24 Śāktism

K Srinivas

Introduction

Śāktism as a religion gives importance to the energy or potency (śakti) of the Godhead than the transcendent Godhead. Śāktism has many forms in the sense that the various forms that energy has taken. Although it is also detected in Vaişņavism, Śāktism is largely associated with Śaivism for śakti is the potency of Lord Śiva. Śāktism views that the world is the transformation (pariņāma) of the energy of Śiva. The realization of Śiva is possible only when we realize the merging of Śakti in Śiva. To become identical with Śiva means to merge our finitude with his infinitude. The yoga or path that this school teaches is called yoga of merging (layayoga). The emotional disturbance of Śakti leads to the creation. Śiva is consciousness. So also Śakti which belongs to him is consciousness. Let us study the various forms of Śāktism.

2. The Forms of Śakti

In Kāli as Śakti one finds terrifying and hideous dimensions of reality. Her terrifying presence reminds us of suffering, violence, and death, and our need to come to terms with these aspects of existence. She is the personification of death and destruction. At the same time, we see divine Mother in her. There are many feminine manifestations of God. She is mātā, the loving mother; Lakşmi, the source of wealth and happiness, Durgā, the destroyer of evil, Saraswati, the power of knowledge, Śrī, the embodiment of beauty; and Pārvati, the embodiment of the peace of virtue and love. There are many more such manifestations of Śakti with so many names in the literature. Śakti often seen as Kāli originated from the Hindu mythology. Although her origin is not all that clear it appears that she is the combination of the various features of the earlier deities. In all probability she accommodates the features of different, Vedic, Indus, and tribal goddesses. For instance, in the Caņḍi portion of Mārkandeya Purāņa, she is referred to as Durgā, ‘the Goddess’. Thus she finds a special place in the Hindu pantheon. All other forms of goddesses somehow derive their identification from this already established deity in the Hindu pantheon. Gradually all these forms of Śakti came to be established in their own right as the worshippers accepted these forms as those of the Divine Mother.

In the “Great Goddess” portion of the Purāņa, Kāli has been ascribed many characteristics. It is also held that she is manifested in her fearsome form to crush the demons in order to safeguard the gods. The gods who were conquered by the demon armies have appealed to Durgā to help them. Having given her word to save the gods from the onslaught of demon armies lead by Caņḍa and Muņḍa, she prepares for the battle against them. When the first demon worriers approached her with drawn bows and unsheathed swords, Kāli becomes furious. Her face turns black like ink and from her brows emerges frightening Kāli brandishing a sword along with a noose. Around her neck there is a garland of human heads, and skull-topped staff. She is covered by tiger skin with her mouth wide open. He tongue protrudes and is thirsty for blood. Her sunken eyes are red with anger. She covers four quarters of space with howling. She looks gruesome with her shriveled skin and protruding fangs. Kāli does not simply attack and defeat the demons but completely destroys them. With one hand she seized the elephants with riders, drivers, and worriers and hurled them down her throat. She also devoured worriers with their horses, and chariots with their drivers, grinding them up horribly with her teeth. Others are trampled to death, slayed with sword, bashed with her skull-topped club and crushed between her jaws.

When Caņḍa and Muņḍa saw their armies are being destroyed in this way, they rushed at the horrible goddess. Caņḍa showered her with arrows and Muņḍa hurled discuses at her. But all their efforts were in vain. She caught all those weapons in her mouth. All these weapons in her mouth shine like so many suns entering into the belly of the clouds. Her horrible howling, wicked laughing, and her mouth wide opened is a deadly sight to watch. She mounted on a huge lion in a  terrible rage cut off the head of Caņḍa mercilessly and ran her sword into Muņḍa. After killing them she held the heads of both the demons in hand, started laughing fiercely and presented them as sacrificial offering to the goddess Durgā. The other images of Kāli are equally gruesome and horrifying. The death personified Kāli is treated as the goddess of the cremation ground. There she feeds the dead bodies to which she first gave life and from which she then sucked the warm lifeblood in their hour of death. She is also known as the goddess of the ocean of blood and is often depicted standing in a boat floating in the ocean of blood. Dipping her skull bowel into the ocean of blood she thirstily drinks the lifeblood of the children of the world that she is continually creating, sustaining and consuming.

