Brahman and the Divine Mother: Ramakrishna's Teaching

On a Sunday morning in Trabuco Canyon, California, a congregation at the Ramakrishna Monastery heard a verse of salutation to Mother Durga, the consort of Shiva, who "gives refuge" and "carries us across this ocean of samsara," before the speaker had said a word of his own. The lecture, given on October 18, 2026 by Swami Jnanasudhananda, fell on the first day of the Durga Puja worship as the speaker described it: a four-day annual observance that ends with the image being immersed in water. What followed was a careful, often funny, and deeply philosophical case that the Divine Mother is not a secondary devotion sitting beside the high truths of Vedanta, but the way those truths become livable. The talk is built on one claim: that Brahman and Shakti are not two realities, and that Sri Ramakrishna went further than philosophy allowed, to a relationship with the Mother that was intimate, argumentative, and personal.

Why does the Divine Mother appear in so many forms?

The speaker began with practical orientation. The Mother is worshipped as Kali, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Parvati, Chamundi, Jagaddhatri, Annapurna, and more. Jnanasudhananda, who said he had come to the United States from Belur Math in June 2025, offered a cautious count: "probably there's more than 100 forms of divine Mother." The forms differ, but he argued that "the basic philosophy behind these deities and the devotional attitudes towards them is more or less the same."

That shared philosophy starts with Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual school. In its framing, Brahman alone is the absolute reality, "beyond name, form, thought, and all distinctions," described in Sanskrit as Satchidananda: pure being, consciousness, and bliss. Everything else, including gods, goddesses, and incarnations, belongs to what the school calls empirical reality. The world we see is real in a practical sense but not absolutely real. For many listeners this is the familiar edge of Vedanta, the point where the Divine Mother could seem like a concession to human emotion.

The lecture's first move was to show why Sri Ramakrishna did not stop there.

What is Shakti, and how is it different from Brahman?

Ramakrishna, as the speaker presented him, fully affirmed the non-dual nature of Brahman. But he insisted that Brahman and Shakti are inseparable. Shakti means power, capacity, or potency: the power by which the absolute manifests, sustains, and withdraws the universe. Jnanasudhananda described the shift in perspective this way. When the ultimate reality is considered without reference to the world, it is called Brahman. When the same reality is considered as the source and sustainer of the world, it is called Shakti.

The distinction is conceptual, not a split in the thing itself. To make this concrete, the speaker turned to two images Ramakrishna used. The first was fire and its burning power.

"Just as fire cannot be separated from the burning power, Brahman cannot be thought as separate or apart from the power by which this universe appears." — Swami Jnanasudhananda, Ramakrishna Monastery lecture, about 9:00

The second image was more unsettling, and more useful for a mind trying to hold two things at once: a snake and its wriggling movement. There is no snake that is not moving, and no movement that is not the snake. We name them separately because our minds need handles. As the speaker summarized Ramakrishna's conclusion:

"Brahman cannot be conceived as devoid of Shakti, nor Shakti apart from Brahman. We give two names to the reality because we approach it from two standpoints, but the reality itself is one." — Swami Jnanasudhananda, quoting Sri Ramakrishna, about 10:00

This is the working idea of the whole lecture. The Mother is not a figure who stands outside the Absolute and begs it for favors. She is the Absolute as it appears in action: the energy that creates, holds, and dissolves everything we experience.

How did an argument with Hazra become a lesson about the Mother?

The speaker knew his audience had read the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, and he leaned on a character many listeners would remember with a grin: Hazra, whose stubbornness, self-importance, and habit of arguing supply much of the Gospel's comedy. The lecture's laughter came from this story, and it was the most human part of the talk.

Hazra had listened to an account of the life of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and announced that everything seen in Chaitanya's life was the play of Shakti, while Brahman had nothing to do with it. The position sharply contradicted Ramakrishna's teaching. Ramakrishna tried to make him understand. Hazra would not listen. The speaker's account of what happened next is the emotional hinge of the story: Ramakrishna, troubled, prayed to the Mother. In the speaker's paraphrase, the prayer was direct: either give Hazra the right understanding, or take him away from this place.

