| Temples & Legends Of Bihar |
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| Temples & Legends
Of India |
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MAHESHI |
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| Her complexion
is like that of the blue lotus, and she is three-eyed, one-faced, celestial and laughs
horribly. She is in an intensely pleasant mood, stands on a corpse, is decked in ornaments
of snakes, has red and round eyes, wears the garments of tiger-skin round her loins, is in
youthful bloom, is endowed with the five auspicious symbols and has a protruding tongue.
She is most terrible, appears fierce, with bare canine fangs, and carries the sword and
the kartri in the two right hands and the Uptala and the Kapala in the two lefts. Her
Jatamukuta of one coil is brown and fiery and bears the image of Aksobhya within it."
There are three images in the Ugratara temple at Maheshi. The central figures are those
of Ekajata and Nila-Saraswati. The rituals according to Tantric from are performed. The
non-Tantric pilgrims also do worship in the ordinary way. The Maharajadhiraja of Darbhanga
endowed the deity with the gift of a village and some of the Maharajas of Darbhanga House
were great devotees of this Ugratara deity at Maheshi. Within the temple precincts there
are a large number of smaller images, which are also worshipped.
It is also a remarkable fact that within a couple of miles of Maheshi village there is
a Sun temple at village Kandaha. Sun temple is also just a very few in Bihar. The
existence of the Tantric deity Ugratara in the neighborhood of the Sun temple, once
evidently was very popular, shows that different deities of the Hindu pantheon were
worshipped almost in the same area, and speaks of the great eclecticism of Hinduism. |
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