The Kāli is also shown the pictures surrounded by skulls and bones, jackals and vultures. She is black as death and garlanded with severed heads. She is often shown in her eternal dance of destruction. Also it is depicted that in her right hands she brandishes sword and scissors, which are symbolic to her power to destroy and cut the cord of life, her left hands display a bowl, the symbol of nourishment and lotus, the symbol of life and purity. One can also notice two bodies under her dancing feet. She is a great source of life and death. The lower Śiva who lacks nourishment is totally lifeless. The upper Śiva whose gaze is fixed on the Mother is bubbling with life. As the story goes the Gods and goddesses summoned the Mother Kāli to destroy a wicked monster who seemed invincible because there appeared thousands of them from every drop of bloodshed, but the demon and his hordes are not a match to the bloodthirsty goddess for she cut all of them into pieces in the battle. Even a drop of blood fell on the ground she lapped them up by drinking every drop of blood shed by them. Finally she devoured the blood shed monster himself.

The victory dance of Kāli looked more and more frenzied as she forgot what she was doing. She was out of control and appeared a great threat to all creation. The earth started trembling and quaking and destruction of Universe appeared imminent, the gods approached her husband Śiva and appealed to him to pacify Kāli to stop her wild dance of destruction. But she did not even bother to respect her husband’s appeal. The perplexed Śiva finally threw himself at her feet. But this act of Śiva did not deter her from the wild dance of destruction as she started dancing on his body. However, at the end, she realized what she was doing and stopped her frenzy saving the Universe from the ravages of destruction due to her mad dance. Kāli’s terrible dance of destruction, according to her followers, is aimed at the destruction of the evil. All those who fall at her feet she rescues them from evil.

3. Kāli as the Destroyer of Death and Fear

The reasons why Kāli is depicted as horrible and gruesome are two. First of all, it helps us in realizing the reality of suffering and death of fear and despair. To encounter Kāli in her terriblemanifestations is to recognize and witness the instability and the disorder of the world and its ever present evils. Her presence in the graveyard reminds us of our own death and loneliness, the pain and suffering of all creatures. It also reminds of the violence and the spitefulness of human beings, and the pitiable condition of all created existence. Hurt and suffering are the integral part of human life that they cannot be ignored or denied. To attempt to do is to drive our fears of them deeper into the unconscious. There they manifest in the form of deep disquieting anxiety and dissatisfaction with life itself. Until we face them these fears cannot be conquered. Kāli in fact represents the fearful aspects of existence that helps us to confront and conquer our fears of hurt, disorder, destruction, loneliness, and death.

One should remember that the intention of Kāli is not to horrify or terrorize us. She only reminds us of reality and how to confront it realistically for the reality of life is mixed up with beauty, ugliness, joy, sorrow, and death. This is known to every devotee of Kāli. Whatever her terrible manifestations may be if she is approached in a proper manner she is very kind to her children as a divine Mother who loves and protects them. It is the view of David R. Kinsley that Kāli is a Mother to her devotees not because she protects them from the way the things really are but because she reveals to them about their mortality so that they can act fully and freely in order to free themselves from incredible bonding web of presence, practicality, and rationality. Although she is a divine Mother, her association with death is inescapable. Her very name is the feminine form of Kāla or time, which is the destroyer of all existence. Her mighty exploits are exhibited in the battlefield, a field of death. Her home is cemetery or cremation ground. Her food is the blood and bowels of killed offerings. During the special days of her worship her image is set up in the cremation ground and bloody devotional offerings are made there.

Kāli’s preoccupation with death is only to suggest that she is personified with time and death. She not only represents death but she conquers it. The death is defeated by the Death (Kāli). She provides her devotees with courage and strength to overcome fear of time and death. Thus she makes them realize the joyous freedom to accept the richness of life and to participate in it wholeheartedly in every moment of existence. For her devotees life is not a curse but is a wonderful blessing to live. Kāli is the personification of total energy and process of existence. Also she is the embodiment of time wherein the eternal energy manifests itself. Existence confronts us with two faces. The first one is mere presence or being, which the Indian mind often personifies it as masculine. The second is its power and energy. This is usually personified in feminine form. From this divine energy or Śakti all the creative processes emerge.This is the reason all the goddesses in Hinduism are referred to as Śakti.

But one must notice that the creation has its destructive side too. As the great seers of the Vedic truths noticed that living beings are food for each other. Through the death and destruction of one being the other lives. Kāli, therefore, is not only the creative source of life but also the dimension of life. She untiringly insists on sustenance, satisfaction and satiation. Her lolling tongue, her blood-smeared lips and body, and her bloodied cleaver represent the irreducible truth that life sustains itself on life. The creative goddess in her terrible and destructive form forces this realization upon us and allows us to face the repeated fears of death and destruction. In the final analysis she prevents us from experiencing the beauty and joy present in existence. Although Kāli’s gruesome appearance and her wild and blood-thirsty caprice make us believe that she is far away from the middle path of the Buddha, she embodies a kind of parallel to the four-noble truths of the Buddha. Through her, the Hindu devotees see the depth and pervasiveness of suffering (duhkha) and the truth that its causes can be recognised and overcome. Through the worship and devotion which is the part of Kāli devotee’s spiritual discipline, the suffering is confronted and conquered. Such an act makes the devotee to see her as the joyous loving Mother. Beneath her frightening appearance is the truth that life, though fraught with suffering and terminated in death, ultimately rooted in joy.

