Bhuvaneshvari: She Whose Body Is the World

The fierce goddesses ask you to look past the world. Bhuvaneshvari asks you to look at it.

After Kali who is time, Tara who ferries across, and Tripura Sundari throned above the gods, the fourth Mahavidya makes the gentlest and in some ways the most radical claim of all. She does not point beyond the visible to some truth behind it. She says the visible is the truth. The universe is not a thing the Goddess made and then stepped back from. It is her body.

The name and the claim

Bhuvaneshvari joins bhuvana, the manifest world, the cosmos of things and places, with ishvari, sovereign, ruler, queen. She is the Mistress of the Worlds. But the tradition presses the name further, glossing her as the one whose very body is the bhuvana, so that what we call the universe is her form, and space itself, akasha, with the five elements that fill it, is her extended substance. The other Mahavidyas are powers within reality. Bhuvaneshvari is reality, as the Mother, spread out as everything there is.

A gentle face

Her dhyana is benign, saumya, where so many of her sisters are fierce. She is radiant, the colour of the rising sun, three-eyed, full and gracious, with a nurturing smile and flowing dark hair. She is usually four-armed: two hands hold a noose and a goad, the same instruments Tripura Sundari carries, and two are raised in abhaya and varada, fearlessness and giving. Some versions give her six arms and add a lotus and a jewelled cup. She sits on a lotus or a lion-throne. The noose and goad here are read as the binding and releasing powers by which the World-Mother governs her own creation, holding the cosmos together and drawing it onward.

There is little blood in her chapter, and that absence is itself a teaching. The tradition is showing that the same Goddess who is Kali’s cremation ground is also this serene mother of the manifest, and that the gentleness is the complement of the terror, not a lesser truth than it.

The Goddess’s own Om

Her seed-syllable is Hrim, and of all the bijas in the Shakta world this is among the most exalted. It is called the Maya-bija, the seed of the divine creative power that spins out the appearance of the world, and the Devi-pranava, the Goddess’s Om, held to be for the Goddess what the syllable Om is for the whole of the sacred. Arthur Avalon, in his public-domain study of the Tantric science of sound, lingered on it; the tradition links it to hridaya, the heart, and reads it as the joining of Shiva and Shakti, consciousness and energy, in the single seed from which manifestation flowers and into which it folds. To sound Hrim, in this understanding, is to sound the heart of the manifest world. As with every Mahavidya, the operative practice is initiatory, and this treatise names the syllable only, as the published tradition does.

A goddess without a war

Bhuvaneshvari has few of the dramatic combat-myths that cluster around Kali or Lalita. Her story is a cosmogony rather than a battle: she is identified with the very act and stuff of world-making, with prakriti, primordial nature, and with the Mahamaya of the Devi Mahatmya and Devi Bhagavata, the great power by which the formless takes form. Her royal epithets bring her close to Tripura Sundari, and the two benign sovereigns shade into one another at the edges, as the ten so often do.

What she lacks in narrative drama she makes up in theological weight. She is the tradition’s clearest statement of immanence, the teaching that the divine is present as the world rather than hidden behind it like a king behind a curtain, in the spread of space, the standing-there of mountains, the sheer fact that anything exists at all. Where a renunciate spirituality treats the visible as a veil to be torn away, Bhuvaneshvari treats it as a body to be revered. The cosmos is not an obstacle to the Mother. The cosmos is the Mother, displayed.

The correction she offers

The popular accounts that bother with her at all tend to file her as a generic “goddess of the sky” or “goddess of space,” and so miss the specific and beautiful claim. Space is sacred because space is her body, not because a goddess happens to live in the sky. To stand under the night and feel the size of it is, in this theology, to stand inside Bhuvaneshvari. The reader who has followed the treatise through the cremation grounds may feel the fourth chapter as a kind of exhale. That is the right response. After the goddesses who undo the world, here is the goddess who is it, and who is good.

Her worship is less geographically concentrated than Kali’s Bengal or Tripura Sundari’s South; she is honoured across Shakta practice, and her Hrim makes her present in a vast amount of Shakta liturgy even where she is not the named focus. She is the seed in many other goddesses’ mantras, the heart-sound under the whole.

After the World-Mother’s calm comes heat again.

The fifth face is fire: Bhairavi, the fierce one, the burning that is hidden inside all making.