Picto Diary - 09 December 2019 (2) - Varanasi, Mother Ganga

Above: BHU Siva Temple. Pune family and us. Banares Hindu University. Varanasi, India. 09 December 2019.

Pune family wants a joint photo. We oblige.

BHU Siva temple is busiest, we are told by guide Shaly, just before final exams!

Banaras Hindu University ( BHU), formerly Central Hindu College, is a public central university located in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. It was established in 1916 by Madan Mohan Malaviya, with co-operation from Annie Besant. With over 30,000 students residing in campus, it is the largest residential university in Asia.

BHU is organized into 6 institutes and 14 faculties (streams) and about 140 departments. As of 2017, the total student enrolment at the university is 27,359 coming from 48 countries.

We visited the inner sanctum of BHU Shiva temple. The temple area was very busy... crowded, with students and ordinary citizens alike.

Shiva, the god to whom this temple is dedicated, is one of the three principal gods of Hinduism (the others, Brahma and Vishnu).

Hinduism is a major world religion originating on the Indian subcontinent and comprising several and varied systems of philosophy, belief, and ritual.

Shiva Temples are specially designed places of worship where the presiding deity is Lord Shiva in the form of a Linga. A linga (or lingum) is a symbol of divine generative energy, a phallus or phallic object, worshiped as a symbol of Shiva.. A Shiva temple is the only Hindu temple where the god is not represented in a personified manifestation.

Above: Image Lingum

Inside the temple we were not allowed to take an image of the lignum. There were many worshipers lined up to worship at the lignum. Seated beside the lingam was a Shiva priest who would accept various offerings from the worshipers. Worshipers poured water from the Ganges over the lignum, garnished the ligum with flowers, honey, spices, and spent a moment in silent contemplation and prayer. They would be blessed by the priest who would chant a prayer and put a mark on their foreheads, the functional equivalent of an "I voted" sticker worn by us on election day. But, not "I voted," rather, "I prayed at the Siva temple today! Shaly, our guide, escorted, the back way, around the line, to receive a blessing from the priest, who made various marks on our foreheads.

Hinduism is very complex, so, I know my overly simplistic explanations won't do it proper justice. But, simplistically, there are many Hindu gods that exist beneath the holy trinity of gods. Each god may have a temple where people can worship that god. There are, for example, Shiva worshipers, Vishnu worshipers and so on. There are temples dedicated to Lord Brahma, the third member of the Hindu trinity, but they are very few.

What strikes, in this visit, and past visits to Hindu temples, is the seemingly extraordinary level of devotion of adherents coming from all walks of life. Indians are an intensely spiritual people whatever their income levels or station in life. The upscale, secular looking Indian person, you might meet... he/she may be a business owner, a lawyer, a bank manager, a government bureaucrat, that is to say, a person living in what we westerners would consider to be an upscale style... nice home, expensive car etc. is most likely devoted to practicing his/her religion.

Four or five years ago we visited the The Kamakhya Temple in Guwahait, Assam. The temple is dedicated to the mother goddess Kamkhya. As we walked through the temple we encountered a family, dressed to the nines... the father and his two sons wore western suits and ties. Mom and a daughter wore "Sunday best," colorful silk saris. From behind, we observed them watching a priest slaughter a goat, part of the ritual of that particular strain of Hinduism. Indians have a deep devotion to their complex, multivariate religious traditions and rituals. Modernism does not seem to have eroded those traditions and obligations as it has done in the "Christian" west.

Its not just Hinduism. Indian Muslims grow in devotion just as their fellow Islamic adherents do throughout the world. Most of the twenty five million Christians in India are devout. In a sense, India is more of a Christian country than is France. Though "Christian" France has a population of seventy million, and though most French people would declare themselves nominally Catholic, few of them go to church or otherwise practice their religion.

Above: Near Dashashwahmed Ghat. Site of Ganges pilgrimage. Varanasi, India.

Drums takes care of Granny amongst teeming masses as we approach the banks of the holy Ganges River. It was supposed to be the other way around!

All Hindus are expected to make at least one visit in a lifetime to Varanasi and the holy banks of the Ganges River.

The River Ganges, running for more than 1500 miles across some of the most densely populated areas in Asia, is perhaps the most religiously significant body of water in the world. The river is considered to be sacred and spiritually pure, though it is also one of the most polluted rivers on earth.

