5.
The Meaning of Pilgrimage
Just as some parts of the body are considered purer than others, so are certain places on earth held to be auspicious because of their extraordinary power and purity, the efficacy of their water and because they were frequented by the sages.—Mahabharata
Pilgrimages are intentionally difficult journeys of devotion. By making a long journey to these powerful places, pilgrims achieve a degree of personal growth. The act of pilgrimage serves as a bridge between the known realm of the earth, nature, society, and the unknown world of divine beings, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity.
A place of pilgrimage is known as a ‘tirtha sthana’—‘that holy site known as a tirtha, which is associated with or inhabited by saints and sages deserving reverence, who are without desire, egoism or delusion and who have been purified by a performance of penance’ (Garuda Purana). A tirtha refers to ‘crossing the ford’—to cross is to be transformed. Among the holiest Hindu tirthas are sacred rivers, especially the Ganges. Its entire length is sacred, yet at some points it is believed that its sanctity comes to a focus. One of this is an extract from Benares Seen from Within. These points of holiest concentration is Kashi. A tirtha is directly experienced as an intensification of the sacred or supernatural power in time and space. It is there—to be seen, to be felt, to enter, rather as the hearth is the centre of the home, to which all who enter naturally gravitate. And this, despite the fact that home and tirtha are essentially opposites.
Among all religious duties of Hindus, pilgrimage is the most important. The pilgrim makes a transformative journey to a tirtha in order to see, to have darshan—which means ‘seeing’: Kashi darshan, Vishwanath darshan, Himalaya darshan. All nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. An integral religious society like India’s searches for identity in the cosmos. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany—a ‘divine showing’. The struggle to overcome the difficulties of the journey opens up to the pilgrim the deeper realities and resources of his own being and of the surrounding world. Pilgrimage brings together the inner and outer worlds, the physical landscape serving as a mirror for the inner one. The pilgrim is cast from the relatively closed home world into the vastness of nature. But long before an individual sets out on the journey, others anciently made their mark on the landscape. Monuments, temples, shrines, tanks and wells are testimony to the hierarchical values vested in sacred territory. Traditionally structured pilgrimage, with its numerous ‘stations’ marking the way, its sequence of natural landmarks and shrines, functions as a planned exploration of ordered and cosmicized space. Everyone has a need for order but not all seek it, or have the privilege to move through space along well-recognized courses laid out by former generations. Indian pilgrimages—and there are many that are well known and enormously popular—reflect a belief that there is something close to the essence, to beauty and truth in the landscape through which the seeker journeys. Pilgrimage is metaphysical sightseeing.
Indians have an uncanny ability to identify just those places which best display manifest power, sacred numen. In fact, Eliade points out, man does not ‘choose’ these places; they are merely ‘discovered’ by him. Such tirthas, to which the faithful have made pilgrimage since time immemorial, usually possess palpably ‘magical’ atmosphere and physical beauty. The whole subcontinent is crisscrossed with ancient trackways along which people wind to and fro from great and little fairs and festivals held there. Pilgrimage continues throughout the year, but during the pilgrimage season public transport is inundated by passengers who are off on their varied quests; there is no country in the world so busily and profusely weaving patterns of devotional mobility. The sheer size of the subcontinent has traditionally provided little stimulus to venture abroad. But the need of the landlocked to break out, to get up and go, abandon stale routine for a while and be free spirits, has fostered the urge to undertake pilgrimage on an unprecedented scale.
To attract large numbers, the tirtha sthana must both be an accessible crossway and yet distant enough to be reached from afar by an arduous journey—like Mecca, Jerusalem, Delos Compostella. Benares, located at a territorial midpoint, at the intersection of transcontinental trade routes, is equally accessible to Indians from all four quarters. The essence of pilgrimage is movement outwards and away from the home base. Even those who are permanently resident in places of pilgrimage have the same urge to take off on a journey to some distant tirtha.
