Durga Puja, the Divine Mother, and the Gift of Surrender

A lecture on the Divine Mother, delivered by Swami Sarvapriyananda and published by the Vedanta Society of New York in October 2026, opens in a place that seems to have nothing to do with a monastery: Times Square, on the evening of a Durga Puja, with King Kong and Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse crowding the same square as the image of the goddess. From that unlikely scene the speaker moves backward through Vedic fire ritual and the Puranas, then forward through the lives of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda and the Holy Mother. Along the way he makes a case that worship of God as Mother is the oldest living form of devotion in Hinduism, that the personal God and the nondual Brahman are not rivals, and that the most practical spiritual act available to a human being is to surrender to a power that is already caring for them. What follows walks through the ideas in that lecture so that the argument can be followed without the video in front of you.

Can a festival this noisy really be sacred?

The speaker's first question is not theological but cultural: is it appropriate to hold Durga Puja in the middle of Times Square? His answer comes from the Sanskrit texts that describe the festival itself. After the image of the goddess is immersed on the tenth day, Dashami, the texts prescribe something called Sabar Utsav. "All the children of the mother dressed in colorful costumes," he describes, parading in groups, throwing flowers, singing, dancing and calling out to one another joyously. The language, he notes with some amusement, is "not very scriptural" by polite standards. The texts even say the Devi will be annoyed if this part of the festival is left out (3:09 and following in the lecture).

He then recounts a scene from Belur Math, where the image was immersed in the Ganga as it still is. Before the immersion, devotees dance in front of the image in a special style called Dhoorichi Nritta, with pots of smoke, which the speaker admits is "a little difficult." A devoted doctor, Dr. Kanjilal, threw himself into the dance so fully that other devotees complained to the Mother that it was inappropriate for a sacred festival. Her reply, as the speaker tells it, was that the dance should go on because the Devi enjoys it and is pleased by it. "She didn't say Sabar utsav, but that's what she meant," he says. "She validated it."

The point is a sharp one for anyone who has ever felt that devotion must be solemn to be real. Joy, noise and abandon are not a lapse from the sacred. In his reading they are part of how the sacred is honored. Times Square, he jokes, has become a kind of nitya Sabar utsav, a perpetual festival running through the night.

Why is Durga Puja called the greatest ritual?

To answer this, the speaker goes back to the Vedic period. Ancient India, he argues, was not built around temples or even images. Its religion was ritual, and its center was the homa and yajna, the elaborate fire offerings. The greatest of them was the Ashwamedha Yajna, a massive, costly and complicated rite. "All that is obsolete now," he says (5:15). Hinduism, over the last two to three thousand years, has shifted toward the worship of deities through puja, the form of worship most people in the lecture's audience would recognize.

So what, in the modern world, stands in the place of the Ashwamedha? The speaker's answer is Durga Puja. That is why it is called Maha Puja, the great worship. He points to its days, Maha Saptami, Maha Ashtami, Maha Navami, and notes that while the first of these is often left unspoken, it belongs in the same grandeur. Each region of India has its own central observance, he explains. In western India and Karnataka, Ganesha Puja plays that role, and in Bengal, Durga Puja is the central expression of Bengali culture.

The lineage matters to his argument. A ritual that has carried the weight of the Vedic fire altar into the present is not a recent invention, and the speaker is at pains to say that the worship of Durga herself goes back to the Vedas, where the Devi Suktam appears in the Rig Veda. "It is one of the oldest, one of the most ancient living rituals in the world today," he says.

Is God male, female, or neither?

The speaker's method on this question is the Hindu habit of answering with a qualified yes and no. Do Hindus believe in God? Yes, though some strains, such as Sankhya, Yoga and Purva Mimamsa, are agnostic or reject a creator. Is God male? "Yes and no. Look, God is proudly female." Is God with form? Yes and no again: God has form, and not just one form but endlessly many, which is why the variety of deities can seem bewildering. "The truth is one. The sages call it variously," he says, invoking the Rig Veda's line, Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti (8:51).

Mother worship, he says, is the earliest recognizable form. He recalls learning as a schoolboy about the Indus Valley Civilization, and about a figurine of a Mother Goddess among its earliest artifacts, dating back more than five thousand years. He notes that the civilization is now often called the Saraswati Civilization. The line of argument is that human beings first met the sacred in the form of a mother, and that this instinct has never disappeared.