In order to realize the joy of one’s life one has to face suffering and death. This is the reason why Kāli reveals suffering and death in their frightening characteristics. The motto of Kāli is not to destroy the devotee but to set him free from these horrifying experiences of existence. It is a paradox that Kāli’s fearsome appearance enables the devotee to regard her as a joyous and loving mother. Freedom is experienced only when one conquers the objects of one’s fear, but not running away from them out of fear. One cannot get rid of suffering by merely withdrawing from the world, but only by confronting it.

4. Kāli as the Divine Mother

Kāli the fearsome destroyer, is the Death that destroys Death and the Fearsome that destroys the fear. But one can also see in her the Divine Mother. She is the creator and the sustainer of life. At first it appears paradoxical that she is seen as the personification of death and destruction and also seen as the Divine Mother. The paradox here is that when death and terror are faced and accepted with the spirit of love then they lose their impact on us. There is no way to conquer death except by accepting it. To accept death is to embrace it. But it is a difficult thing to do. But it is something pleasurable to embrace one’s mother. If death is the mother that can be embraced though love then death can be overcome. In loving devotion to Kāli one can overcome time, death, and fear.

Such a function of goddess has inspired Tantra. The underlying aim of Tantra is to become aware that all the dimensions and powers of existence are actually the manifestations of energy (Śakti). Tantric practices are so polluting and sinful outside Tantrism. These practices include eating meat, drinking liquor, and having sex with other than wife. The reason behind them is that the polluting and sinful are also part of life and must be accepted to get librated from its bondage. But one must notice that Tantric practices do not encourage the degradation of life or promote permissiveness. Their aim is to spiritually transform one’s life by conquering those very aspects of life that are destructive and binding. Tantric metaphysics consists in accepting any part of existence as sacred therefore the entire bloody mess is also sacred. The central methodology of Tantrism is summed up in the following manner. In order to fight poison it must be done through poison alone. Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the nineteenth-century Hindu saint, a devotee of Kāli, makes this view very clear while describing the Tantric practice. Fear and death can only be overcome only through fear and death. Therefore Kāli, the divine Mother, manifests herself in the form of fear and death only to conquer them. The influence of Tantric practice is such that the distinction between the sacred and the ordinary, and the pure and the polluting vanishes. From a non-Tantric Hindu perspective they are basically degrading and polluting experiences.

5. Kāli as the Creator

The traditional understanding of Kāli in her various manifestations embodies the dynamism of the world in its creative and destructive forms. Like any mother, the Divine Mother as goddess generates existence out of her own being. Thus she shares her life with the newly created forms of existence. The other side of creation is destruction. The Divine Mother is also shown in her destructive mood. To put it in nutshell, the Divine Mother has two faces one smiling with grace and love, and the other scowling blackly, fearful and horrifying. By accepting her in darkness her worshippers are able to conquer their fears and come to realize her joyful and loving nature. The Divine Mother symbolizes the loving relationship between the mother and her child. This relationship begins with the sharing of mother’s love through which the child prospers. In her return the child (worshipper) can trust the mother completely and openly with any feeling of guilt and obligation. Total trust, security, and love represent the ideal mother-child relationship. The mother’s love is freely earned by the child. When the child grows all that the mother wants from her child is trust and love. All the actions, however mischievous, are overlooked by mother. Kāli’s worshippers are safe and secure under her protection. Her fearsome appearance does not deter them from being her worshippers.

Summary

In Śāktism, the Divine Mother Kāli is both the cause of creation and destruction. Thus she embodies both horrible and destructive aspects of reality. Her gruesome appearance and her blood-thirsty nature only show that her worshippers must come to terms with their fear of suffering, loneliness, and death. Her worshippers only see kindness and love in her fearsome appearance. The Divine Mother reveals that ugliness of hurting and dying so that we can conquer our fear of them to attain the freedom to experience, peace and joy. She is only the destroyer of suffering, fear and death.

Web links

• http://www.britannica.com/topic/Shaktism
• http://hinduism.about.com/od/tantra/a/what_is_tantra.htm
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Shaktism

Bibliography

• Danielou, Alain, The Gods of India: Polytheism, New York: Inner Traditions International, 1985.
• Hawley, John S and Donna M. Wulff, Devi: Goddess of India,(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
• Kinsley David R., Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Devine Feminine in the Hindu Religious
• Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.