Pilgrimage is a universal feature in the religious life of man—and even those who profess no religion still feel the urge to make an arduous journey to some distant and elevating goal that transcends the normal parameters of their lives. To benefit from the spiritual and moral qualities of some particularly holy place both the pilgrim and the secular-intentional seeker must approach their goal in the right frame of mind. A stressful journey, possibly through hostile territory, or under taxing climatic conditions, overcoming all kinds of hardships and hazards, is a way to test character at all levels and under the most varied circumstances: cooperative effort stimulates the timid to strive far beyond their customary abilities. ‘The pilgrim’s difficult, self-denying, or painful movement is itself the efficacious rite, and at certain times and places this movement is thought to generate power, ‘‘heat”, tapas.’ (William Sax)
‘In all Indian languages,’ writes Agehananda Bharati, ‘Sanskrit or Dravidian, the word for pilgrimage contains the root for “to go”, “to move” … it was the motion, the effort of moving on and then up the steep mountain, the circumambulation and the various prostrations in and around the shrine … which must be seen as the key element in the whole undertaking.’ (‘Pilgrimage in the Indian Tradition’, History of Religions 3, No. I 1963: 135–67.) The pilgrim’s movement as transient supplicant is towards a goal defined by its relative motionlessness as a tirtha sthana, which is also a state of being. Motionlessness is considered a highly numinous condition, the magnetic attribute of deities, temple images, kings, charismatic leaders, gurus and holy men. But relative motionlessness is attainable, on the one hand, through the deliberate immobilization of body and consciousness in Yoga, including steady posture, control of the motion of the breath and by ascetic austerities, tapasya. On the other hand, pilgrimage was explicitly conceived, say the classic ancient texts, to serve as an appropriate discipline among the disempowered, the poor, low castes, women, the unlettered and those without the facilities to engage in sustained disciplines.
Indian thought is emphatic, however, in stating that nothing in the phenomenal world is entirely without movement or free from process change, and that the body also is in a constant state of change. There is a solution which takes into account this inherent mutability, for the heart of pilgrimage consists in a simple dramatization of the contrast between continuous phenomenal change and divine stasis: the act of circumambulation, pradakshina.
The rite of circumambulation and its associated taboos seem to have been common to the whole ancient world. Its usual explanation as a survival of sun-worship may be an oversimplification. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the rite was primarily cosmogonic in origin and that it reflected the need once universally felt to live in harmony with cosmic forces, represented in this case by the sun as ultimate generator of life. To circumambulate clockwise was to identify with the sun’s diurnal course, regarded as life-enhancing and bringing luck.
(John Irwin, ‘The Stupa and the Cosmic Axis’,
South Asian Archeology 1977)
At this point it is helpful to note the structure of a typical Indian pilgrimage from start to finish …
- Preparation and separation stage: the pilgrim receives instruction, takes a vow and prepares mentally and physically to face hardship.
- Liminal stage: divine interrelatedness at the tirtha sthana, including circumambulation of an axial centre.
- Re-aggregation stage: return to the starting-point, reflection, absorption of insight.
Diagrammatically, the scenario could be drawn as the symbol of infinity: with an axis of pradakshina at the start, at the goal and at the conclusion. It is the clarity of this circular movement which distinguishes Indian from Western pilgrimage. In his impressive study of the idea of pilgrimage behind Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Donald Howard is able to tell us that of 526 accounts of the Jerusalem pilgrimage none depicts a return. In Chaucer’s book, while pilgrimage is conceived as an inner and symbolic passage of the soul, a fortiori the pilgrimage of life, it is treated as a oneway journey. As Chaucer portrayed it, this journey was a dark one, beginning in the red-light district of Southwark, omitting the substantial places like towns and shrines, and recounting the pilgrims’ passage through the outskirts of towns—giving the journey a ‘displaced … spectral, removed quality’. His general picture is a dark portrayal of a discreditable bunch of sinners passing through a fallen and doomed world. The particular sense of mutability that The Canterbury Tales gives is that of the passing moment, and of a disordered Christian society in a state of decline and uncertainty; ‘we do not know where it is headed’ (Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales, University of California Press, 1976). The contrast here is stark, not least because the unilinearity of Western pilgrimage is spiritually inconclusive, a one-way journey, whereas the pattern of the Eternal Return to which Indian pilgrimage conforms, possesses the wholeness of a circle and an efficacy which, at its best, can be transformational.
The system of pilgrimage in Kashi originally consisted of five routes in concentric circles, with the usual compression ratio of higher potency at the centre diminishing towards the periphery; consequently, the outermost route, an impressively exact circular form of 168 miles (296 kilometres), is no longer followed.
This circle of terrain was perceived to be the ancient Kashi Mandala, still visible on aerial survey maps. The most important pilgrim route nowadays is the Panchakroshi Yatra, a journey performed in six days over a distance of 55.2 miles (88.5 kilometres). Autumn is the popular season for this yatra, but especially during the intercalary month, an extra month added every thirty-two and one-half months to adjust the cycle of the lunar calendar to the solar year. During the intercalary month, around 45,000 pilgrims perform this pilgrimage. But during the annual Shivaratri festival, the milkmen of Benares still perform the yatra by running it barefoot over two nights and two days. The normal Panchakroshi Yatra starts with a purificatory bath in the Ganges at Manikarnika Ghat, followed by rituals in and around the Vishwanath temple and finally an initiation rite at the Manikarnikeshvara temple; thus there is a pradakshina at the start of the pilgrimage, and this will be repeated in the same spot at its conclusion.
