The Tantric & Vedantic Identity of the Great Goddess in the Devi Gita of the Devi-Bhagavata Purana------------------------------- The Birth of the Goddess & Her Identity:- Around the sixth century of the common era, in the Devi-Mahatmya of the Markandeya Purana, the Great Goddess (Mahadevi) makes her first formal appearance in the Hindu Sanakritic tradition. The Devi-Mahatmya recounts the story of the birth of this Great Goddess from the combined warth of the gods just prior to her battle with the demon Mahisasura. The story nicely reveals her awesome might & martial fury. The intense anger of the gods, arising from their defeat at the hands of the demon, issues from their bodies in the form of light. The several lights unite into a single mass, from which emerges the Goddess herself: Mahadevi as Mother (The Oriya Hindu Vision of Reality) In this essay, I examine the contemporary significance of Mahadevi, the Great Goddess, to Oriya Hindus living in the temple town of Bhubaneshwar in the state of Orissa in eastern India. I focus on three issues pertaining to her identity in Bhubaneshwar: first, the belief that the Goddess is immanent in all forms of the created universe: second, the meanings that Oriya Hindus attach to her most common appellation, Ma, or “Mother”; and third, the stress that Oriya Hindus palce on complementarity between the male and female principles. In elaborating on these three points, I draw on several popular stories about the Great Goddess anr her power. Although these stories may be based on textual sources, it has been my experience that individuals who narrators explicity attribule their stories to a particular text, but such attributions are usually inaccurate. For the purpose of this essay, the lack of authoritative textual sources for these stories is relatively unimportant. The temple town of Bhubaneshwar is predominantly Saiva, and the Oriya Hindus who live here belong, for the most part, to families of herditary servsnts (sevaka) of Lingaraj, the form in which Siva is worshiped here (For a more complete description of the community, see Seymour 1983; Mahapatra 1982; Shwedwe 1991). This temple is an important pilgrimage site foe all Hindus. Pilgrims from North India, Assam, & Bengal. In particular, make a point of praying here before going on south to worship at the Jagannatha temple in Puri. Kali as Nurturing Mother:- The need to appeal to nurturing sensibilities to cause her to regain self-control is another familiar & fairly commonplace story told in the temple town. In this story, too, Kali regains self-control when she is recalled to a sense of her matemal responsiblities. The story as I heard it from one of Lingaraj’s is as follows:There can never be a bad mother (kamata). Mothers always want the beat for their children, they will sacrifice anything, even their own lives, for their children’s welfare. Look at Kali Ma (“Mother Kali”); she is fierce & terribl, but even she wants only the best for us, her needy children. And how do we worship her? We worship her as Ma (“Mother”); we address her as Ma, & there is a reason for this—because only then does she listen to us. Only then will she not consume us. Let me tell you a story about the poet Bhanja9 Bhanja was, as everyone knows born a fool (bokka), a simpleton. One evening, late, he want to defecate in the fields, & when he was returning Candi (another name for Kali) pursued, with loose hair, & he stopped. He asked her, “What do you want?” And she replied, “I want to drink your blood. Give me your blood.” And Bhanja was such a fool, he didn’t recognize Ma, but he took a sharp pebble from the ground & cut his finger and gave it to Devi. Ma began sucking on the finger & she drained all the blood from Bhanja. When life was finally ebbing from Bhanja’s body, he moaned, “Oh, Ma!” That was enough! Ma heard her son acll her “Ma,” and she stopped drinking his blood. Instead, she gave him back all his blood, brought him back to life, & said, “Myson, you were willing to give me your life; now ask me a boon, any boon, & I will give it to you.” And Bhanja that he be given the power to create poetry, the power to imagine (kalpand koriba sakti). Ma asked him to poen his mouth, & she wrote the alphabet on his tongue. From that day forth he became the silver-tongued poet that we know of today. Do you see now? When he called her Ma, she couldn’t resist him. Even though she had this terribl desire to consume blood, she forgot herself & thought only of him. Ambiguous & Definitive (The Greatness of Goddess Vaisno Devi). The abode of Trikta Devi, who is also called Baishno Devi,1 is situated near Hansal on the top of a mountain difficult of access within a watery cave, and people go on its pilgrimage with here in parties & groups from far and wide, beating drums and cymbals, and go dancing & singing praises of the Devi. The ringleader is called sant. According to the belief of most of the Hindus “Devi” is the name of the omnipotent divine power, and according to some it is the manifestation of essence/principle, the primal unity which is capable of creating bodies at the behest of the Almighty. Some say it is the aggregate of the potential of all the gods. But God knows the truth. The cave shrine of goddess Vaisno Devi lies nearly six thousand feet up at the end of a nine mile path on Trikuta, a three-peaked mountain located in the Jammu region of the state of Jammu & Kashmir. Ganeshas Badehra, author of the royal chronicle Rajdarsani (compiled in 1847 C.E. for the Dogra king, Maharaj Gulab Singh), attributes the above description of Vaisno Devi to the time of Raja Jas Dev, who succeeded to the throne in 996C.E. If the reference is accurate, then Vaisno Davi was already being visited by pilgrims coming “from far & wide” as much as a thousand years ago. No matter what the historical reality, however, the cave shrine of Vaisno Devi has emerged today as one of the most important pilgrimage sites in all of NorthIndia. The Pilgrimage:- The Vaisno Devi cave shrine, also known in the past as Tarkota, Traikakud, Trikta Devi, been a sacred place for local people—primarily Rajputs & Brahmins—for perhaps a thousand years; for Panjabis, at least a few hundred. In recent time the annual number of visitors, mostly urban in origin, has reached five million. A number of Dogra kings of Jammu have been associated with Vaisno Devi. The most important patron was Maharaj Gulab Singh who was appointed raja of Jammu by Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of Lahore, in 1822. When the Lahore court fell to the British in 1846, Gulab Singh paid to the victors a part of the war indemnity they demanded from Lahore. In exchange, Gulab Singh was given control of Kashmir & other territories. To support Hinduism in his enlarged kingdom, he founded an organization, eventually named “The Dharmarth Trust,” to build and manage temples, schools, dharmsalas and charitutions. Its sole trustee is Dr. Karan Singh, the current to Gulab Singh’s lineage. Although Vaisno Devi was formally placed under the managemant of the Dharmarth Trust by Gulab Singh, in practice, control of the shrine was help by local Brahmin & Thakur families known as the baridars. The barldars did not have a good reputation with pilgrims.