In the Mahābhārata, as the great battle at Kurukshetra is about to begin, the blind king Dhritarāshtra learns from a host of omens that this battle will turn the earth to a river of blood and will usher in the Kali Yuga—the age of darkness and degeneracy, the last of the world’s four ages. The battle is a family feud between estranged cousins—the noble Pāndavas, the nephews of Dhritarāshtra, cheated and exiled from their rightful kingdom, and the self-righteous Kauravas, the king’s own sons, lined up against them. We can imagine the old king, filled with sorrow, looking down at the battlefield from a hill, with his attendants. His father, the ancient sage Vyāsa, offers to bestow sight upon him so that he can see the battle. But Dhritarāshstra does not wish to see the slaughter with his own eyes, so instead Vyāsa bestows the gift of panoptic sight upon his bard Sanjaya, who will report everything that happens on the battlefield, day and night. Vyāsa then tells them of the signs and omens he sees, which fill them all with fear and foreboding. There are black clouds with red linings in the sky. There are showers of dust by day and showers of blood by night. Donkeys are born of cows and a horse gives birth to a calf. A bird with one wing, one leg, one eye, screams through the sky. Rivers flow backward and their waters have turned to blood.1
Seeing both sides of the battlefield filled with the rulers and armies of all the kingdoms of the earth, Dhritarāshtra asks Sanjaya to tell him where they have all come from, which regions and cities, and he asks his bard to repeat to him the story of the earth with its rivers and mountains, its regions and its inhabitants.2 It is a moving reminiscence at the outset of what will be a calamitous war. It will be a battle in which even the winners will not win. In this ominous space, as the end is about to begin, the bard Sanjaya describes the order of the universe to Dhritarāshtra. His account is called the bhuvana kosha, the “atlas of the world.”
Sanjaya first recounts to the king the layout of the whole world and the place within it of the land called Bhārata and its peoples. He describes a circular world here called Sudarshana, with six mountain ranges stretching from east to west, separating the seven regions, or varshas, of the earth. The southernmost is Bhāratavarsha, shaped “like a bow” with the curvature of the bottom of the circle. In the middle of the earth is the great Mount Meru, a golden mountain watered by the heavenly Gangā that falls to earth on top of the mountain and becomes seven streams, one for each of the varshas. Sanjaya describes four lands or islands, dvīpas, one in each direction from Meru, lands with their jeweled peaks and magical wishing trees. The southern island is Jambudvīpa, Rose Apple Island, named after the jambu tree that grows to a very tall height on the flank of the mountain.3
Finally he comes to this land, called Bhārata, where these armies have now drawn up to fight. The king asks Sanjaya, “Tell me about this land about which the kings, especially Duryodhana, are so covetous, and being covetous have come to fight with each other.” Now, having described the slopes of Meru with its jeweled peaks, Sanjaya goes on to name the seven great mountain ranges of Bhārata, and he lists seriatum—one after another—a virtual torrent of rivers, 160 rivers in all, flowing from the mountains. And, at the end, he lists the clans and peoples of Bhārata, those who are gathered here on the verge of this terrible battle. Sanjaya renders an account of the world as it is known, a good thing to call to mind as it is about to undergo such a catastrophic upheaval.
From this and other passages in the epic, it is clear that the Mahābhārata’s vision of the land of Bhārata extends from the Himalaya Mountains that stretch across the north to the Malaya Mountains that provide the backbone of the peninsular south and fall into the sea at Kanyākumārī. The land extends from the Sahyādri Mountains of the Western Ghāts to the Mahendra Mountains of the Eastern Ghāts. It includes not only the great rivers of north India and the Deccan—the Gangā, the Sindhu, the Narmadā, and the Godāvarī—but also the Kāverī and Tamraparnī of the south. Here, as in the pilgrimage section of the Mahābhārata, there is no doubt that the north is better known to the bards than the south, but there is also no doubt that the term “Bhārata” gestures toward the whole subcontinent.
The “Atlas of the World” accounts, all generally similar, are found not only in the Mahābhārata, but in most of the Purānas. As we shall see, these accounts contain many elements of the imagined cosmos that seem quite fanciful—jeweled mountains, guardian elephants, seas of milk and sugarcane juice—and yet these same accounts move almost seamlessly into a more conventionally geographical description of the landscape of India, with its various regions, rivers, and hills. Often, these Atlas of the World accounts are followed by praises of the various tirthas. What is most striking and most relevant for our purposes as we think about the “sacred geography” of India, however, is the fact that it all comprises a worldview that is highly systematized. The wider universe, even in its most extravagant mythic dimensions, has its own patterns and systems, its groupings of seven mountains and seven rivers, illumining the ways in which India’s landscape has been conceived. And one other important thing: the universe imagined here is organic—a living whole—sprung from the very body of the divine. This, too, just might help us understand the ways in which the places of this earth have come to bear so many resonances for the pilgrims who have long sought them out.
How a world is imagined and lived in begins with “maps” far more profoundly ingrained than those of the cartographer. It includes a deep sense of home and the familiar places likened to it. It also includes a sense of the distant and unfamiliar. Mapping the known world has always included, at its periphery, the unknown world, terra incognita, which the imagination may conceive as shadowy and frightful or as golden and glorious. Hindus, while they have long known the geography of India, have not rested content with the knowledge of their own subcontinent, nor have they imagined their own land to be the center or heartland of the entire universe. In that sense, Hindu geographical thinking as we see it in the Purānas has been somewhat modest about the place of Bhārata in the larger scheme of things. India, the known world, was but one petal of the earth, which they likened to a lotus flower. Hindu cosmology extended the imagination beyond India to the other petals of the lotus—China, northern Asia, western Asia—and even beyond our lotus-flower world to the other worlds that encircle it like water rings in a lotus pond, extending outward in larger and larger circles to the very threshold of infinity.
