The Goddess of a Hundred Eyes

There was a demon called Durgama, son of Ruru, who thought harder than most demons about why the gods kept winning.

"It is the Vedas," he decided. "The gods live on the offerings, and the offerings are made with the Vedas. Take away the Vedas and the gods will starve."

So he went up into the Himalaya and did tapas. He lived on air. He thought of Brahma and nothing else, for a thousand years, until the heat of it troubled the three worlds. At last Brahma came, riding his swan, with a smiling face, and stood over the demon, who sat with his eyes closed.

"Ask," said Brahma. "I am pleased with you. Ask what is in your mind."

Durgama opened his eyes.

"Give me the Vedas," he said. "All of them. Every mantra in the three worlds, whether it is with the gods or with the brahmins. Let them all come to me, and give me the strength to defeat the gods."

"So be it," said Brahma, and went away.

From that hour the brahmins forgot the Vedas. They stood at the river in the morning and could not remember what to say. The evening prayers stopped. The fire offerings stopped. The rites for the dead stopped. No one could make a sacrifice, because no one knew the words.

"What has happened?" the brahmins asked one another. "Where have the Vedas gone?"

And the gods, who live on the offerings, grew thin and weak. Durgama came and laid siege to their city, and they ran.

Then the rain stopped. Without the sacrifice there was nothing to bring it. For a hundred years not a drop fell. The wells went dry, and the tanks, and the rivers. The crops died in the fields, and then the animals, and then the people, in their thousands.

The brahmins who were left went up into the mountains and prayed to the goddess. They had nothing else to give her.

She came. She came dark blue, with a great bow and arrows, and a lotus, and she was covered all over in eyes. There were a hundred of them, and more than a hundred, and every one of them was looking at the dry, dead world.

And she wept. She wept from all her eyes, for nine days and nine nights, and her tears ran down onto the earth and filled the wells and the tanks, and ran together into rivers, until the world had water again.

Then she held out her hands, and they were full of greens and roots and fruits and grain, and she fed the starving from them. It came from her own body and it did not run out. The people called her Shatakshi, she of a hundred eyes, and Shakambhari, she who carries the greens.

Durgama heard of it and came out with his army. The goddess sent out from her body a host of other goddesses to meet them, and they destroyed his army, and she killed him herself.

She gave the Vedas back to the brahmins.

"These are parts of my body," she told them. "Take care of them. You have seen what happened when you lost them."

"And my name is Durga," she said, "because I killed Durgama."

The older Devi Mahatmya does not tell this story. It foretells it.

At the end of its great battles, when the demon brothers Shumbha and Nishumbha are dead, the gods praise the goddess as Narayani, and she promises them that she will come back whenever they need her. Then she tells them some of the times she will come.

When rain fails on the earth for a hundred years, she says, she will be born, though not from a mother. She will look on the sages with a hundred eyes, and they will call her Shatakshi.

Then she will feed the whole world with the plants that keep life going, which will grow out of her own body, until the rain comes again. And she will be famous on earth as Shakambhari.

And at that time she will kill a great demon called Durgama, and for that she will be called Durga.

These few lines are all the Devi Mahatmya says. It does not name the demon's father, or say how he won his power, or mention the Vedas at all. The later Purana takes the lines and makes the full story out of them, with Brahma's boon, the forgotten rites and the nine days of tears.

The prophecy came true in stone. Shakambhari, the goddess of the greens, has temples of her own. The best known is in the Shivalik hills near Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Another stands near Sambhar Lake in Rajasthan, the great salt lake, and another at Badami in Karnataka, where she is called Banashankari, the goddess of the forest.