Shri Devi Bhagwat Katha

Shri Devi Bhagwat Katha is the telling of the Devi Bhagwat Mahapuran, the great purana of the Divine Mother, which the parampara holds as the fullest account of Shakti, the power the tradition places behind all of creation. It is a katha heard far less often than the Shrimad Bhagwat, and the parampara treats it as a rare and elevated telling. A Shri Devi Bhagwat Katha is that purana brought into a home, narrated by a Vyas of the Narwar Dham parampara, so that a family and its gathering hear the story of the Devi in the shastriya krama, in their own aangan. At the heart of the Devi Bhagwat is a teaching the parampara returns to: that Shakti is the power without which even the great devas cannot act, and that the Mother creates, sustains and withdraws the whole of creation in her forms. The katha carries the frame the tradition sets, the sages of Naimisharanya gathered to hear it, the telling that Vyasa gave to Raja Janamejaya, and the reason the Devi Bhagwat is held supreme among the puranas, that it grants both bhoga and moksha, worldly sufficiency and liberation, where the shastras usually give one or the other. It holds the mahatmya of hearing the katha itself, the mahima of the Divine Mother, and the path of devotion that reaches her. The Vyas is an acharya trained in the Narwar Dham parampara, and the katha is told in that lineage's discipline and bhaav. The duration is the family's to choose, from a single day's saar to the full fifteen-day telling, each a complete observance in its own right.