Dasha – MAHAVIDYA…

….Beautiful goddess…Sri Tripura Sundari.

“Tara Devi is the blue form, Bagala is the tortoise incarnation, Dhumavati is the boar, Chinnamasta is Nrisimha, Bhuvaneshvari is Vamana, Matangi is the Rama form, Tripura is Jamadagni, Bhairavi is Balabhadra, Mahalakshmi is Buddha, and Durga is the Kalki form. BhagavatÌ Kali is the Krishna murti.” (Todalatantra, chapter 10)

Dasha Maha Vidya….

Dasha(10)
Mahavidyas(goddesses) representing the cycle (life)

* DASHA-MAHAVIDYA;
…. Mother’s 10 divine incarnations. 

The epitome of entire creation.

*Kali Power of Time and The Night of Eternity
*Tara Power of Void and The Night of Anger
*Tripura Sundari Power of Absolute Splendor
*Bhuvaneshwari Power of Space/Perfect Realization
*Tripura Bhairavi Power of Death, Night of Destiny
*Chinnamasta Power of Sacrifice, Night of Courage
*Dhumavati Power of Deprivation, Night of Frustration
*Bagalamukhi Power of Instantaneous Stopping
*Matangi Power of Domination and
* Kamalatmika The Night of Illusion

Kali – The Power of Time
Kali is Power of Action (Kriya Shakti). Kali is the electromagnetic energy, which extends over all space. Kali is related to shame; She is shown in pictures as a naked woman, a shameless creature. The idea of the symbol is that She eliminates interactions, which create duality (subject-object relationship is duality). Lack of interactions is death. Nakedness has this meaning that space is the clothing. Yes, space is the clothing in which energy is concealed. Kali is manifest as the power of the Kundalini Shakti in the body. Kali represents power over time, conquering time. Kali is supposed to be dark in color, the color of sky, blue unmanifest; future contained hope, cure for miseries.
Blue is considered the color that heals.

Tara – The Star, The Power of Sound
the unmanifest sound of Omkârâ bursts forth into the manifest world. Omkârâ symbolizes manifestation… “She is Târîni, crossing US (jeevas) to the beyond, She is the bridge to walk to immortality. She is high pitched sound, reflecting the Omkârâ heard in the heart centre, transforms itself, first into super sonic sound, and then into light and then into darkness again as the frequency increases”
Târâ is worshipped with an aim to experience the undifferentiated state. She is worshipped focussing awareness at the navel centre. “Tara” means the one who crosses and helps others to cross the river, helps to overcome difficult situations and transcend. Tara is the feminine form of ‘Aum’. She also relates to the power of perception and knowledge. Her location in the human body is the Manipura chakra or navel centre. As ‘Aum’ She is also in the Third Eye or Ajna chakra.
Meditation: focusing on the ‘Aum’, one should feel its energy enter within.

Sodasi – The Power of Perfection, Radiant Beauty.
Lalita Tripura Sundari as the Ichcha Sakti,I.e. both the WILL Force of the Supreme Brahman and First Desire (Love/Ananda) that gave rise to Space (Wisdom/ Cit) and Time that caused ALL to come into Being (Sat). This makes Her the Mother who gave birth to Time and Space of course everything else. The Goddess Sundari, or the Goddess Shri Tripura Sundari is the flower of consciousness – graceful, harmonizing, joyous, peaceful, bountiful, protective, knowing and powerful – symbolized by Lotus of Lotuses. She is The Most Beautiful who manifests Divine Knowledge and Love; She knows best how to lift a person from the Illusion of Bondage to Eternal Cosmic Love and Power of the All Pervasive. She is the Adishakti, the Mother of Mothers – Lakshmi, Saraswati and Gowri. They are three emanations from the Adishakti. Sundari is the primal power of The Supreme Brahman Himself in various forms. The First Desire of the Supreme to manifest caused a division in the Being. Sundari is this First Desire (Kamakala or Ichcha Shakti). Desire is the secret of creation; it is the root of manifestation; it is the mainstay of Existence. The Desire first takes the form of fragmentation and then a seeking to unite all the fragmented parts in the whole. The Divine desires to sacrifice Himself in creation and then desires to receive back the creation into Himself. This two-fold desire is the basis of Love, the vivifying bond that ties the creator and the created. Love exists by itself, independent of the objects through which it manifests. Love has no clinging, no desire, no hunger for possession, no attachment.Simply put,the craving for union of the self with the Divine.
Sundari is Hrim, the combination of Hari, Hara, and Virinchi; She is called Vishnu Maya, the great illusion; She is the greatest seductress there is, continuously assuming new forms, and highly procreative and blissful like a sixteen year old girl. Tripura Sundari is an ocean of knowledge. Sundari, or Tripurasundari is the flower of consciousness – graceful, harmonizing, joyous, peaceful, bountiful, protective, knowing and powerful – symbolized by lotus of lotuses. She is The Most Beautiful who manifests divine knowledge and love; She knows best how to lift a man from the illusion of bondage to eternal cosmic love and power of the all pervasive.