Originating from the Gangotri Glacier, high in the Himalayas of northern India, the river flows southeast through India, into Bangladesh, before spilling into the Bay of Bengal. It is the primary source of water—used for drinking, bathing, and irrigating crops—for more than 400 million people.
For Hindus, the River Ganges is sacred and revered, embodied by the goddess Ganga. Though iconography of the goddess varies, she is most often depicted as a beautiful woman with a white crown, riding the Marka (a creature with the head of a crocodile and the tail of a dolphin). She features either two or four arms, holding a variety objects ranging from water lilies to a water pot to a rosary. As a nod t the goddess, the Ganges is often referred to as Ma Ganga, or Mother Ganga.

Because of the purifying nature of the river, Hindus believe that any rituals performed at the banks of the Ganges or in its water will bring fortune and wash away impurity. The waters of the Ganges are called Gangaajal, meaning literally "water of the Ganges".

The Puranas—ancient Hindu scriptures—say that the sight, the name, and the touch of the Ganges cleanses one of all sins and that taking a dip in the sacred river bestows heavenly blessings.

The "numbers" of Varanasi - and India - are staggering. Outside of China, India "happens" on a scale unimaginable in the West, which seems too crowded as it is. We know that India's population approaches 1.2 billion souls. Over eight hundred million of those Indians are Hindus and almost all of them will come here to Varanasi on pilgrimage at least once in their life. So, as Drums guides Granny through the teeming throngs, amidst the cacophony of car and motorcycle horns and wandering cows, it seems hard to imagine that this wave of humanity descends on this location three hundred sixty five days a year.

I like to use the Facebook "location check" feature to document my visits. The location check feature shows how many people have clicked a Facebook location check for a given location. So, lets review some representative Facebook location check numbers. Wasatch Bagel has a few hundred hits. Yellowstone National Park approaches a million hits. Dashashwahmed Ghat, in Varanasi, has over five million Facebook location check hits. Aside: Internalize this figure if you want to get a sense of the growing power of social media. Young Mark Zuckerberg might have been fascinated with his technological tool to bring people together. However as Facebook grows in power and influence one wonders if Zuckerberg has grown in wisdom to fully understand the power of what he has wrought.

Above: Ritual Ganges Ceremony. Dashashwahmed Ghat. Varanasi, India. 09 December 2019.

The ceremony begins at 8:00 PM and lasts almost an hour. It involves various rituals and incantations. The principle audience is people in boats afloat in the Ganges River.

Varanasi is a hard city to visit. But, because of its spiritual centrality in an intensely spiritual nation, a full appreciation of India cannot be attained without a visit to Varanasi.

I first visited Varanasi (also called Banares) in 1963 when I was eighteen years old. So much of my memory of those years is buried away in aging grey matter, but, my recollection of being in a boat on the Ganges with my parents and brother observing the rituals and cremations on the ghats remains vivid.

Above: Observing Ritual Ganges Ceremony. Dashashwahmed Ghat. Varanasi, India. 09 December 2019.

Mohan/Praveen as usual, taking car of us by arranging for elevated seats.

Above: The Cremation Ghats. Manikarnika Ghat. Varanasi, India. 09 December 2019.

Varanasi, a maze-like city on the shore of the river Ganges, is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, and the holiest of the seven sacred cities in Hinduism. It’s believed that if one is cremated in Varanasi, and their ashes are released into the sacred and purifying water of the Ganges, their reincarnation cycle will end and they will reach Nirvana.

Every day at Manikarnika Ghat, the largest and most auspicious cremation ghat, around 100 bodies are cremated on wooden pyres along the river’s edge. The ghat (steps leading down to the holy water) operates around the clock, every day of the year. The eternal flame that feeds the fires is said to have been burning for centuries now.

Throughout the day, every day, there are funeral processions bringing loved ones to the ghats. An unfortunate fact of people wanting to die in Varanasi is that there are crowded boarding homes throughout the city full of elderly people, many of whom spend their days begging on the streets to save the money needed for funeral costs. For some Westerners, this may sound like a grim and macabre place, but Varanasi is full of life and celebrations. To die and to be cremated in Varanasi is to have the chance to achieve Moksha (the end of the rebirth cycle), a great honor and the ultimate goal of earthly existence. The city is full of temples, religious ceremonies, burning incense, and offerings to Shiva, and strangers are welcomed to watch the cremation rituals and rejoice with the families that their loved one has entered Nirvana. Watching the sunset on a boat with the pyres burning in the foreground is to experience a different way of thinking about life and death.

(Hat tip: Atlas Obscura)