The next day Hazra came back and said he agreed. He had accepted that Vibhu, the all-pervading spirit, exists everywhere. The speaker noted that Bhavanath, one of the devotees, was astonished that Ramakrishna had taken Hazra's words so seriously. Why not simply ignore him, or try again to persuade him? Ramakrishna's reply, as Jnanasudhananda related it, was that he was now in a different, more spiritual mood and could no longer get into arguments with anybody.

The point is not that a monk won a debate by prayer. The story shows where Ramakrishna located the Mother: not only in the cosmic principle of Shakti, but in the living relationship between a devotee and what he is trying to understand. Philosophy, in this telling, is what happens when someone asks the Mother to settle a question.

Why is God described as a mother at all?

The lecture moved from the philosophical to the devotional. Jnanasudhananda raised a question many listeners bring to Hinduism from outside: why the motherhood of God is emphasized. A traditional answer can say God is infinite, omniscient, and beyond all description. The question the speaker wanted to hold open was why, in addition to these abstractions, the tradition keeps returning to an image of the Divine as mother. The second part of the talk, which he announced as an analysis of the "dreadful aspect" of the Divine Mother, was where that question was meant to be tested, because a mother is not only the one who comforts. She is also the one who destroys what she has made.

In that section the lecture reached for Swami Vivekananda, who, the speaker said, "used to say that Mother" (the transcript cuts off here) and for a story in which a monk, a promise, and a visitation of famine and sickness meet. The fragments available for this article do not allow a full retelling, and the speaker's larger argument in this section should be heard in full rather than reconstructed. What the excerpt does make clear is his method: he does not let the Mother become sentimental. He insists she includes terror, and that devotion has to reckon with it.

What did Ramakrishna's relationship with the Mother look like?

The lecture's third part, which the speaker introduced as Ramakrishna's "intimate relationship with the divine Mother," is where the talk's architecture becomes clear. The philosophy of Brahman and Shakti is the map. The relationship is the territory. In the speaker's account, Ramakrishna did not speak about the Mother only as an abstraction. He spoke to her, argued with her, prayed to her, and reported what she told him. In the relayed words, "my mother is Brahmamayi": the Mother who is made of Brahman, or whose substance is the Absolute.

This is the detail that makes the talk more than a lecture on comparative philosophy. Jnanasudhananda's argument is that the non-dual insight and the intensely personal devotion are not in competition. Ramakrishna's intimacy with the Mother is the form in which the non-dual insight was lived. Understanding that Brahman and Shakti are one does not remove the need for prayer; it changes what prayer is for.

Why does Durga Puja matter for this teaching?

It is worth noting how the talk began and why. The speaker described the Durga Puja worship in terms that are both ritual and communal. A traditional worship lasts four days. Devotees at his Santa Barbara Vedanta temple had held a briefer worship the previous day. Many were doing extra japa of Durga's name, Jai Shri Durga, from October 10 through October 20. Devotees pledged daily counts through a Google Form, and the counts were kept across the ten days the tradition considers especially auspicious. The annual worship, in other words, is not an occasion for theology alone. It is a practice of repetition, commitment, and collective attention. The lecture's philosophy was meant to give that practice its reasons.

Where to go from here

This excerpt covers the lecture's opening and first major argument: that Brahman and Shakti are one reality seen from two standpoints, that Ramakrishna insisted on this against the stubbornness of Hazra, and that the Mother is the Absolute in action rather than a figure beside it. The later parts, on the Mother's dreadful aspect and on Ramakrishna's intimate relationship with her, are where the speaker takes the argument into its hardest territory, and they deserve a full hearing rather than a summary.

To hear the complete lecture, visit the Ramakrishna Monastery website at ramakrishnamonastery.org. The Vedanta Society of Southern California, which the monastery is a branch of, publishes information about its Trabuco Canyon programs at vedanta.org/trabuco-canyon-monastery. Read the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna alongside the talk, especially the Hazra episodes, and notice how often the lesson arrives through a joke, a prayer, or an argument that somebody did not win.