Mahamaya: The Power That Binds and Frees

Why even the wise stay attached; the Goddess as the force of both delusion and liberation.

Medhas answers the two seekers by unfolding the strange double nature of Mahamaya: the same power that binds beings to the world in delusion is the power that, when she is pleased, sets them free. Attachment is not a private failing but the working of a cosmic power, and recognising it as such is the first turn from being bound toward being free.

The Sage's Answer

The king and the merchant had asked their question, and Medhas had given it a name: Mahamaya. Now, seated in the hermitage while the evening fire burned low, the sage went further. He did not describe a gentle helper, and he did not describe a simple enemy. He described a power with two faces, and told the men that both faces belong to one Goddess.

She is the power, he told them, by which this whole moving and unmoving world is spun out and held together. Everything you can name stands up inside her measuring: the kingdom and the family, the wealth and the loss of it, and the very feeling that these things are yours. She is what makes a world appear at all. And the same power that makes the world appear is the power that binds you to it, tying your heart to what you own with the thread the last lesson called mamata, the sense of mine.

That is her first face. It is the face Suratha and Samadhi already knew, without knowing its name. They had been living inside it their whole lives.

The Power That Frees

Then Medhas turned the coin over. This same Goddess, he said, when she is pleased, becomes the boon-giver for the liberation of beings. The very power that binds is the power that releases. She is at once the highest knowledge, the wisdom that frees, and the cause of the world's bondage.

सा विद्या परमा मुक्तेर्हेतुभूता सनातनी। संसारबन्धहेतुश्च सैव सर्वेश्वरेश्वरी॥

sā vidyā paramā mukter hetu-bhūtā sanātanī saṃsāra-bandha-hetuś ca saiva sarveśvareśvarī

She is the supreme, eternal knowledge that is the cause of liberation, and she alone is the cause of bondage to the world, she, the ruler of all rulers.

Devi Mahatmyam, Chapter 1