Banaras

Banaras, Varanasi, Kashi: These are names used in India to refer to the pilgrimage city that is arguably the heart of Hindu South Asia. Located in the middle Ganga Valley between the Varana and Asi rivers in India's eastern Uttar Pradesh, it is one of the world's oldest continually inhabited cities. Kashi (“luminous”) is its oldest moniker, first associated with the kingdom of the same name 3,000 years ago. Varanasi is another designation, found in the Buddhist Jataka tales and in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, and indeed today, Varanasi is the city's revived, postindependence designation, which combines the names of the two rivers on either side of it. The city was identified in the Pali language as Baranasi, from which emerged the corrupt form of the name, “Banaras,” by which the city is still widely known. According to the 2001 census, the human population of Banaras is 1.5 million.

Kashi is a tirtha, a Sanskrit word meaning “ford.” In earlier times, this was a crossing where the great Northern Road met the Ganga River. More significantly for adherents, however, Varanasi is a crossing between the worlds of gods and humans. Kashi is not alone as such a tirtha on the Indian subcontinent, but it is arguably the most “supercharged.” Activities performed in this place are weightier in their significance and more efficacious in their fruits. As such, Varanasi has long been a destination for pilgrims where liberation or enlightenment is especially achieved. As the Sanskrit proverb famously proclaims, Kashyam marnam mukti—“Death in Kashi is liberation.” Kashi is the god Shiva's chosen city. Other city monikers attest to Shiva's bond: Kashi is Avimukta (“never forsaken”), even at the time of the cosmic dissolution. One Hindi saying speaks of Shiva saturating the land: Kashi ke kan-kara Shiva Shankara—“Even the stones of Kashi are Shiva.” Today, there are literally thousands of Kashi temples and lingams (“aniconic phallic stones”) attesting to his patronage.

The area situated between the Varana River in the north and the Asi River in the south is Kashi's locus. There are some 84 ghats (“stone stairways”) lining the western banks of the Ganga, aligned south to north like buttons on the placket of a dress shirt. This river is unique here in that it is the only place that flows south to north. The three-mile journey from the southernmost ghat (Assi) to the northernmost (Adi Keshava) takes about an hour to travel by boat. From the safe lookout of the boat, one can see bathers taking a “holy dip” in the river, making offering to the goddess Ganga, and greeting Surya, the sun god, in the cool morning with a bowl of marigolds, rose petals, candles, and prayers. One can also see the two burning ghats known as Harishchandra and Manikarnika, where thousands of Hindus come from around the world for cremation.

As a spiritual crossing, we may understand Banaras as a series of five concentric circles, spanning outward like ripples on a pond from the center at the Jnanavapi, the “well of wisdom,” near the Visvesvara (“Lord of All”) Temple on the Ganga, to a point known as Delhi Vinayaka 17.6 kilometers west. All pilgrims begin and end their various journeys here at the well, believed to be the site of the first primordial water on earth. Each of these five circles corresponds to the five gross elements, five parts of the human body, five divine attributes, and five chakras.

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