Durga Pooja & Yajna

Navaratri Durga Puja and Homa

This Navaratri, you are warmly invited to take part in our sacred Durga Homa — not merely to witness the pooja, but to participate in it yourself to seek the grace, protection and blessings of the the Divine Mother Durga for yourself, your family and others.

In Vedanta, the ultimate reality is known both as Brahman, the unchanging ground of all existence, and as Shakti, the living power through which the universe is created, sustained, and renewed. Shakti is worshipped as the Divine Mother. Sri Ramakrishna taught that Brahman and Shakti are identical, like fire and its power to burn - inseparable, two ways of speaking of the same one reality. To worship the Divine Mother is not a step down from philosophy into mythology; it is the same reality, met through relationship rather than abstraction.

Durga Puja commemorates the Divine Mother's victory, as the goddess Durga, over the buffalo-demon Mahishasura, a being so powerful that no single god could defeat him alone, until the gods combined their energies into one Divine feminine force strong enough to prevail. Read as it is meant to be understood, the story points inward: Mahishasura represents the stubborn, shape-shifting force of ignorance and ego in each of us, which resists our better efforts and returns in new forms just when we think we have overcome it. Durga's victory is the reminder that this inner darkness is not unconquerable, and that the power to overcome it can be invoked and received, not manufactured alone.

In Bengal, and in the Ramakrishna tradition especially, Durga Puja carries an additional, intimate meaning: it is celebrated as the Mother's homecoming, the daughter returning for a few days to those who love her. This is why devotees sing Agamani songs in the days before the Puja, welcoming Uma home.

At Belur Math, Durga Puja has been celebrated every year since Swami Vivekananda first performed it there in 1901. This is why, at our Centre too, the worship of Durga is offered together with the worship of Maa Sarada, the Divine Mother known through scripture and symbol, and the same Mother known through a living, human life.

A question naturally arises for anyone encountering Devi worship for the first time: if the ultimate reality is one, formless, and beyond all attributes, as Vedanta insists it is, then what does it mean to worship that reality as a Mother, with form, name, and personality?

Sri Ramakrishna answered this question directly, from his own realised experience. He taught that Brahman and Shakti are not two realities, but one reality known in two ways:

"Brahman and Shakti are identical, like fire and its power to burn." — Sri Ramakrishna

Fire cannot be separated from its power to burn; the moment you think of one, the other is already implied. In the same way, the motionless, attributeless Absolute (Brahman) and the active, creative Power that manifests, sustains, and dissolves the universe (Shakti) are one and the same reality, seen from two different angles. Formless when at rest; the Divine Mother when in action. Nothing is added to Brahman by calling it Mother — the Mother is Brahman, immanent, active, and near, rather than remote and inactive.

This is why worship of the Divine Mother is not a concession to those unable to grasp the formless Absolute. It is, rather, the recognition that the Absolute is not only the silent ground of existence one arrives at through withdrawal from the world, but also the living intelligence already at work within the world, within one's own thoughts, struggles, and efforts, in this very moment. To worship Durga is to meet Brahman exactly where a human being actually lives: not in abstraction, but in relationship, in change, in the ordinary texture of a life still being lived.

The days of the Puja can then be understood as a structured encounter with that immanent, active Mother, each day drawing attention to a different facet of how her presence moves through a genuine inner life, from its first stirring to its final recognition that the one worshipped and the one worshipping were never, in truth, separate.

For someone encountering this festival from outside the culture it grew up in — in Auckland, in Hamilton, on a farm in the Waikato — it can help to set aside, for a moment, the question of geography and history, and ask a different question: what is this festival actually describing? Because underneath the specific names and days, Durga Puja maps something universal: the movement of the mind from forgetfulness toward recognition, and the stages a serious inner life tends to pass through on that journey. Each day of the festival corresponds to a stage of that movement.

Mahalaya opens what is called Devi Paksha, the "fortnight of the Goddess." Philosophically, this is the moment before anything visible has happened — the point at which a dormant capacity begins, almost imperceptibly, to stir. Every genuine spiritual change starts this way: not with a dramatic breakthrough, but with a faint shift in attention, a small willingness that wasn't there before. Mahalaya represents that first, barely noticeable movement — Shakti, which Vedanta describes as the universe's own creative power, beginning to turn toward manifestation, in exactly the way a half-remembered intention starts, quietly, to turn toward becoming an action. Nothing has been resolved yet. But something has begun.

