DASHA MAHA VIDYAS -Ten Great Wisdom Goddesses

DASHA MAHA VIDYAS -Ten Great Wisdom Goddesses

Index: Intro (Mother Kālī) - 

1.Mahā Kālī  

2. Tārā 

3. Tripura Sundarī 

4. Bhuvaneśvarī

5. Chinnamastā 

6. Bhairavī 

7. Dhūmāvatī 

8. Bagalāmukhī 

9. Mātaṅgī 

10. Kamalā

KĀLĪ  -Intro

Of all the Hindu icons, Kālī is the most confronting for most westerners! It must also be mentioned in all fairness that many Indians also find her iconography disconcerting.

Mother Kālī is usually depicted dancing on the prostrate figure of Lord Shiva. She is black in colour with four arms. Her hair is dishevelled and her tongue lolls out of her mouth.

She has four hands — holding a decapitated head, a sword, a bowl of blood which she drinks and the lower right hand displays the gesture of fearlessness. She wears a garland of human heads and her skirt is comprised of severed arms.

Bearing in mind that Kālī is the embodiment of Time and that impermanence and change are the 2 underpinning realities of the universe and our existence in it — the image of the Goddess attempts to portray the force of disintegration and confronts us with the reality of our own mortality.

Symbols

The Kapāla — 

head she holds represents our Ahaṁkāra concept-of-self — the ego. It is the concept of ourselves as separate and unique individuals which is the foundation upon which the edifice of ignorance and delusion is built. It is the pivot of our assumptive personal universes.

The Khaḍga — 

sword - represents discrimination and wisdom.

Through discriminating between the real and the unreal, the truth and the untruth we gradually progress towards insight and wisdom which culminates in the elimination of the ego.

Our spiritual practice does not consist of achieving anything but rather removing those conditioning factors which obscure the vision of the Divine which is our essential, natural state.

The Muṇḍa-mālā —

garland of human heads - represents all the false personalities that we embody and the masks that we wear —all of which hinder and obscure insight into our true natures.

The severed hands-

 represent the countless actions - Karma that we engage in to support our assumed identities and to fulfil our cravings and repulsions —all in search of the actualisation of "happiness projects" which never really bring the ultimate happiness expected.

The demon who was Kālī’s nemesis on the field of battle was Rakta-bīja —the blood-seed demon, whose every drop of spilt blood generated another demon like him — representing our desires.

Each and every desire that is fulfilled begets another desire just as strong. The only way to terminate this cycle is to decapitate the demon and to drink his blood.

The drinking of the blood symbolises the quaffing of all desires, cravings and attachments which are the basis for our existential suffering.

The hand bestowing fearlessness indicates the need to overcome the greatest of all fears which is the fear of personal annihilation. By facing our fears and confronting the ultimate time-bound experience —death, we can achieve liberation from our spacio-temporal limitations and the cycle of rebirth and achieve Nirvana — the Supreme Bliss of "non-existence".

Mahā-Kālī is the personification of the universal power of transformation, the transcendent power of Time, the Great Goddess who rules unchallenged over the universe and all that is in it.

All processes in the universe are seen to be cyclic and can be divided in 10 phases connected with the symbolism attached to the mystical number 5 —the five aspects of Śiva and the five aspects of Śakti operate as day and night —the markers of Time.

Mahā-Kālī sub-divides herself into the 10 goddesses known as the Mahā-vidyās (ten objects of transcendent wisdom) which are the 10 aspects of the cycle of time — they’re representative of the entire processes of projection and withdrawal of the universe. They are the underlying subtle energies of which the gross universe is the outer expression.

Impermanence and change are the 2 underpinning realities of the universe and our existence in it, hence the Goddesses of Transcendental Wisdom are ultimately the powers of disintegration, but it is through the disintegration of all of our assumptive universes and everything that “appears” desirable and by facing what appears to us most fearful, (mahā-bhaya) the ultimate time-bound experience — death, that we can be liberated from bondage to the cycle of becoming and attain the ultimate goal of life, the limitless supreme bliss (parama-ānanda) of “non-existence”(existence is being conditioned by time and space.)