The whole universe is seen to consist of seven concentric ring-shaped islands and ring-shaped seas, together with the heavens above and the netherworlds beneath. All this the ancients called Brahmānda, the Egg (anda) of Brahman. Its farthest limit was an infinitely distant mountain range called Lokāloka, the “World-Unworld” Mountains, beyond which there was no light at all. Beyond that was the shell of the egg, if you will. Thus, the Universe, including all that the mind can know and imagine, even to the outer limit of thought, is a closed ecosystem, an organic whole.
While the word “Brahmānda” is commonly translated as “universe” in both Sanskrit and Hindi, it is a word that evokes a particular understanding of creation in which the whole universe evolves, like a living thing, from an egg or a seed. Hiranyagarbha, the “golden egg,” is one of the most important recurring themes of Hindu cosmogonic myths. The word garbha means not only egg, but also embryo, seed, germ, and womb. It is the generative source of creation. All particular forms of life—human, animal, and plant—emerged, in the beginning, from garbha, in its widest sense. So too this whole universe was born from this nucleus of heat, fire, and energy. As one cosmogonic hymn of the Rig Veda begins:
Hiranyagarbha arose in the beginning.
He was born, the One Lord of all that is.4
Another hymn, this one from the Atharva Veda, evokes the image of embryo upon the waters of creation:
In the beginning generating offspring,
The waters brought an embryo into being;
And even as it sprang to life,
It had a covering of gold.5
The image of the golden egg or embryo appears often in the ancient Vedic hymns. So far, it is not much of a story as myths go, but it is certainly a powerful symbolic image: the incubation and splitting open of an organic whole from which the entire contents of creation pour forth. In the Shatapatha Brāhmana, this originary symbol begins to generate a story, a myth: The primal waters labor in asceticism, tapas, with the desire to create. They engender an egg (anda), which incubates for a year, hatches, and produces from it the creator god called Prajāpati, the “Lord of Offspring,” who, in turn, creates the earth, the sky, and heaven with his speech, creates day and night, and creates the gods with his upward breath and the anti-gods, the asuras, with his downward breath.6
The egg contains within its seamless unity the whole contents of creation. The extension of correspondences from the contents of the egg to the structure of the universe is widely explored in the Brāhmanas and Upanishads. The Chandogya Upanishad, for instance, contains a succinct statement of the connective strands of correspondences from the microcosm of the egg to the macrocosm of the universe:
In the beginning this world was merely non-being.
It was existent. It developed. It turned into an egg [anda].
It lay for the period of a year. It was was split asunder.
One of the two eggshell parts became silver, one gold.
That which was of silver is this earth.
That which was of gold is the sky.
What was the outer membrane is the mountains.
What was the inner membrane is cloud and mist.
What were the veins are the rivers.
What was the fluid within is the ocean.7
The body, like the embryo or egg, also serves as an originary symbol of genesis and creation. The world with its diversity and organic unity, they say, is like the human body. The most famous myth of bodily creation is the dismemberment of the primal person, Purusha, as told in Rig Veda X.90. There, Purusha is the oblation offered by the gods in sacrifice. From this cosmic being, time and the seasons are born; from his various parts the Vedas are born. Horses, cattle, goats, and sheep are born. The social order is generated: from his head, the brahmin; from his arms, the kshatriya; from his thighs, the vaishya; and from his feet, the shudra. From his mind, the moon was born; from his eye, the sun; from his mouth, the gods Indra and Agni; from his breath, Vāyu, the wind. In essence, the whole universe is formed from and adds up to the very body of Purusha. But who or what is this Purusha? In the widest sense, Purusha is Being itself, not just a being. In this hymn, we are told that only a quarter of Purusha is manifest to become the various parts of the known universe. Three-quarters, so they say, is transcendent, beyond our human ken.
The Aitareya Upanishad makes clear the symbolic similarity of the egg and the body of Purusha as manifest in creation, for here the Spirit, atman, gathers together the primeval waters and shapes Purusha, upon whom he broods, “like an egg [anda].” A whole fabric of correspondences is woven, linking the seed of creation to the elements of creation and, by extension, to the human body.
And from that purusha, brooded upon like an egg,
A mouth broke open. From the mouth came speech, from speech, fire.
Nostrils broke open. From the nostrils came breath, from breath, the wind.
Eyes broke open. From the eyes came sight; from sight, the Sun.
Ears broke open. From the ears came hearing; from hearing, the quarters of heaven.
Skin broke forth. From skin came hairs; from the hairs, plants and trees.
A heart broke forth. From the heart came mind; from mind, the moon.
A navel broke forth. From the navel came the out-breath; from the out-breath—death.
A penis broke forth. From the penis came semen; and from the semen, the waters.8
In later Purānic mythology, the Hiranyagarbha, containing the full potential and diversity of life, also appears in bodily form as Vishnu, floating on the vast waters, having withdrawn the whole of the universe into his body during the period of universal dissolution called the pralaya. When the new creation is about to begin, a lotus springs from the navel of the sleeping Vishnu. Its stem rises; its bud is closed, containing, like the egg, the full potential of creation. When the lotus flower opens, there sits Brahmā, the creator, ready to fashion the particulars of the universe.9 Everything that is will be manifest in creation from the nucleus, the world within.