"There is in this universe a great power which thinks of itself as feminine. You worship it as mother. She thinks of itself as the mother of the universe." (Swami Sarvapriyananda, quoting Swami Vivekananda, Vedanta Society of New York lecture)

How did Durga come before the universe?

The lecture leans on the Brahma Vaivarta Purana, which traces the history of Durga's worship back to the beginning. According to this account, the goddess was worshipped before the universe itself was created, in the eternal Vrindavan, the realm where Krishna dances eternally with the gopis, and not the earthly Vrindavan. There Krishna is said to have worshipped Durga for the first time. The speaker treats this as a timeless origin rather than a historical date, which is how Puranic cosmology is meant to be heard. The image of the Mother is not a late addition to a male-centered religion. In this telling, she is prior to creation.

What does it mean to see God in a living presence instead of a stone?

Here the lecture turns to Narendra, the young man who would become Swami Vivekananda. The speaker describes him as someone who did not believe in image worship or ritualism, and who was proud of his intellect (32:31 in the lecture). The story unfolds around his encounter with Mother Kali. Where he expected a stone image, the speaker says, he found a living presence. He returned and, in effect, admitted that the Mother had been at play with him: "I know it is your play." The lecture uses this turn to show how a skeptic can be humbled not by argument but by direct contact.

This is also where the speaker separates two kinds of realization. One is the nondual realization of Brahman, the ultimate reality beyond all names and forms. The other is the personal relationship with the Mother who appears in forms. The lecture does not treat them as competitors. The speaker's argument is that the personal form is the way many people approach the formless, and that devotion to the Mother can lead to the same ultimate truth that the sages describe in abstract terms.

What does taking refuge in the Mother look like?

The lecture's most practical section is built on a Sanskrit phrase, Ma Tvam Hi Tara, which the speaker glosses in the lines that follow: "You are the one who takes us across the samsara, the ocean of samsara" (37:17). The Mother here is the one who ferries the devotee across the sea of birth and death. Taking refuge is not a complicated intellectual exercise. It is letting go.

To make this clear, the speaker draws a contrast between two kinds of spiritual posture, using images of animals. The baby monkey clings to its mother, holding on with its own grip as she leaps from tree to tree. The kitten, by contrast, is carried by the mother, who grips it by the scruff, and the kitten does nothing but go limp. The monkey path is effort, discipline and self-reliance. The kitten path is surrender, trusting that the Mother will carry you (39:08). The speaker's sympathy is clearly with the kitten for those who find effort impossible, and he asks his listeners to consider which of the two they are trying to be.

The surrender he describes is not passive resignation. It is an act of trust in a power that already holds you. "If you can surrender to God," the lecture suggests, a person stops trying to control every outcome and begins to live within a larger play.

What did the Holy Mother mean for Vivekananda's mission?

The lecture moves from Vivekananda's own inner life to the Holy Mother, Sri Sarada Devi, and her blessings for his work (46:41). In the speaker's telling, the Mother is not a distant symbol but a person whose grace shaped a movement. The lecture also reminds listeners that the Mother's presence is not limited to a single temple or to one famous devotee. The speaker then turns to a broader point (52:02): the Divine Mother can be seen in all women, and to honor a woman is to honor the same power that is worshipped as Durga or Kali.

What is the final lesson of the Mother's play?

The lecture ends with the idea that life itself can be seen as the Mother's play (55:04). The speaker suggests that when a person encounters difficulty, the right response is to recognize that the difficulty is part of a larger order. "It is her play," he says (58:14). Humans, he admits, find this hard. "It doesn't come easily to us." Yet the wiser response, he says, is to accept whatever karma comes as a blessing from God, and to "express our helplessness" to the Mother, who can take that helplessness and turn it into grace.

Where to go from here

The lecture is best understood as a single argument with several entry points. Start with the Times Square scene and the Sabar Utsav passage, which show how joy and devotion belong together. Then follow the Vedic and Puranic material to see how deep the tradition of Mother worship runs. Finally, listen to the sections on Narendra, Ma Tvam Hi Tara, and the monkey and kitten, which give the surrender teaching its practical edge. Anyone interested in the full scriptural context can explore the Vedanta Society of New York's lecture archive, which groups talks by scripture and by topic, and its published books by Swami Sarvapriyananda. Those who want to test the idea of surrender in their own lives might begin with a single question the lecture leaves open: where in your life are you trying to be the monkey, and where might you let yourself be carried?