direct legacy of this bipolar notion of the Deity. It is one of the great contributions of Sri Ramakrishna to Indian religious tradition that his spiritual experience has identified the Sakti not as a mere female counterpart of the Absolute, but as the Absolute Himself personalised - the Saguna Brahman of the Vedanta, who is the origin, the support and the end of the manifold universe. The Saguna Brahman is, in a devotional sense, Father or Mother, and, for the matter of that, can be invoked in any other loving relationship as Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher and so on. But the Master described the Saguna Brahman specially by the epithet 'Mother', and conceived and invoked Him as the Mother of all beings. In doing so, it must be clearly understood that he did not have in mind the contrast between masculinity and femininity or the bipolarity of a male and female element in the Deity as in orthodox Sakta theologies, although he often used the current phraseology of the Sakta schools. In other words, when God is called Mother, the implication is not so much to give us a Female Deity as to remind us that in his function of redemption (Anugraha), Motherhood is the most adequate of all humanly understandable concepts to describe His unconditioned love for those who seek shelter in Him, abandoning all other support.
Human experience vouches for the fact that the mother's love is unconditioned by any consideration of merit or demerit, excellence or lack of it in respect of another related as off-spring. The capacity to do so is the uniqueness of the mother's heart. Hence Acharya Sankara has, in a well known hymn to the Divine