Maa Brahmacharini Mantra

What the Maa Brahmacharini Mantra is

The Maa Brahmacharini Mantra is the group of three short texts recited to Brahmacharini, the second of the nine Durgas, on the second day of Navaratri. Her name joins brahma, sacred knowledge and the Absolute, to charini, 'she who practises', and it names Parvati in the years she spent in austerity before her marriage to Shiva. No author is known for any of the three. The name mantra, Om Devi Brahmacharinyai Namah, offers salutation to her by that title alone. The dhyana shloka, a single anushtubh couplet that is also the second verse of the nine-verse Navadurga meditation set, draws her with two lotus hands holding an akshamala, the rosary of beads, and a kamandalu, the ascetic's water pot, calls her anuttama, 'with none above her', and asks her to be gracious. The stuti takes the 'ya devi sarvabhuteshu' frame of the Devi Mahatmya and sets her name in it, so that the Goddess who dwells in all beings is saluted in this one form.

The vow on Gaurishikhara and a visitor

The fullest classical telling of the austerity behind her name is the fifth canto of Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava. Parvati took her parents' leave and climbed a Himalayan peak, which the poem says was afterwards called Gaurishikhara. There she sat in summer within four fires with the sun as the fifth, stayed out in the rains without shelter, and at last stopped eating even the leaves that fell from the trees by themselves; for that, the canto says, she was called Aparna, 'without even a leaf'. Then a young brahmachari came to her grove, matted, in a deerskin, with a staff of palasha wood. He asked why she wanted a groom who wore an elephant hide, lived in the cremation ground, rode an old bull and had three eyes and no known family. Parvati answered that small minds cannot measure the great, and rose to leave rather than hear more. The visitor took his own form: it was Shiva, who told her he was her servant from that day, bought by her tapas. In Kashi her shrine stands in the lanes near Durga Ghat and Brahma Ghat, and temple tradition holds her annakoot festival on Kartik Purnima.

The mantra, in six scripts

Maa Brahmacharini Mantra lyrics in full

Three short texts for the second day of Navaratri: her name mantra, the rosary-and-water-pot dhyana shloka, and the stuti line with her name set in the Devi Mahatmya frame.

All 3 verses, in Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and English, each with its meaning. Choose a script:

The syllable people get wrong

Akshamala (akṣamālā) in the dhyana shloka opens with the cluster kṣ, a k followed at once by sh, so it is ak-sha-MAA-laa with both a's of mālā long; reading it as 'aksa-mala' or 'achha-mala' loses the k-sh sound that gives the word its meaning, 'a garland of akshas', the beads.

When the Maa Brahmacharini Mantra is chanted

Weekday. Friday

Festival. Navaratri, second day (Dwitiya)

Questions