Vishnu resting on the Endless Serpent, Deogarh 6th century
In the Purānas, we find the compelling story of the sage Mārkandeya. While Vishnu is asleep during the time of the pralaya, between eons of creation, Mārkandeya wanders through the condensed cosmos of the interior world within the sleeping Lord, visiting all the mountains, rivers, and holy tīrthas contained therein. He does not realize that he is within the body of God until, one day, he falls out of the mouth of Vishnu and into the vast sea. Mārkandeya finds, to his astonishment, that he has literally fallen out of what he had thought was the world. There in the primal sea, he is confronted by an unimaginable immensity. He is overwhelmed with another view of what is real, and he is relieved to be snatched up and swallowed again by Vishnu and to find himself once again in the familiar “real” world he knew. Many years later, he falls out of Vishnu’s mouth again, and the memory of encounter with the unimaginable immensity begins to awaken him to this vast reality.10
In imagining the emergence of life and the world of form out of the formless waters of the deep, Hindus have envisioned that form as the Hiranyagarbha or the body of the recumbent Vishnu. How natural also to see the lotus as the seat of the Creator, the place where creation begins to take shape. After all, the lotus is the plant that rises from the muddy depths of the waters below to float and flower on the surface. Anyone who has seen the lotus in flower on a pond can well see how readily this natural form would serve the Hindu imagination. The lotus came to be seen as the first place of living form on the waters of creation. Brahmā emerges from the lotus bud to begin the work of creation as we know it. We must remember, however, that Brahmā, the Creator in this view, is not the Supreme Reality in any sense, but merely instrumental in the process of creation.
“Creation” in this Hindu view of things is designated by the word srishthi, literally the “pouring forth” of the universe from the source. As a complex plant or tree grows, bursting forth and developing from the simple unitary seed, or as a complex creature emerges and grows from an embryo, so is this whole and diverse universe poured forth from the Hiranyagarbha, from Purusha, or from the very body of the divine. There is no God who stands apart from it and creates it. Indeed, everything there is, as far as thought can reach, is within the unitary systemic whole of the Brahmānda. One could say that everything is a manifestation that has poured forth from the living body of the Whole, what some would call God.
The notion that the universe is a systemic whole is foundational in the Hindu imagination. Whether it is the egg or the seed or the body—all of which are important originary symbols—the system is complete. Nothing is left out. Nothing is set apart. The whole universe is a vast ecological system in which the primary life process is one of bursting forth, pouring forth, growing, flourishing, dying, decaying, withdrawing into seed form, and coming to life again. Within this systemic whole, everything is alive and interrelated. Of this organic universe, the German scholar Betty Heimann has written, “Nothing stands isolated. Everything has its repercussions in a wider sphere of time and space beyond its immediate present.”11 These “repercussions” or connotations mean that everything situated within the systemic web of meaning is a symbol. In Mircea Eliade’s terms, a symbol reveals the continuity between the human, or the earthly, and the cosmic. He writes, “Religious symbols are capable of revealing a modality of the real or a structure of the world that is not evident on the level of immediate experience.”12 Symbols break open the interlocking meanings of the cosmos. They “reveal a multitude of structurally coherent meanings.”13 In India, the coherence of meanings revealed by symbols is like the coherence of the body or a living plant: a dynamic system, an interrelated whole, in which everything has symbolic resonances.
There is considerable agreement in the epics and Purānas that the Brahmānda, the Egg of Brahman, this whole universe, consists of seven islands.14 In the middle of the universe is our own circular or lotus-shaped island called Jambudvīpa, Rose Apple Island, named for its special tree, the jambu, or rose apple. Rose Apple Island is what might be called “the world,” or at least the known world from the Indian perspective. It is the lotus island of which Bhārata, India, is the southern petal. Sometimes the term “Rose Apple Island” is used more specifically to refer to that southern petal and becomes the ancient name of Bhārata itself. In either case, at the center of the lotus-shaped continent of the world is Mount Meru. And encircling Rose Apple Island are six other “islands,” all shaped like rings and all separated by ring-shaped seas of exotic waters.
This is a fascinating view of the universe. Our little lotus island of human habitation is seen to float in the middle of a universe of vast extent. That seems natural enough to the human imagination. What is arresting in this view, however, is that the other “islands” beyond the horizon of the known world are not islands of land mass, as we normally imagine islands to be, scattered here and there through the infinite seas. They are islands of encompassment. They are ring-shaped, and these ring-islands surround their ring-seas, “like a rim surrounds a wheel.”15 Rose Apple Island is safely encompassed by one ring after another. The universe is one concentric and unitary whole.
Rose Apple Island floats “like a boat” in the middle of the Salt Sea, at the center of the universe.16 As the Vishnu Purāna puts it, the Salt Sea, one hundred thousand leagues wide, encircles Rose Apple Island “like a bracelet.”17 Rose Apple Island is said to have seven zones, one of which is India. It has seven ranges of mountains, one of which is the Himalayas, and it has seven rivers, all flowing from the celestial Gangā. It is anchored at the center by Mount Meru. As we will see, this sevenfold schema is duplicated on the islands of the wider universe and within the land of India itself.