Shashthi (Bodhon) — Turning Inward

Bodhon literally means "awakening," and it is tempting to read this as something done to an external image. But its real significance lies elsewhere. In the Ramakrishna–Vedanta understanding, God is not confined to any single form, and worship of the Divine Mother in an image is a support for the mind, not a limitation on what is real. Bodhon, understood inwardly, is the moment a person consciously decides to treat their own inner life as sacred ground — the decision that this is worth doing, worth attending to, worth taking seriously. It is less an awakening of the Goddess than an awakening to her — the moment devotion stops being a vague sentiment and becomes a deliberate act of attention.

Saptami — From Insight to Practice

Saptami marks the shift from invocation to sustained engagement. Many spiritual seekers have a version of Mahalaya and Shashthi at some point in their lives — a stirring, a decision to pay attention. Far fewer sustain what follows: the unglamorous, repeated work of actually practising. Saptami represents this turn from insight to discipline. It is the day the festival stops being primarily a feeling and becomes primarily a practice — which is, incidentally, exactly where most spiritual lives quietly stall, and exactly why this day matters.

Ashtami and Kumari Puja — Divinity Prior to Achievement
Ashtami includes Kumari Puja: the worship of a young girl as a living embodiment of the Divine Mother. For a modern, Western audience this can sound, at first hearing, like an odd custom. Its actual claim is worth sitting with, because it is a radical one: that the sacred is not something a person earns, builds, or achieves — it is what is already present in a human being before any of that construction has begun. Sri Ramakrishna taught that the Divine Mother is felt with particular clarity in a pure-hearted child precisely because a child has not yet layered status, ambition, or self-image over their basic nature. The philosophical claim underneath Kumari Puja is that this same unconditioned ground exists in every person — including the person reading this now — and worship here is a rehearsal in recognising it, rather than a specialised event happening to someone else. Swami Vivekananda instituted Kumari Puja at Belur Math in 1901 as part of the Puja he established there, giving this teaching a permanent, living form within the tradition.

Navami — Offering Into Fire
Navami completes the main worship with Homa, an offering into consecrated fire. In the Vedic understanding, fire (Agni) is not simply a ritual element; it is the very principle of transformation — that which converts one substance into another, permanently and without possibility of return. What is offered is not a possession one is reluctant to give up, but precisely the opposite: the traditional formula spoken with each offering, idam na mama — "this is not mine" — names the entire logic of the ritual. Whatever has been offered can no longer be claimed back as "mine." Understood inwardly, Homa is the willingness to offer one's own accumulated tendencies — old resentments, fears, self-images, defended positions — into a fire that will not give them back in their old form. Nothing sacrificed at Navami is lost; it is converted. This is arguably the most practically useful teaching in the entire festival for a spiritual seeker anywhere: real inner change requires that something actually be given up, not merely observed or understood.

Sandhi Puja — The Threshold Moment
Sandhi Puja falls at the precise junction between Ashtami and Navami — traditionally the moment the Goddess, in her fiercest form as Chamunda, overcomes the most stubborn resistance of the entire festival. Anyone who has tried to change a long-held habit, or sit with a difficult emotion without running from it, will recognise this structure without needing the Sanskrit: most of an inner struggle can be handled with steady, gradual effort, but there is very often one narrow, concentrated moment where gradual effort is not enough, and something more decisive — more full-blooded — is required. Sandhi Puja is the festival's acknowledgment of that moment: the recognition that transformation sometimes depends less on sustained gentleness than on a brief, total, undivided intensity, met at exactly the right instant.

Vijaya Dashami — Form Returning to the Formless
"Vijaya" means victory: the definitive overcoming of Mahishasura, the shape-shifting demon whose form the tradition reads as ego and ignorance — clever, adaptable, and endlessly capable of assuming a new disguise the instant one strategy for containing it succeeds. The deeper teaching of the day, however, lies in Visarjan, the immersion of the sacred image. This is not a sorrowful ending. The image dissolves back into the very water and clay from which it was formed, and by extension, into the very consciousness from which it was never, in truth, separate to begin with. This is the non-dual heart of the whole festival: Durga, worshipped for ten days in form, and Brahman, the formless reality named at the start of this journey, are recognised, at the end, as one and the same thing seen from two directions. The embrace shared among devotees on this day is the same recognition, turned outward — the same one Self, met again in every other person standing there.

VEDANTA
NEW ZEALAND

Navaratri Durga Puja and Homa

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VEDANTA NEW ZEALAND

Navaratri Durga Puja and Homa

Contact Us

VEDANTA
NEW ZEALAND