Random Meditations Through Her 1,000 Names - V
Why the Sri Lalitha Sahasranama is a description of war that happened in the primordial ages and happens today inside innumerable seekers.
The fifth name states that she manifests to help the devas - Devakaryasamudyata.
In the context, the devas (a divine being) are beseeching the goddess through the fire ritual to come and release them from the tyranny of Bandasura. A substantial number of the 1,000 names also explain the battle and subsequent vanquishing of the asura (demon) by the goddess.
Who are these asuras and devas? Of late, there has been a tendency to reinvent these terms as ethnic communities. The devas are supposed to be the fair-skinned Aryans and the asuras, the dark-skinned aborigines. There is nothing in the puranic or vedic literature to substantiate such reinventions. They are simply bygone colonial racist misunderstandings which have been recycled. The Indic view of these two groups actually provides a great insight into the way human psyche works and manifests. Sri Aurobindo explains this in a detailed manner:
The general nature of all human beings is the same, it is a mixture of the three gunas; it would seem then that in all there must be the capacity to develop and strengthen the <i>sattwic</i> element and turn it upward towards the heights of the divine transformation. That our ordinary turn is actually towards making our reason and will the servants of our <i>rajasic</i> or <i>tamasic</i> egoism, the ministers of our restless and ill-balanced kinetic desire or our self-indulgent indolence and static inertia, can only be, one would imagine, a temporary characteristic of our undeveloped spiritual being, a rawness of its imperfect evolution and must disappear when our consciousness rises in the spiritual scale. But we actually see that men, at least men above a certain level, fall very largely into two classes, those who have a dominant force of <i>sattwic</i> nature turned towards knowledge, self-control, beneficence, perfection and those who have a dominant force of <i>rajasic</i> nature turned towards egoistic greatness, satisfaction of desire, the indulgence of their own strong will and personality which they seek to impose on the world, not for the service of man or God, but for their own pride, glory and pleasure. These are the human representatives of the <i>Devas </i>and <i>Danavas</i> or <i>Asuras</i>, the Gods and the Titans. This distinction is a very ancient one in Indian religious symbolism.
Sri Krishna in the sixteenth chapter of Bhagavad Gita gives a detailed list of attributes of the asuric and daivik qualities. What is to be noted here is that these natures are not permanent. As Sri Aurobindo points out, the dynamics of three gunas like kaleidoscopes can create a continuum of combinations for the persons and through the emotional states of persons. Complete asuric forms like Hitler and Aurangzeb are rare though not impossible, so are the saintly personages.
For ordinary humans like us, we have our moments where the asuric and daivic nature alternate. This is a dynamic view of the inner realm of human beings. It is unfortunate that we have not used this effective framework to do psychological study of humanity. It is better than the genetic determinism, Freudian and Marxist views of psychology. From the minds of the sages to the minds of the criminals, the way the three guna dynamic creates asuric and daivik personality types and what type surfaces in a person in what circumstances and in what inter-personnel relationships - if they are studied properly then the inner battle that happens in every person can be understood for the benefit of all humanity. Note how different and how humanistic and how more scientific this system is compared to the colonial pseudo-science of ‘criminal castes’ ‘criminal races’ etc.
Once a person achieves an inner awakening, then she becomes conscious of these two aspects inside her. An inner battle begins. Here, it should be remembered that the devas are still tools for the realisation of the self and hence ultimately they need to derive their sustenance and support from that self. And that never happens initially. Initially, the asuric hold is fought by the devas who assume that they on their own strength can defeat the asuric bondage. But they fail miserably. (Kena Upanishad tells the story of how when the devas became egoistic, thinking that they won the asuras by their own strength, the goddess appeared and made them understand that their accomplishment was because of the Brahman). That is the fall. Then comes the realisation that they need the goddess - the self as the divine feminine. And they surrender the ego and mind in the fire pit. She arises.
This is a battle that happens in puranic time. This time is both old and new. The tyranny of Bandasura over the devas is realised at once by the seeker inside his or her own self, once the spiritual seeking starts. Si Ve Radhakrishna Sastri explains this in his commentary on the fifth name thus:
The self bound by ignorance is the <i>Bandasura</i>. When ignorance serves selfishness, it takes an <i>Asuric</i> form. It makes the divine nature of our senses disappear. Each sense organ is associated with a <i>Devata</i>. For the eyes it is the Sun; for the speech it is Agni; for the tongue it is <i>Varuna</i>; for the nose <i>Aswins</i>; for the ears the <i>Devatas</i> of all the directions; for the skin it is <i>Vayu</i>; for the hands Indra; for the legs Vishnu; for the mind it is the <i>Soma</i>. When the self becomes bound by ignorance then these organs cannot reach their divine potentiality and thus are oppressed. The Goddess emerges so that the ignorance is annihilated and the seeker is liberated and the organs become free of the bondage and accomplish their fullness.
She then does the war - the inner war- for the devas. It is a war that happened in the primordial ages and it happens today inside innumerable seekers. It will happen again. And Sri Lalitha Sahasranama is the description of that battle and the victory over the self, and what greatness she as the self of all existence holds in her.