The Bhāgavata Purāna begins its account of the ring-islands by saying that just as Mount Meru is surrounded by Rose Apple Island, and Rose Apple Island is, in turn, encircled by the Salt Sea, so is the Salt Sea encircled by the island of Plaksha.18 The second of the ring-islands, named for the golden plaksha, or fig tree, also has seven zones, seven principal mountain ranges, and seven great rivers, all of which are named, but that need not detain us here. Encircling Plaksha is the Sea of Sugar-Cane Juice, which is twice as wide as the Salt Sea and extends up to the shores of the third ring-island, Shālmali, named for the shālmali, or silk-cotton tree. Just as Plaksha is twice as large as Jambudvīpa, so is Shālmali twice as large as Plaksha. And so it is, we are told, with each of the ring-islands. The islands are progressively bigger and the seas that stretch between them progressively more extensive. Beyond Shālmali is the Sea of Wine, which reaches to the fourth ring-island, Kusha, named for its sacred kusha grass. Beyond Kusha is the Sea of Ghee or Clarified Butter, extending to the fifth ring-island, Krauncha, named for its greatest mountain. Then comes the Sea of Yoghurt, reaching as far as the island of Shāka, named for the great teak tree. It is encircled at its outer rim by the Sea of Milk. Finally, beyond the Sea of Milk is the sixth of the ring-islands, Pushkara, named for its lotuses. It does not have seven mountains, but only one high, circular mountain range. There are no other mountains and no rivers. And beyond Pushkara, the seventh sea is the Sea of Pure Water, which reaches to the very edge of the world and the ring of mountains called Lokāloka, “World-Unworld,” at the very boundary of the infinite.19
The mountains of Lokāloka are at the limit of the worlds that comprise the universe. The word loka means “world,” but not just world in a geographical or spatial sense. It includes the meanings of both “space” and “light” and is, therefore, the world that shines forth. Loka does not simply exist; loka must be gained and won. It is a safe world, an ample and open place to live. It is the world, divinely illumined.20 Not surprisingly, Lokāloka is the boundary where light is divided from darkness. These mountains are the imaginative embodiment of the very notion of “limit.” The rays of the sun that circles Mount Meru and the light of the brightest star, the Pole Star, which stands high above Meru, can reach to the slopes of Lokāloka and no farther. The World-Unworld mountain range is not only as far as light can reach, but as far as thought can reach. The far slopes of Lokāloka are in darkness. And beyond, the darkness is encompassed by the shell of the Egg of Brahman. As one Purāna puts it, “Beyond it [Lokāloka] perpetual darkness invests the mountain all around, which darkness is again encompassed by the shell of egg.”21
These concentric ring-islands, with Jambudvīpa at the center, are structurally the same: Each has its seven zones, seven mountains, and seven rivers, and each has its distinctive trees and plants. As one moves outward, each is twice as extensive as its predecessor. It is a strikingly secure and benign worldview. Looking outward from Rose Apple Island into the terrae incognitae of the outer islands, the world is not imagined to be shadowy and dangerous; on the contrary, it is imagined to be more and more sublime. These outer islands are not thought of as heavens, however, since the heavens rise in the vertical dimension of Brahmānda. Still, life is idealized beyond the horizon, not viewed with suspicion, as is so often the case in ethnocentric worldviews. Here, fewer and fewer of the human hardships of life in Bhārata are thought to exist as one moves outward across the seas of sugarcane juice and wine, through the various ring-islands. Increasingly, people live a very long time, as long as one thousand years. There are no heavy rains and flooding streams; no heat of summer or cold of winter; no fear from the movements of the stars and planets. There is no jealousy, hatred, or anxiety.22
As one moves outward through the islands, the four castes have different names and function in interrelation with each other in increasing harmony, but the social system of the terrae incognitae is nonetheless imagined to be structurally like that of Bhārata in that four castes do exist. The one exception is the outermost ring-island, Pushkara, where it is said that there is no caste (varna) or stage-of-life (āshrama) at all. There on the outer rim of the universe, people are all healthy, powerful, happy, long-lived, and equal. “There is no distinction of caste or order; there are no fixed institutes; nor are rites performed for the sake of advantage. The three Vedas, the Purānas, ethics, and polity, and the laws of service are unknown. Pushkara is in fact, in both its divisions, a terrestrial paradise, where time yields happiness to all its inhabitants, who are exempt from sickness and decay.”23
Varnāshrama dharma is the undergirding value system of Hindu social and religious life in which one’s appropriate dharma is generally determined by caste (varna) and stage of life (āshrama). It is not surprising that Hindus would imagine the terrae incognitae to have such a system too, with different names but the same basic categories, just as nineteenth-century Christian scholars and missionaries expected the terrae incognitae to have “religions,” “scriptures,” and “beliefs,” the contents different, no doubt inferior, but the categories the same. What is remarkable and counterintuitive in this Hindu worldview is the generous presupposition that those people of the terrae incognitae, beyond the horizon, are not inferior, but even more observant and pious than we. Still more remarkable is the absence of the basic social structures of caste in imagining the most remote of the ring-islands. In India, varnāshrama dharma is transcended only by the sannyāsīs, who have figuratively “cast off” from this shore, from this way of life, for a life of freedom in which caste and station are left behind. Varnāshrama dharma is also transcended in the time dimension—in the first of the four ages, the perfect Krita Yuga, before time begins its downward slide through the ages. Here in the vision of the ring-islands, varnāshrama dharma is transcended in the spatial dimension. In imagining the ideal world on the outer rim of the universe, circled on its inner bank by the Sea of Milk and on its outer bank by the Sea of Pure Water, Hindus have overturned even their own most deep-rooted cultural assumptions, such as hierarchy and its social expressions, and imagined a world of perfect equality.