On the sixth day of the circuit, the pilgrims reach the north-eastern limit of the city at the confluence of the Varana with the Ganga. At this spot, so it is said, Vishnu first stepped upon the soil of Kashi, before reaching the site of the well he would dig at Manikarnika. The footprints of Vishnu are installed at the beautiful site of the Adi Keshava temple in a grove of trees beside the Ganga–Varana sangam. How lovely it is to cross this confluence, especially after the monsoon, when the small seasonal bridge which fords it is still freshly built, its bamboo still golden yellow in the early morning sunlight. I join the pilgrims returning to the city from their five days pradakshina of its perimeter. Here the sun seems more lustrous, the breeze more full of promise, the shade under the trees more velvety, the chatter of the pilgrims more friendly. When the city comes into view the pilgrims raise their palms in salutation. The world is bigger, brighter and more beautiful than it ever seemed before. For several months on the road this is the way it is.
Following the path along the river, past the earthworks remaining from excavation at Rajghat of ancient city remains dating back to the eighth century BC, the pilgrims reach again the place from where they started, Manikarnika Ghat. After bathing, they return to the Vishwanath temple. The concluding ritual is performed in the Jnanavapi pavilion while reciting the names of all 108 shrines and images they had visited on their circuit, asking the deity to excuse them for their mistakes.
Yes, they are pious. In the modern world piety tends to be looked upon as ineffectual and stupid. Count Keyserling was impressed by the piety he saw in Benares. ‘The atmosphere of devotion which hangs above the river is improbable in its strength,’ he writes, and urges any interested Christian to spend some time on the Ganges: ‘here he would discover what piety means …’
‘What European can still pray fervently? Who knows that concentrated devotion which is sufficient unto itself, which needs no institutions, and eliminates automatically the influence of disturbing surroundings? Hardly one among a million.’ To be pious is to be trustful, to retain a little of the child’s waywardness, which means to be a bit of a free spirit, a lover of the fantastic, grateful, lowly.The trustful lowliness of these pilgrims is their real resource. For as everyone knows, India’s people are heavily stratified into castes, and the castes are set in their ways; and caste means inequality accepted. To be a pilgrim in this city full of priests, learned pandits and brahmins is a deep, but secret, thrill for the lowly. There are no distinctions of rank among pilgrims—all are equal. Their casteless equality almost makes them for a while members of a special caste, the caste of pilgrims, a holy caste. The exhilaration of this equality is an exquisite irony. Because without the lowliness of the pilgrims they who are high could not be high, and they who are high, by serving the low, must experience what it is to be low. Contained in this bond of priest and pilgrim is a paradox: they who are society’s weakest members, adrift, away from home, for a moment glimpse, and in a sense attain, sacred power.
The rite which visibly seals the bond of equality is the shaving of the pilgrim’s head and the ritual bath in the sacred Ganges, in whose waters all distinctions dissolve. Like a baby, born again, shorn of status, the shorn pilgrim symbolically possesses natural blessedness. And like a child, he is, temporarily at least, absolved of his obligations to kin and caste. Freedom from care, restoration to the child’s state, abolition of gender distinctions, equality in lowliness, simplicity of speech and manners, trust—all these concern the inner meaning of pilgrimage, involve the relation of the whole person to other whole persons, and instil an awareness of an unseen order. All comes to rest in one very simple common feeling: the certitude of being at home in one’s own soul.
A seeker asked the great sage of Benares, Anandamayi, if she thought pilgrimage could be a way to find truth.
There are two kinds of pilgrims on life’s journey; the one like a tourist is keen on sight-seeing, wandering from place to place, loving first one thing then another, flitting from one experience to another for the fun of it. The other treads the path that is consistent with man’s true being and which leads to his real home, to Self-knowledge. He lets God speak within him and his thought grow silent. Every step leads homeward into his own heart. So long as one’s real home has not been found there will be suffering; the sense of separateness is the root of misery and is founded on delusion, on the idea of duality. This is why the world is called duniya—‘based on duality’. But home is neither here nor there; it is either nowhere at all or within you. The true pilgrim is he who seeks darshan—that energy which emanates from the holy. To be a pilgrim is to be always ready for the miracle which overtakes you, to glimpse the hem of God’s robe. Not all who come face to face with the holy can actually receive benefit. Many remain, as it were, dry even as they plunge into the waters.
To have Kashi darshan at the Manikarnika Well, centremost point of the holy city, is to be in touch with Ultimate Reality. This is why the dead are cremated by the Manikarnika Well. Every step of the pilgrim is death, every step is birth. The distance beckons, longing awakes. The pilgrim does not seek, he finds. Whoever tries to grasp the goal of pilgrimage with his mind, sees it slip from his grasp.
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This is an extract from Benares Seen from Within.