On the second morning of Navratri the soil in the vessel has begun to show pale green, and the lamp lit on Ghatasthapana is still burning. The Goddess worshipped today has no mount and carries no weapon. She walks barefoot, dressed in white, a rosary in one hand and a water pot in the other, and what she brings to the festival is time. She is Brahmacharini, the Goddess of tapas, and the Devi Kavacha names her second among the Navadurga: dvitiyam Brahmacharini. If Shailaputri is the ground on which everything stands, Brahmacharini is the first thing done upon it, which is to turn the whole self toward one purpose and to stay turned for as long as the purpose requires. This article follows her story, her form and the long Indian reflection on tapas that her name carries.
The Name and Its Meaning
The word Brahmacharini joins brahma with charini, she who practises or moves in. Brahma carries two senses that the tradition keeps together. It is the Absolute, the Brahman of the Upanishads, and it is also tapas, the disciplined power through which the Absolute is approached, so that she is both one who moves in Brahman and one who lives the life of austerity. A third sense lies close at hand in the word brahmacharya, which names the first of the four stages of life, the period of the student who lives in the teacher’s household and gathers all attention for learning. Brahmacharini is the Goddess in that stage, a seeker who has set everything else aside.
From Beauty to Tapas
Her story continues directly from the previous day. Parvati has grown up in the house of Himavat, and the sage Narada, visiting the mountain king, tells him that his daughter is destined to be the wife of Shiva. Both the Shiva Purana and Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava preserve this prophecy, with differences of detail in what follows. Shiva, meanwhile, sits in deep meditation in the Himalaya and gives no sign of turning toward the world. In the Kumarasambhava the gods need a son of Shiva to overcome the demon Taraka, and they send Kama, the god of desire, to stir him. Shiva opens his third eye and Kama is burned to ashes, and Parvati, who had stood nearby with flowers in her hands, returns home with her hopes broken (canto 3). At the opening of canto 5 she resolves to make her beauty fruitful through tapas, since beauty and desire had failed to reach him.
The Austerities of Parvati
Kalidasa’s fifth canto describes her practice at length. She puts aside her ornaments and sleeps on the bare ground. In the hot season she sits among four fires with the sun overhead as the fifth, in the rains she stays on an open rock beneath the clouds, and in winter she stands in cold water through the night. She waters young trees as if they were her children, and the deer of the forest lose their fear of her. She lives first on the leaves that fall from the trees, which the poet calls the extreme of austerity, and then she gives up even the leaves, and for this reason those who knew the old stories called her Aparna, she who does not take even a leaf (5.28).
One day a young hermit, a brahmachari, comes to her hermitage. He is Shiva in disguise, and he asks why a woman of such beauty undertakes this tapas and for whom. When he learns that her wish is Shiva, he laughs and speaks against him, describing a poor and frightening ascetic with ashes for ornaments, a bull for a vehicle and no known family. Parvati’s anger rises, she rebukes the stranger for slandering one he does not know, and she turns to leave, at which Shiva takes his own form and holds her hand. Kalidasa gives him a line (5.86) in which he says that from this day he is her servant, bought by her austerities. The Shiva Purana tells a similar story in which the seven sages test her resolve first, and Shiva himself follows in the guise of an old brahmin.
Her Form
Brahmacharini walks barefoot, wearing white. In her right hand she holds a rosary of rudraksha beads, and in her left a kamandalu, the ascetic’s water pot. The verse used in her worship says that she holds the rosary and the water pot in her lotus hands, and asks that the supreme Brahmacharini Devi be gracious. The white garment is read as purity of intent, the rosary as japa, the repetition of a name through which attention is gathered into one point, and the water pot as the least on which an ascetic lives. That she goes on foot places her on the path itself, since tapas is a road travelled step by step and no vehicle can carry anyone across it.
Popular tradition links her with the Svadhishthana chakra, whose name means one’s own abode. It is placed below the navel and associated with water and with the creative and emotional energies of a person. In this reading the second night turns the energy gathered at the root toward a single direction. As on the first day, the chakra scheme is one reading among several.
Tapas in the Vedic and Yogic Traditions
The word tapas comes from the root tap, to heat, and Indian thought has seen heat at the origin of things for as long as it has kept records. The Nasadiya hymn (Rigveda 10.129.3) says that the One, enclosed in emptiness, was born through the power of heat. Another hymn (Rigveda 10.190.1) says that order and truth were born from kindled tapas, and from them the night and the ocean. In the Taittiriya Upanishad (Bhrigu Valli) Varuna instructs his son Bhrigu to seek Brahman through tapas, declaring at each stage that tapas is Brahman, and the Mundaka Upanishad (1.1.8) says that Brahman expands through tapas. In these texts the creative power of the universe and the disciplined power of the seeker share a name.