These places of the imagination are as important in the mapping of a worldview as the places that are immediately known. What characteristics does a culture attribute to the lands beyond the horizon? Are they dark and dangerous? Are they greener and richer, the desired objects of conquest? Are they virgin, wild lands? Are they frontiers to be tamed? Are they dark and pagan lands to be converted? Here Hindus have envisioned a universe that neither threatens them nor invites conquest. The abundant islands of the unknown worlds are comfortably separated by exotic oceans. Rose Apple Island is safely encircled and encompassed by islands of increasing perfection and piety, even up to the very end of the world, where the earth is made of gold dust and where “whatever is placed is not taken back.”24
Rose Apple Island, in the middle of all the rings of continents and seas, is imagined in two distinctive but not contradictory ways in the world-atlas literature. The one that appeals most to the poetic mind’s eye is that of a lotus-flower world, in which the four continents spread out like the petals of a lotus from the great Mount Meru, which stands at the center, as the seed cup of the lotus of the world. As we have seen, this is basically a fourfold worldview, with four petal-continents, the southern continent being Bhārata. In addition, there is a sevenfold imaginative vision of the world, in which Jambudvīpa is circular, with seven horizontal zones. This is the view described by Sanjaya in the Mahābhārata and in most of the Purānas.25 This is an expression of the system of cosmic geography in which each of the islands is seen to have seven zones. In the case of Jambudvīpa, the southernmost zone, bow-shaped, is Bhārata. We will look briefly at each of the fourfold and sevenfold conceptions and then turn to the great mountain that centers not only Rose Apple Island, but the entire universe, Mount Meru.
The fourfold worldview is mapped onto the four cardinal directions: Rose Apple Island, they say, floats like a lotus in the Salt Sea.
The four famous great continents are stationed on the petals,
The powerful Meru is stationed on the pericarp.26
There is unanimity in the literature on the names of the four petals, which leaf out to become the earth’s four continents: Ketumāla in the west, Uttarakuru in the north, Bhadrāshva in the east, and Bhārata in the south. In the center is Meru. The heavenly River Gangā lands on top of this great mountain on her course from heaven to earth, and she, too, splits into four branches and flows out upon each of the petal continents: the Chakshu River to the west, the Soma or Bhadra River to the north, the Sītā River to the east, and finally, the Alakanandā, India’s own Gangā, to the south.27
This is clearly a mythological view in which the universe we know is oriented to the four directions with a massive, centering mountain. So widespread is this worldview in Indic cosmology that Japanese pilgrimage maps of India show Mount Meru prominently, with a swirl of rivers circling it, one spinning off in each cardinal direction.28 Those with a geographical bent have struggled to pinpoint the various petals of the world-lotus, and they do see it having some relation to Asian topography. Meru itself, they say, is the Pamir knot, where the mountains of Asia swirl together—the Hindu Kush from the west, the Himalayas and the Karakoram Range from the southeast, the Kunlun Mountains from the east, and the Tien Shan Mountains from the northeast.29 From the vantage point of the Pamir knot, Ketumāla is the Central Asian plateau stretching west toward the Caspian Sea, watered by the Amu Darya River, formerly called the Oxus and identified with the Chakshu, which rises in the Pamirs and empties into the southern end of the Aral Sea. Uttarakuru is the north country, reaching today into Central Asia and watered by the Syr Darya River, the ancient Bhadra River, which empties into the northern end of the Aral Sea. Bhadrāshva is the Tarim Basin or Chinese Turkestan, north of the high Tibetan tableland and reaching toward China in the east. It is watered by the Yarkand River, known as the Sītā in the Purānas. Bhārata, of course, stretches to the south, watered by the Gangā.
From the standpoint of the deep structures of the imagination, however, the important thing is that this is a fourfold world in which the other petals are more or less like ours, spreading forth from Mount Meru in the other three directions. Indeed, the entire world order is fourfold as it spreads out in a three-dimensional geographical mandala. Mount Meru has four sides, each a distinct color (varna) and each identified with one of the four castes (also varna). Flanking Meru at the base of each petal, in each of the four directions, is a mountain that serves as a buttress (vishkambha) to this world axis.30 These buttress mountains provide the setting for further elaboration of the fourfold scheme. On the very top of each mountain is an enormous tree, and these four trees are called the “flagstaffs” of the universe. On Mount Gandhamādana, India’s buttress mountain, is the rose apple tree with fruits as large as elephants, so they say, and when they fall to the ground, they splatter to produce the delicious rivers of Bhārata to the south!31 Each mountain, further, has special forests and groves, and each sends forth seven rivers into its particular petal. According to some sources, each petal is identified with a particular theriomorphic deity, a form of Vishnu, as its support. Bhārata, for instance, is supported by Vishnu as Kūrma, the tortoise, who bears the land upon his back. There are many variations in the particular details of this fourfold world mandala, but the pattern and the intent are clear enough: The world, with its topographical features, its social order, and its gods, is four-quartered and centered at Mount Meru. Indeed, the fourfold nature of the world extends all the way out to the far slopes of Lokāloka, where four huge elephants stand guard at the four directions.32
Side by side with the fourfold view of the world lotus is the numerology of the “sevens” associated with each of the petals and each of the islands.33 Our island of Jambudvīpa, here meaning the entire lotus-island we have been describing, is also sevenfold. Just as there are seven islands in the Brahmānda, each with seven zones, seven primary mountain ranges, and seven river systems, so Rose Apple Island has this sevenfold structure as well. Its seven divisions are seen as horizontal sections of a huge circle, having as their boundaries the six long mountain ranges stretching from the Western to the Eastern Sea. In the center of the central belt of this circle-world is Mount Meru. The southernmost range of mountains is the Himalayas. The land of Bhārata and land of Uttarakuru lie respectively at the southern and northern ends of the circle, and each is said to be shaped like a bow.