Bhuvanesvari – Conscious Space, Power of knowledge.
Integrating and unifying knowledge begins with Shri Bhuvaneshwari. The act of seeing is Shri Bhuvaneshwari. Shri Bhuvaneshwari is also known as Maha Mâyâ (Maya can not be said to either exist or not exist because it is an intermediate state of the realization process) or the Shuddha Vidya (Vidya = science or knowledge). What comes from knowledge? Sometimes it is the act of seeing¹(that involves the sensation of sight plus memory yielding perception. The complete action involves the seeing, the seer and the seen to produce knowledge). Sometimes it is one’s Desire (Will) which makes the act of seeing to happen. The basic idea here is that the restriction of an individual consciousness is an artificially imposed one, and it is possible to transcend this by sâdhana (practice). Bhuvaneshwari is perceptive power leading to knowledge. Therefore She is Jnâna Shakti (Gnosis Shakti). She is the Space concept in manifestation, the ether medium through which light moves and extends. Bhuvaneshwari is Maha Mâyâ. Mâ is to measure. Shri Bhuvaneshwari the Universal Queen of Space measures out the immeasurable.
Meditation: Inhale deeply as you focus on the seed mantra ‘hrim’

Tripura Bhairavi ; Goddess Durga form of Tripura Bhairavi..
The combination of saguna and nirguna indeed leads one to liberation. Bhairavi sees every man as Her lover. She consumes all the sins in the fire of Her knowledge of non-duality; she becomes Svaha in the fire.
To the Great Goddess of Love, one offers these acts as worship, and attains Siddhi (Spiritual Power). One who understands the essential oneness of all things breaks loose the mental bonds, gets liberated, and even while enjoying in full the life, attains Jeevan Mukti (Liberation or Enlightenment). For Her fearless worshippers She cuts the bonds and Liberates them truly in spirit.
She is also Bhairavi, Ananda Bhairavi, or Tripura Bhairavi (Sparsha Devata).
When H(Shiva), S(Shakti), R(fire of the desire of the union between Shiva and Shakti) are added to Aim, Klim and Souh, the mantra of Tripura Bhairavi is formed. Tripura Bhairavi represents pure kama (desire), that is not necessarily constrained by the niceties and control of Sringara characteristic of Lalita Tripura Sundari. Tripura Bhairavi represents the surging, raging, and hissing power of the Kundalini Shakti. She is the Hidden Divinity, the Veiled Goddess, and the Dormant Power that is picturesquely described as a coiled serpent in deep sleep. It is the passive Power of Tapas (Heat), the immobility caused by deep concentration or Samadhi. She is like a caged lion, Bhairavi, a source of unremitting Bliss (Ananda). The sleeping serpent Kundalini, wakes up, rises its hood, shoots forth, licks up the nectar in the Head-lotus, glides back into the abyss of the Muladhara and agains shoots forth with renewed energy. Sundari pours down soma (nectar); Bhairavi burns (Ardram jvalantîm).