The Bhagavad Gita gives tapas its most careful definition. In the seventeenth chapter (17.14 to 17.16) it describes the tapas of the body as reverence, purity, straightforwardness and non-violence, the tapas of speech as words that cause no distress and are truthful, pleasant and beneficial, and the tapas of the mind as serenity, gentleness, silence, self-control and purity of heart. The same chapter (17.5 to 17.6) condemns those who undertake harsh austerities out of pride and torment their own bodies, and the sixth chapter (6.16 to 6.17) says that yoga belongs to the one who is moderate in eating and in rest. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra counts tapas among the three parts of the yoga of action (2.1) and says that its practice destroys impurity and brings perfection of body and senses (2.43). Tapas in the Indian tradition is therefore a discipline of heat that transforms, and it has nothing in common with self-injury.
The Spiritual Significance of Brahmacharini
The first teaching of Brahmacharini is that what is deeply wanted has a cost measured in time. Parvati’s beauty, the gods’ plan and Kama’s arrows could not reach Shiva, and her tapas did, which the poet states in the image of a purchase. The tradition reads this as a truth about every serious aspiration, whether of knowledge, of art or of the realisation of the Self, that it is gained by continuity of practice, and a single stroke seldom accomplishes it.
The second teaching lies in the test. The stranger who spoke against Shiva was Shiva himself, and Parvati’s reply was loyalty, which places the steadiness of the heart at the centre of tapas. Her austerity is complete at the moment the one she loves is insulted in front of her and she refuses to listen.
The third teaching is in the name Aparna. She gave up ornaments, then shelter, then food, then even the fallen leaf, and the stages show tapas as a gradual lightening, in which each thing set down makes the next easier to set down. The Gita’s insistence on moderation guards the same path from the other side, since a seeker who gives up too much too quickly loses the strength the path requires.
The fourth teaching is the order of the days. Shailaputri gave a place to stand, and Brahmacharini shows what is done there: one stays, and stays with attention. A devotee who fasts, recites or keeps silence on the second night enters that discipline in a small way, and the tradition values the small and sincere practice as the seed from which a larger one grows.
Seen Through the Natural World
The Indian image of tapas as heat has parallels in the physical world that anyone can observe. Clay shaped into a pot becomes durable only after the fire of the kiln has changed it permanently, and metals are refined by heat that burns away what is not metal. The tradition uses such images as analogies, and they describe how sustained effort changes the one who makes it more than they prove anything about the subtle body.
Fasting during Navratri is a matter on which the tradition and modern medicine can be set side by side. The tradition itself asks for moderation, in the verses of the Gita cited above, and Navratri fasts in most households mean a restricted diet of fruit, milk and certain grains and tubers, with food still eaten. Modern medical advice is that people who have diabetes, who are pregnant or nursing, who take regular medication, who are elderly, or who are children should consult a doctor before changing their eating, and that no one should continue a fast through dizziness or weakness. A devotee honours the Goddess of tapas by practising it within the limits of the body, as the Gita asks.
Studies of meditation and sustained attention report benefits for attention and for the management of stress, although the research is varied in quality and its conclusions are cautious. What can be said with confidence is that a practice kept up over days and weeks changes the person who keeps it, which is the observation the tradition places at the centre of Brahmacharini’s story. The chakra scheme remains the tradition’s own account and has not been established by measurement.
The Walk into the Forest
By the evening of the second day the lamp is still burning, and the barley shoots have lengthened beneath it. Brahmacharini has no weapon to show the festival and no mount to carry her, and what she offers is the sight of a young woman walking barefoot into a forest to stay there until her wish is fulfilled. The old stories end with the mountain’s daughter and the ascetic of the snow peaks joined, because one of them had been willing to wait. Tomorrow the series moves from the forest hermitage to the bell that sounds at the first sign of danger, with Chandraghanta.
Sources and Further Reading
Primary texts
- Rigveda 10.129.3 (Nasadiya Sukta) and 10.190.1
- Taittiriya Upanishad (Bhrigu Valli); Mundaka Upanishad 1.1.8
- Bhagavad Gita 6.16 to 6.17, 17.5 to 17.6 and 17.14 to 17.16
- Yoga Sutras of Patanjali 2.1 and 2.43
- Kalidasa, Kumarasambhava, cantos 1, 3 and 5
- Shiva Purana, Rudra Samhita (Parvati Khanda)
- Devi Kavacha, recited with the Devi Mahatmya
Translations and studies
- Wendy Doniger, The Rig Veda: An Anthology (Penguin Classics)
- Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upanishads (Oxford University Press)
- Swami Gambhirananda, Eight Upanishads (Advaita Ashrama)
- Swami Gambhirananda, Bhagavad Gita with the Commentary of Shankaracharya (Advaita Ashrama)
- Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (North Point Press, 2009)
- David Smith, The Birth of Kumara (Clay Sanskrit Library)
- J. L. Shastri (ed.), The Siva Purana (Motilal Banarsidass)
- David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses (University of California Press, 1986)