This imaginative vision of a world divided into zones by one lateral range of mountains after another is certainly understandable from the perspective of India, where, to the north, stretching across the earth, are mountains, mountain valleys, and more mountains—for almost as far as one could travel, or as one could imagine. India’s great Himalayas, the “abode of snows,” span the subcontinent from shore to shore like the “earth’s measuring rod,” as the poet Kālidāsa put it. Magnificent as they are, the Himalayas are still the most earthly range of mountains in view, for they are, after all, himavān, “made of snow.” Farther north and more distant are mountains said to be made of gold, or made of blue lapis lazuli, or the shimmering color of peacocks’ feathers.34 Just as there are seven mountain ranges in this worldview, so also there are seven rivers that branch out from the celestial Gangā to water the whole earth; three streams carry the waters of the Gangā eastward; three streams carry its waters westward; and one—the Bhāgīrathī, India’s Gangā—carries its waters southward.35
Jambudvīpa is symbolically centered on Mount Meru, sometimes called Sumeru. This mountain is the center not only of Rose Apple Island, but of the concentric ring-islands as well. As the cosmic mountain, Meru is imitated and repeated architecturally in Hindu temples, with their shikharas, or “mountain peaks,” rising toward the heavens. It is repeated as the center post of Buddhist stūpas, the outer convex dome shape of which is called the anda, the egg, and the central axis of which, rising above the anda, is Meru.36 It is repeated in the multitiered, ascending roofs of pagodas in Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. In Bali, these tall multitiered shrines that duplicate the sacred mountain are actually called merus, and the great volcanic mountain of Bali, Gunung Agung, is said to be a piece of Meru itself, fallen into the South Pacific. Mount Meru is the axis mundi, the mountain in the center of the world, joining the earth to the heavens above. But Meru not only rises toward the heavens, it is also rooted deep in the earth, joining the earth to the netherworlds beneath as well. One hundred thousand leagues high, they say, is Meru. It extends eighty-four thousand leagues into the sky and sixteen thousand leagues into the earth.37
Directly over Meru stands the Pole Star, Dhruva. The world-atlas literature describing the earth is often found in tandem with those sections of the Purānas that describe the heavens, with the movements of the sun and the moon, the stars and the planets.38 Dhruva is the fixed point, the “star-supporting pillar,” connected to Meru by an invisible but firm post. Around it, the heavenly bodies move, as if fastened by a cord. One Purāna compares the movement of the heavenly bodies around Dhruva’s invisible post to the movement of oxen around the post in the center of the threshing floor.39 Thus the planets move, on shorter and longer tethers, propelled by the force of the wind. And so does the sun move around Meru, creating day and night in the world below.40 On the top of Meru, however, directly below the Pole Star, it is always day.
Meru is said to be a mountain of pure gold. As the Purānas commonly put it, “In the middle of Ilāvrita, Meru rises up, golden.”41 It is so brilliant that it is commonly said to be a “smokeless fire,” glowing with incandescence so pure that it emits no smoke. The mountain is said to be golden because it is touched by Shiva himself.42 And, of course, it is golden because the sun always shines upon it. Indeed, the constant light of the sun on Meru is used in Sanskrit classical literature as a common simile for constancy. When the Pāndavas enter the forest to embark on their years of exile, the bard of the Mahābhārata says of their good wife Draupadī, “Draupadī does not leave the Pāndavas as the light of the sun does not leave Meru.”
Mount Meru is commonly described as “four-sided” (chaturasra), and we might perhaps think of the “sides” as its slopes. As we have seen, the four-sided Meru gives orientation and directionality to the four quarters of the world. Meru is also said to have four varnas, “colors,” and by extension this word came to mean “caste,” in its most general sense. When Meru is called the four-varna mountain, both color and caste are included. Indeed, the relation of color to caste is made explicit. The east slope of Meru is white, with the properties of the brahmin caste; the southern slope is yellow, with the properties of the vaishya caste; the western slope is “black as a bee’s wing” and has the properties of the shudras; and the northern slope is red, with the properties of the kshatriyas.43
The measurements of Meru are given with consistency in all our sources. We have mentioned that its height is said to be eighty-four thousand leagues and its depth in the earth sixteen thousand leagues. The astonishing dimension, however, is the diameter of the great mountain: At its base, Mount Meru is said to be sixteen thousand leagues across; and at its summit, Meru is said to be thirty-two thousand leagues across. Here the common image of the mountain peak is turned upside down: Meru is smaller at the bottom than it is on top! Meru reverses the pyramidal image of the mountain to which the imagination is accustomed, the broad-based mountain ascending to a single peak. While such a peak may suffice for the divine abode in a monotheistic worldview, it is clearly inadequate for the gods of India. At the broad summit of Meru there is plenty of room for all. Here the center of the lotus generates the imaginative vision, spreading outward with many stems and seed pods.