Chinnamasta – The beheaded Goddess. The one who sacrifices.
Her left foot forward in battle, She holds Her severed head and a knife. Naked, She drinks voluptuously the stream of the blood nectar flowing from Her beheaded body. The jewel on her forehead is tied with a serpent (symbolic that the Kundalini Shakti has risen to the Center between the Eyebrows or Anja Chakra). She has Three Eyes. She holds in her hand, is drinking the middle stream of blood spurting from Her neck (symbolic of the Life Force coming from the Central Channel), while at Her left and right sides are two naked Shaktis, each of whom drinks a separate stream of blood from the neck of the Great Central Shakti (symbolic of either the downward or upward flow of the Life Force or Prana). She is an invitation for lightning, thunderbolt to strike the body from head to foot. She gives kapâla moksha, yet She is living after death. Chinnamasta is the thunder destroying all the anti-divine forces. She is the hidden radiance in the heart of the cloud. Ruling over the cosmic mind, She acts through the human mind as the sense behind the senses. The most powerful activity of the senses is sex.
Chinnamasta remains in concentrated form at the ajna chakra, her activity is in the Sushumna where She traverses up/down;the sustaining current of electric energy and power.

Dhumavati – The Smokey One – the Power of Poverty.
is depicted as an ugly old woman. She is reflected in all of the aspects of life which we shun, i.e. the diseased, the destitute, the forlorn and those that are outcast. It deepens one’s conviction that all objects in this universe are indeed in a state of decay and that one’s true self is truly not an object of knowledge. She contains within herself all potentials and shows the latent energies that dwell within us. ‘Dhuma’ means ‘smoke’, so Dhumavati means one who is composed of smoke. She obscures what is evident and known to reveal the hidden and the profound. She reveals all that is imperfect, the disappointments, sorrows, humiliation, defeat, loss and loneliness, and all the negative states in our ordinary existence in order that we may transcend it. Learning from our negative experiences and treating them as lessons in wisdom.
Meditation: Contemplate on your negative experiences in a detached manner, and let the golden message come through with the Grace of Dhumavati. She is the only Widow Goddess. She is the Goddess of Inconscience…Power of Perversion and the force of distortion.
She is depicted as utterly ugly and abominable. Pale in face, long in limbs, sparse in teeth, breasts sagging, decrepit, uncouth, fickle, with dirty clothes, and disheveled hair, She bestrides on a cart with a raven.

Bagalamukhi – The Power of Cruelty.
Meditation on this mystic design is said to endow the meditator with the Power to control your enemies and those who seek to harm you. In all contests, and all legal battles, Her Power is notorious. This reflects the cosmic cycle of survival of the fittest. Through the meditation on this yantra, your success in competition is secured. Bagalamukhi The eighth Maha Vidya, Bagalamukhi represents hypnotic power, the power to ‘stun’. She is the Goddess who stupefies the opponent and paralyses his speech. She is the paralysing power, the striking force. She induces sudden immobility or restraint. She also represents speech used as a weapon to destroy negativity.. Wearing glittering gold earrings, merged in bliss, with a beautiful face and lovely breasts; radiant as bright gold, her face effulgent as the full moon. By praying to MAA BAGALAMUKHI, we ask her to control our tongue and mind

Matangi (Saraswati / Ucchista Chandali / Chandala Kanya) –
Matangi is the ninth among the Dasa Maha Vidyas. She is the Word as embodiment of thought. She is the Goddess of the spoken word as well as outward articulation of inner knowledge, including all forms of art, music and dance. Matangi relates to Saraswati, the Goddess of wisdom and knowledge. She is the form of Saraswati directed towards inner knowledge. She represents the teachings of the guru, and the continuity of spiritual instruction in the world. Matangi is the intelligible manifest Creative Word (Sound) of the Supreme Brahman. A primordial throb (Adya spanda) which originates by the self-volition (Desire or Will) of the Supreme, starts a series of vibrations that take the form of (nada). This is the Eternal Word (Logos), the Creatrix of Manifestation. The manifestation takes place in four steps: sthula (gross, matter principle), sukshma (subtle, life principle), Karana (causal, mind principle), and Maha Karana (great causal, original rhythm). These steps correspond to the four steps of jagrat (waking state), swapna (dream state),

