparable just as the heat is inseparable from the flame, the cold from the ice.

            While many who worship the Divine Mother do so to procure material benefits, the supreme devotees never ask for anything but for devotion and knowledge. There is the famous incident of Narendranath (later Swami Vivekananda) going to ask for money and wealth from Mother Bhavatarini, the special aspect of Kali at Dakshineswara.

After Narendranath’s father died, the family was in great financial difficulty, with even the relatives who used to throng the house, enjoying their hospitality, deserting them. Like many other young people of Bengal in those days, Narendranath used to visit Brahmo Samaj gatherings, and was strongly against idol worship.

However, he had also started visiting Sri Ramakrishna Paramhamsa at the Dakshineswar Kali temple. Ramakrishna’s great love for Narendranath was no secret, and Narendranath also could not but feel a strange attraction for Ramakrishna whom he first took to be a rather whimsical, but extraordinarily spiritual person.

Narendranath was extremely worried about the future of his family without his father, and as the eldest son, he was trying very hard to procure a job, but without any success. One day Sri Ramakrishna suggested that he should ask for money and a job and whatever he wanted to Mother Kali in the temple. It was a Tuesday, an auspicious day for the worship of the Mother, and Ramakrishna assured Narendranath that he would get whatever he wanted.

Narendranath went, and saw the living presence of the Divine Mother in the image of Kali. He prostrated and begged for pure devotion and knowledge. When he returned, Sri Ramakrishna asked him if he had asked for wealth and all, and Narendranath said that he had forgotten to ask for money; he only asked for devotion and knowledge.

Sri Ramakrishna scolded him and sent him again, and again Narendranath forgot to ask for money. This happened thrice, and then Sri Ramakrishna, mightily pleased with Narendranath’s attitude, assured him that his people will not feel the hard pinch of poverty; they would not be wealthy, but would never be in want of the essentials for life to go on.

In the Durga Saptashati story, after the king and the trader listen to the stories of the Divine Mother from the sage Medha and after they worship the Mother, they too got what they wanted. The king wanted to be the ruler of his kingdom again, and that is what he got, but the trader had acquired enough dispassion not to desire for worldly things. He attained mukti, ultimate liberation through the grace of the Mother.

If we understand the metaphorical implications of the stories of the terrible battles between the Devi and the demons, we would understand that what is required is the sacrifice of the greed, lust, hatred, egoism, egotism, cowardice…..in us. That is the huge army of the demons to be sacrificed before the Goddess, not some poor buffalo or goat.

A South Indian poet-saint calls upon Mallikarjuna Shiva, a manifestation of Shiva as a hunter, to hunt in the jungles of his (the poet’s) mind and kill the beasts like greed and lust.

In a similar manner, a Sakta should aspire to sacrifice his lust, greed, etc., before the Divine Mother and thus propitiate Her so that She bestows liberation.

Shakti sadhana is about minimizing and finally completely erasing one’s negative tendencies and embracing the divine, not about showing off how may animals one has sacrificed before Kali or Durga. The beasts to be sacrificed are inside, not outside.

sanjeevnath21@gmail.com 9476527719

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