Since Meru is king of the mountains in a confluence of mountain ranges that is the most awesome on earth, it is all the more arresting that Hindus do not derive their symbolic image of Meru from the great granite and ice peaks of the Himalayas. Rather, it comes from the living, organic world of flowers. Meru is the “seed cup [karnikā] of the lotus of the world.”44 Virtually everywhere Meru is described in the world-atlas literature, this image of the seed cup of the lotus is used. The central part of the lotus flares out distinctively at the top, supporting a flat surface with little bumps for each seed. Similarly, Mount Meru spreads out at the top, supporting a broad plain where the various gods have their citadels. The four continents leaf out like petals. And Meru is encircled not only by its four buttress mountains, but by twenty smaller mountains, said to be arrayed like filaments around the seed cup of the lotus. These are called the kesarāchala, the “filament mountains.”45
Most accounts tell us that on top of Mount Meru is the city of Brahmā, the world creator. Around Brahmā’s city is a circle of eight subsidiary citadels, one in each direction, the capitals of the eight lokapālas, the “world guardians” assigned to the cardinal and intermediate directions.46 Despite the ecumenical nature of the mountaintop, Meru nonetheless lends itself particularly to Shaiva mythology, since Shiva is the mountain god par excellence, and since Vishnu’s dwelling place is well known to be in Vaikuntha, at the zenith of the heavens. The Linga Purāna says that all three gods—Brahmā, Vishnu, and Shiva—have abodes on Meru. Shiva’s abode is described in most detail, however, and is said to be a seven-storied palace.47 The Kūrma Purāna tells us, “In front of the abode of Brahmā there stands the sacred, white, and resplendent mansion of Shambhu (Shiva), the suzerain of gods, possessed of unlimited energy.”48
On the top of Meru, the River Gangā first touches the earth, having descended from heaven through the path of the Milky Way, from Vishnu’s foot according to some sources. The Gangā circles the city of Brahmā and then flows down from the mountain in four, or in seven, streams. The Vishnu Purāna puts it beautifully:
The capital of Brahmā is enclosed by the River Gangā, which,
issuing from the foot of Vishnu and washing the lunar orb, falls here
from the skies and after encircling the city, divides into four mighty
rivers, flowing in opposite directions. These rivers are the Shītā, the
Alakanandā, the Chakshu, and the Bhadrā.49
What is north of the sea and south of the Himalaya,
That land is called Bhārata, where the descendants
of King Bharata live.50
All of this cosmology, from the Brahmānda with its ring-islands to the many zones and petals of Rose Apple Island, is finally but the wider context for the geographical description of Bhārata, the land of India. It is a “bow-shaped” land, according to the Purānic cosmologies, which see it as the southern cross-section of the disc of the world. The Mārkandeya Purāna pushes toward greater accuracy: It is more like a rectangle, with the Himalayas stretched back on two sides like the string of a drawn bow.51 The Purānas describe its extent. It is a thousand leagues, they say, from north to south, and from Kanyākumārī at the southern tip, the land gradually broadens out as one goes north to the source of the River Gangā.52
In moving from the descriptions of the seas of sugarcane juice and yoghurt, and the lands where trees yield fruit as big as elephants, out onto the southern petal of the lotus, the authors of the Purānas begin to describe a land whose topographical features are more or less the bona fide components of a modern atlas.53 As the British geographer B. C. Law says of the Purānic accounts, “The fabulous element as pointed out by Cunningham is confined, as a rule, to outside lands, and their allusions to purely Indian topography are generally sober.”54 Like the other world-islands and petals, however, it is a land with systematic features. The descriptions invariably include an enumeration of the sets of mountains, the systems of rivers, and the respective peoples of India.
The seven mountain ranges of Bhārata are the kulaparvatas, the “clan mountains,” so called because each was related in ancient times to a particular clan or tribe: the Mahendra Mountains of Orissa to the Kalingas, the Malaya Mountains of the south to the Pāndyas, and so forth. Along with the Himalayas, these seven mountain ranges compose the very bones of India: There are the Mahendra Mountains of the Eastern Ghāts between the Godāvarī and Mahānadī Rivers; the Malaya Mountains of the south, including the Nilgiri Hills and the southern spine of mountains called the Cardamom Hills, which extends to the tip of India; the Sahyādri Mountains of the Western Ghāts, running along the coast of the Arabian Sea; the Vindhya Mountains extending across central India, along the course of the Narmadā River; the Suktiman and Riksha Mountains in central east India; and the Pariyatra Mountains in central west India, including the Aravalli Hills of Rajasthan.55
The rivers, too, are named, and in most of the bhuvana kosha accounts they are listed according to the mountain range in which they have their headwaters. First, there are those that rise in the Himalayas—the Gangā, Sindhu, Sarasvatī, Yamunā, Gomatī, and others. From the Pariyatra Mountains flows the Mahī River, which empties into the Gulf of Cambay, and numerous north-flowing rivers that empty into the Yamunā, including the Shiprā or Kshiprā River, which flows through the central Indian city of Ujjain. From the Riksha and Suktiman Mountains flow many rivers, the most famous being the west-flowing Narmadā, which rises at Amarakantaka, and the east-flowing Mahānadī, which empties into the Bay of Bengal. The Vindhyas are the source of many rivers, including the Payoshnī and Tapi, which parallel the Narmadā to the south. From the Sahya Mountains of the eastern coast come the great Godāvarī and the other rivers that rise in what is today Maharashtra. These mountains are also the source of the Krishnā and Krishnāvenī Rivers of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. The Kāverī River rises in the Coorg country of the southern Sahyas and flows eastward through southern Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Finally, from the Malaya Mountains flow such rivers as the Vaigāi and Tamraparnī of Tamil Nadu. In all, the list includes more than 150 rivers and tributaries. The Purānas conclude, “All these rivers are holy; all are Gangās that run to the sea; all are mothers of the world; and all are known to be destroyers of the world’s sins.”56
