Namaste and good morning everybody.

Very auspicious day it is Durga Pooja, the worship of God as the divine mother.

I sometimes say I'm called upon to introduce Hinduism to schools here, to school students.

And I say one way of understanding Hinduism is to say that for every question the answer is yes and no.

So for example, do Hindus believe in God? Yes and no. Because there are

systems in Hinduism which do not talk about God. I know an exanqueer. Is God male?

Yes and no. So God is male with the male form and with a female form, the divine feminine, and beyond gender.

Is God with form? Yes. So you go to a Hindu temple, you will see endlessly so. And no, God is formless. So the ultimate reality

is conceived of and understood in multiple ways, in a vast spectrum of ways with various names,

various forms. And one of the most powerful and most ancient conceptions of God in Hinduism has been God as mother. We know we studied the

Indus Valley civilization in India Saraswati Valley civilization and there among the oldest

most ancient icons to archaeological finds are figurines of the mother goddess.

I still remember there were those pictures in our history textbook.

So I was thinking what should I talk about today and is Durga Pooja.

So I said I'll just talk about Durga Pooja. And what I'll do today is one of our very senior

monks was there. Swami Bodhatmananda. Not Bodhahnanda who was here in the Vedantau society.

Bodhatmanandah. Bhabo Maharaj. It's not really too well known to the public out.

Not well known at all to the public outside,

but among the monks, everybody knows his name because he was the first principal, the founder of what we call the monastic training center.

So he trained generations of monks. All the senior monks in our order now have been trained by him.

So he was a monk who was also a monk maker.

Swami Bodhātmananda.

...