Kamalatmika (Sowbhagya Lakshmi / Kamala) – Power of Wealth and Prosperity
THE YOUNGEST The last of the Dasa Maha Vidyas, Kamalatmika is Beauty revealed in all its glory. While Dhumâvati is the oldest, Kamalâ is the youngest. She is consciousnes in manifestation, the beauty and bliss in creation. She removes poverty, physical and spiritual. She is fleeting in nature and exacting in Her sâdhanâ. Nevertheless, of all the Divine powers, She is the most alluring to man.
‘Kamala’ means ‘lotus’, and Kamalatmika represents the unfoldment of Divine Nature and its manifestation in the physical world. Just as the lotus has its roots in mud and yet produces a beautiful flower, the beautiful soul emerges from the gross physical body. Kamala nourishes and supports us in the elevation of our soul through our spiritual as well as worldly goals. She brings to the devotee abundance of worldly wealth as well as love and bliss. She is also the force who helps us to see the beauty and Divine quality in every thing. Her affection knows no bounds. She sustains the world with the milk of life from Her very breasts. She is born out of ocean of milk, as Sudha (Vishnumâya). She is the Divyaguru, the inspiration of these notes. She is the hlâdini shakti (the power of enjoyment), the bhoga of Vishnu. She is the tenth of the great vidyas; in this, she symbolises both the saguna and nirguna paramatman .
Kamalâ means one who wears the waters for robes. She is clothed in waters of creative consciousness, the soul-force immanent in all creative activity. She is described as the Lady of the Lotus. She walks on lotuses giving them beauty. She has two of Her hands holding lotus flowers and the other two are engaged in the act of warding of fear and granting boons. Draped in white silk, Her luminous complexion is golden. She is constantly bathed by four huge elephants, white as the snowy mountain, with pots full of water of luminous immortality. Elephants signify sagacity, wisdom, mental movement and activity, the creative principle as manifested in the creative world.
….More to say, all these Devis are the manifest forms of Sri Lalitha. And these ten aspects of sakthi are the epitome of the entire creation. And the knowledge of these ten Devis are indicated as DasaMahaVidyas. And they start from Kali to Kamala. Each of them have a specific sadhana, upasana, mantra, yantra & upachara. Sri Devi is adored in many temples & sacred places. There are same fifty one important Sakthi Peethas all over India. For eg : Kanchi – Kamakshi, Kasi – Visalakshi, Madurai – Meenakshi, Mysore – Chamunda, Maharastra – Amba, Kolkatta – Kali, Kollapur – Mahalakshmi, Samayapuram – Mariamma & so on. And all these Devis(dasha mahavidya’s) in one or other way, come among the Das to shower their blessings upon their true sadakas in which ever form they are worshipped

Tamil Song depicting the Dasha – Mahavidyas

…..CHOOSE YOUR DIETY/MOTHER…CHANT THE RELATED MANTRA FOR HER GRACE.
*MAA KAALI
Om Kaalikayai vidmaha, Smasavasinyai deemahi, Tanno ghora praochadhayat
*MAA TAARA
OM Taraayai vidmaha, Ugrataarayai deemahi Tanoo Devi Praochadhayat
*MAA BHUVANESHWARI
Sarvamohiniyai vidmahe, vishwa Jananayai deemahi Thannah Sakthi praochadhayat.
*MAA MATHANGI
Aim Sukapriyayai, klim Kameswaryai deemahi Thannah Shyama praochadhayat
*MAA DURGA
Kathyayanaya vidmahe, Kanyakumari deemahi Tanoo Drugai Praochadhayat

……Let the Grace of Dasha – Mahavidyas ever flow on to Us…
SARVAM SUKHINO BHAVANTHU