In addition to the mountains and rivers, a standard element of the world-atlas descriptions is the account of India’s regions and the enumeration of its peoples. The regions of India are five: the Middle Country (Madhyadesha) of the Gangetic Plain, the North Country or the Northern Road (Uttarāpatha) extending into the hills and mountains; the South or the Southern Road (Dakshināpatha), the East (Prāchya), and the West (Aparānta). The Purānas list all of the janapadas, the kingdoms of the regions of Bhārata, each with its various clans and peoples. In addition, it is commonly noted that the margins or borderlands are inhabited by the Kirata tribesmen in the east and by the Yavanas or Greeks in the west. Between east and west, however, there is the homeland of the brahmins, kshatriyas, vaishyas, and shudras of Bhārata.57
There is a remarkable geographical awareness built into this world-view, a remarkable sense of “this land,” its extent and features, its people, and its relation to other lands and the wider universe. In the Purānas, all this schematic exposition of the world atlas immediately precedes the extensive tīrtha māhātmyas that celebrate the sacred places of India. Here we see the geographical articulation of Bhārata profusely expressed as the Purānas locate and praise innumerable tīrthas. The māhātmyas go into extensive detail, in some cases enumerating hundreds of tīrthas up and down the course of the Narmadā River or in cities like Mathurā and Vārānasī. In our journey through India’s tīrthas, we will see, again and again, the ways in which they are grouped in threes, fours, fives, sixes, tens, and twelves, in systems of seven rivers and seven cities, in patterns that create a complex and variegated landscape, patterns that participate in the schema of a larger patterned universe.
Bhārata is the southernmost land of this lotus world. India’s imaginative world map does not place India directly in the center of the world, as did Anaximander when he drew the first world map with Greece in the center, or the medieval cartographers when they placed Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the center, with the continents spreading forth like petals. Rather, Bhārata is but one of the petal continents. In many ways, it is the least glorious. Far from the usual cosmological ethnocentrism in which one’s own world is described as civilized, while the surrounding lands, vaguely known, are thought to be less so, even barbarian, the Indian visionaries who described the world actually idealized the other petals of the world, the lands beyond, just as they idealized the outer ring-islands of the universe.
In the other lands—Ketumāla, Uttarakuru, and Bhadrāshva—people are said to have golden complexions, their skin as lustrous as seashells. They live lifetimes of one thousand or ten thousand years. They suffer no sickness or selfishness, no old age or decay. All are equal in strength and stature. Their lands are filled with rivers of cold, clear water and ponds of white lilies. The list of blessings goes on. In these other lands, people enjoy a perfection as natural as the perfection of nature. Indeed the wish-granting trees and the delicate waters seem to bestow their own perfection upon the inhabitants of these lands.58 These lands are called bhoga bhūmis, “lands of enjoyment,” where those who have reaped the rewards of their good deeds are born again to live long, long lives of enjoyment.
Bhārata is different. Here people are not uniformly beautiful, golden, and lustrous, but are of many races and types. Here people are generally small in stature and live relatively short lives of no more than one hundred years. They are subject to the usual rounds of sickness and misfortune, flood and catastrophe, old age and death. And yet, without exception or hesitation, Bhārata is said to be the best place to live in this wide universe, despite the abundant blessings of the other petal continents and the distant ring-islands. They may be bhoga bhūmis, but Bhārata is karma bhūmi, the “land of action.”59
Thus I have told thee of that four-leafed lotus-flower which is the earth; its leaves are Bhadrāshva, Bhārata, and the other countries on the four sides. The country named Bhārata, which I have told thee of on the south, is the land of action; nowhere else is merit and sin acquired; this must be known to be the chief country, wherein everything is fixedly established. And from it a man gains Svarga [heaven] and final emancipation from existence, or the human world and hell, or yet again the brute condition, O brahmin.60
In a worldview that places ultimate value, not upon enjoyment, but upon freedom from rebirth, the land of action is the only place where one can work to attain such freedom. Here alone through action, or karma, can one shape one’s destiny toward freedom, all the while running the risk, of course, of shaping one’s destiny toward further bondage as well. Life in karma bhūmi may result in rebirth as a human or an animal; it may lead to the enjoyment of heaven, or the punishment of hell, or it may, with practice and discipline, lead to the freedom of moksha. But here in karma bhūmi, change is possible and action matters.
One might say the Hindu vision of the other continents that skirt Meru is a utopian vision, for they are, in the true sense of “utopia,” “no place,” at least no place that is real. The perfection ascribed to them is generous, but when compared to the land of Bhārata, the praises of the lands of enjoyment have a hollow ring. Here in Bhārata there is sorrow and anxiety, along with joy and peace; here there is sickness and death, along with health and longevity. And yet a human birth here in Bhārata is very rare, and very precious, coveted even by the gods in heaven, so they say. For only in the hurly-burly of the land of action is the attainment of freedom, moksha, possible.
Therefore this Bhārata is the most excellent land in the
Rose-Apple Island, O sage. For the others may be lands
of enjoyment, but this is the land of action.61
