Devi Mahatmya (Durga Saptashati): Sanskrit Text, Transliteration and Meaning, Chapter by Chapter

The Devi Mahatmya, “the greatness of the goddess”, is the central text of the worship of the goddess in India. It has thirteen chapters and tells how the goddess comes into being and defeats three sets of demons when the gods cannot. It is also called the Durga Saptashati, “the seven hundred”, from the traditional count of its verses, and the Chandi Path or Chandi Saptashati, after the goddess Chandi (Chandika) who is its main figure. It is read, recited and heard throughout the year and most of all in the nine nights of Navratri.

This section sets out the Devi Mahatmya one chapter at a time. Every verse has the speaker, the Sanskrit in Devanagari, a simple transliteration and a meaning written in plain English, followed by a chapter summary, a note on where the other texts differ from the print, and answers to common questions. Chapter pages are long because they give every verse.

Where the Devi Mahatmya sits

The Devi Mahatmya is a part of the Markandeya Purana, one of the eighteen major Puranas. In that Purana its thirteen chapters are numbered 81 to 93, and the verse references on each page here keep that numbering: verse 1.8 on these pages is verse 81.8 of the Purana. The Purana is traditionally credited to the sage Vyasa, like the other Puranas. The Devi Mahatmya is usually placed by scholars somewhere around the fifth or sixth century CE, with some earlier and some later suggestions, and it is thought to be older than much of the rest of the Purana. Its dating is not settled.

The text is told as a story within a story. The sage Markandeya is speaking to his pupil Kraushtuki, who has asked about the Manus, the lords of the ages. Markandeya gets to the eighth Manu, Savarni, and says that to understand how he came to be one needs to know a story. In that story a king named Suratha has lost his kingdom and a merchant named Samadhi has been thrown out by his family, and they meet the sage Medhas in a forest. They ask why they still feel attached to what has hurt them. Medhas answers with the whole of the Devi Mahatmya. Chapter 13 returns to the two men and tells what became of them.

The three episodes (charitas)

The thirteen chapters fall into three charitas, “deeds” or “episodes”. The names below are the ones given in the printed recitation books, which also name a sage and a goddess for each. The books assign the first episode to Mahakali, the middle one to Mahalakshmi and the last to Mahasaraswati.

The book is not evenly weighted. The last episode is more than half of it, and chapters 5 to 13 hold most of the hymns, the mother goddesses and the best known speech of the goddess, in chapter 10. Many readers start with the first chapter and go on, and some start with chapter 4, whose hymn is among the clearest in the book.

The traditional order of recitation

When the Devi Mahatmya is recited in full as the Chandi Path, printed recitation books give the parts in a fixed order. The core of the order is three short texts said before the thirteen chapters: the Devi Kavacha (a protective prayer), the Argala Stotra and the Kilaka Stotra, in that order. After the chapters, many books add three more texts called the Rahasyas, and a prayer asking pardon for any fault in the recitation. Different traditions and books vary in the extra items that they include, so follow your own family or teacher.

We have given the thirteen chapters first because they are the text itself. The Kavacha, Argala and Kilaka are printed in recitation books, and we plan to add them on the same terms, from their oldest sources, once the sources have been checked.

How to read the Devi Mahatmya

Read one chapter at a time and keep the frame in mind. Almost the whole book is spoken by the sage Medhas to the king and the merchant, so the “I” of the narrator is Medhas, and where the goddess speaks it is marked on the verse. The hymns (chapter 1, verses 53 to 66; chapter 4; chapter 5, verses 7 to 39; and chapter 11) speak to her directly and can be read on their own.

The chapter pages give the speaker line for every verse, the Devanagari, a simple transliteration and a meaning. The transliteration is a guide to sound without the marks used in scholarly work, and it will not teach correct recitation, which is best learned from a teacher or a trusted recording.

The book can be read as a story, as a devotional text, as a text of the Shakta tradition in which the goddess is the highest reality, or as a piece of Puranic literature. These readings sit side by side in the tradition, and we say where a point is read differently by different traditions. This site gives text and meaning and does not make promises about the results of reciting it. Chapter 12 describes the benefits the text claims, and we report them as the text’s own claims.

How the text on these pages is sourced

The main text on every chapter page is an old printed edition: the Nirnaya Sagar Press Saptashati, edited by Vasudev Laxman Shastri Panshikar and published by Tukaram Javaji at the Nirnaya Sagar Press, Bombay, in Shaka 1839 (1917 CE). The scan is on archive.org under the identifier SaptashatiNirnayaSagarPress. Its large, clear print is easy to read, and we read the Sanskrit from the page images, scan pages 106 to 249 for the thirteen chapters. The scan’s automatic text is unusable for this book, so we did not rely on it. The same volume holds the ritual matter, the Kavacha, Argala and Kilaka and the Rahasyas, which we have not used here.

Two other texts are kept as witnesses and are no longer the main text. GRETIL (the Goettingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages) holds the Markandeya Purana, chapters 1 to 93, entered by members of the Sansknet project in Roman script and published in 2020. GRETIL says plainly that the file has not been proof-read. Sanskrit Wikisource has the same chapters. Both have 588 verses in these thirteen chapters, and we used them to build the first version of these pages: the earlier checks corrected 116 verses where GRETIL has a typing slip (nearly all a single letter). Each chapter page still lists those slips at the foot.

We then read every one of the 588 verses against the print, line by line. In 474 verses the print agrees with our text, apart from word spacing and the way a nasal is written. In 114 it does not. In 103 of them it reads differently in a letter, a word or a line, and in 11 it does not have the verse at all. In each case the page now gives the print’s reading, and the reading of GRETIL and Wikisource is listed at the foot of the chapter page, so that you can see both. The print follows the recitation tradition of the Saptashati, which differs from the text of the Markandeya Purana in a number of places. Seven verses lose a line in the print (1.76, 2.19, 2.63, 2.65, 3.19, 4.30 and 5.8), and in chapter 9 the print has a verse (9.10) that GRETIL and Wikisource lack, where they repeat verse 9.

The 11 verses that the print does not have are 2.45, 3.20, 3.41, 3.42, 4.1, 4.31, 5.27, 5.31, 5.33, 7.20 and 11.23. We keep a card for each, marked as not in the print, so that the verse numbers stay those of the Markandeya Purana and links to other verses still work.

The numbering needs two notes. The verse numbers on these pages are those of the Markandeya Purana, in which the speaker lines are not numbered. The print numbers the speaker lines as well, and its own running count, in the last column, reaches 700 at the end of chapter 13: that is the traditional count of 700 that gives the Saptashati its name. A verse number from the print will therefore not match the number here. Second, the print and the Purana text differ in the places listed above, and some recitation books differ from this print in turn, so a book you hold may differ from this page in a line or a word.

The print is a Sanskrit text with no translation, and we have not copied any translation or commentary. Where a witness text read differently, we list a single reading, not any apparatus.

Meanings and chapter notes are our own wording and are not taken from any translation. The Devi Mahatmya is a traditional text with no living copyright, and where a point of interpretation differs between traditions, we say so.

Related pages

• Sharad Navratri: the nine nights when the Devi Mahatmya is most often read
• Navratri daily puja: the daily worship for the nine nights
• Durga Puja: the festival in eastern India, closely linked to Chapters 2 to 4
• Devi Suktam: the Rigvedic hymn in which the goddess speaks
• Mahishasura Mardini Stotram: a hymn to the slayer of Mahishasura
• Durga Chalisa: forty verses to Durga
• All mantras, stotras and sacred texts