India is a vast country, peopled with diverse
and ancient civilizations, and its religious geography is highly complex. To
grasp the complexity of the situation, it is important to consider two
aspects of Indian life: its characteristic of being an ethnic and cultural
mosaic, and the ancient rural foundations of many of its religious and
cultural patterns.
The process of racial and cultural mixture that began in India 5000-10,000
years ago has been continuous into historical times. Although isolated from
the rest of Asia by oceans on three sides and impassable mountain ranges to
the north, India has experienced a near-constant influx of differing
cultural influences, coming by way of the northwest and the southeast
(including extremely ancient migrations from the drowned continent of
Sundaland, which had been in the general region of contemporary Indonesia).
India in the third millennium BC was inhabited in the tropical south by a
people called the Dravidians, in the central and northeastern regions by
aboriginal hill and forest tribes, and in the northwest by the highly
advanced Indus Valley civilization known as the Harappan culture.
The religion of the city-building Harappan peoples seems to have been a
fertility cult centered on the Great Mother, while the rural Dravidians and
the various tribal cultures worshipped a wide variety of nature spirits,
both benevolent and demonic. Anthropological theories of the 1800’s and
1900’s (deriving from a biased Eurocentric outlook) stated that around 1800
BC a nomadic people, called the Aryans, entered northwest India from the
steppes of Central Asia. A large amount of archaeological, scriptural,
linguistic and mythological research conducted during the past few decades
has now shown this earlier theory to be inaccurate. While it is certainly
true that migrations of different cultural groups did enter India from the
northwest during ancient times, it is now abundantly clear that a highly
sophisticated culture had already been thriving in the Indus valley region
long before the supposed entrance of the hypothetical invaders from Central
Asia.
What these archaic people already living in northwest India called
themselves we do not know, but the term ‘Aryans’ is no longer considered
suitable for them. Current scholarship has accepted the term ‘Harappan’
following the naming of one that culture’s great cities as Harappa in the
early 1900’s. Scholars have also significantly pushed back the date of the
Harappan culture to approximately 3000 BC (or earlier), rendering it
simultaneous with the oldest cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Harappan
culture possessed a sophisticated religion called Vedism (again, we do not
know what the people themselves called their religion), which worshipped
powerful gods such as Indra, the god of rain; Agni, the god of fire; and
Surya, the sun god. During the millennia of the Harappan culture the
religion of Vedism developed an increasingly complex form with esoteric
rituals and magical chants, and these were later codified in the sacred
Hindu texts known as the Vedas.
The religion identified as Hinduism did not actually appear until the
centuries preceding the Christian era. Hinduism is an aggregation of the
religious beliefs and practices deriving from the Vedism and fertility cults
of the Harappan peoples, and the animistic, shamanistic, and devotional
practices of the widely varying, rural-dwelling indigenous cultures of
south, central, and eastern India. Adding to and further enriching this mix
were the concurrently developing religions of Jainism and Buddhism. Indian
culture has thus developed a fascinating collection of religious beliefs and
customs that range from simple animistic worship of nature spirits in a
common rock or tree to the complex, highly codified Brahmanic rituals
practiced at the great pilgrimage centers.
In India we find the oldest continually operating pilgrimage tradition in
the entire world. The practice of pilgrimage in India is so deeply embedded
in the cultural psyche and the number of pilgrimage sites is so large that
the entire subcontinent may actually be regarded as one grand and continuous
sacred space. Our earliest sources of information on the matter of sacred
space come from the Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda. While the act of
pilgrimage is not specifically discussed in these texts, mountain valleys
and the confluences of rivers are spoken of with reverence, and the merits
of travel to such places are mentioned. Following the Vedic period the
practice of pilgrimage seems to have become quite common, as is evident from
sections of the great epic, the Mahabharata (350 BC), which mentions more
than 300 sacred sites spanning the sub-continent. It is probable that most
of these sites had long been considered sacred by the aboriginal inhabitants
of the region and only later came to be listed in the Mahabharata as
different regions came under the influence of Hinduism. By the time of the
writing of the Puranas (sacred texts of the 2nd to 15th centuries AD), the
number of sacred sites listed had grown considerably, reflecting both the
ongoing assimilation of aboriginal sacred places and the increased
importance of pilgrimage as a customary religious practice.
Hindus call the sacred places to which they travel tirthas, and the action
of going on a pilgrimage tirtha-yatra. The Sanskrit word tirtha means river
ford, steps to a river, or place of pilgrimage. In Vedic times the word may
have concerned only those sacred places associated with water, but by the
time of the Mahabharata, tirtha had come to denote any holy place, be it a
lake, mountain, forest, or cave. Tirthas are more than physical locations,
however. Devout Hindus believe them to be spiritual fords, the meeting place
of heaven and earth, the locations where one crosses over the river of
samsara (the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth) to reach the distant
shore of liberation. Writing in Banaras: City of Light, Diana Eck speaks of
tirthas as being
...primarily associated with the great acts and appearances of the gods and
heroes of Indian myth and legend. As a threshold between heaven and earth,
the tirtha is not only a place for the upward crossings of people's prayers
and rites, it is also a place for the downward crossings of the gods. These
divine descents are the well-known avataras of the Hindu tradition. Indeed,
the words tirtha and avatara come from related verbal roots....one might say
that the avataras descend, opening the doors of the tirthas so that men and
women may ascend in their rites and prayers.
Although tirthas are primarily those places where a god or goddess or some
spirit has dwelled or is still dwelling, there is another reason certain
places may be accorded sanctity in the Hindu tradition. Saintly individuals
who lead exemplary lives imbue their environments with the holiness that
accrues from their spiritual practices. Devotees who had visited the saints
while they were alive often continued to seek inspiration in the same places
after the saint had died. Over many centuries, folk tales about the lives of
the saints attained legendary proportions, attracting pilgrims from great
distances. If miracles were reported at the shrine, the saint's legends
would spread across the entire country, attracting still more pilgrims.
In India all temples are considered sacred places and thus religious
visitors to the temples may be described as pilgrims. For the purpose of our
discussion, however, for a temple to be considered a true pilgrimage shrine
it must have a long-term history of attracting pilgrims from a geographic
area beyond its immediate region. Given this condition, the number of
pilgrimage sites in India is still extremely large; one text, the Kalyana
Tirthanka, describes 1,820 shrines of importance.
Based on years of research and pilgrimage in India, I have chosen a smaller
number of shrines, approximately 150, as the primary pilgrimage sites. Those
sites (whose locations are shown in the map section of www.sacredsites.com)
include the Four Dhams or Divine Abodes at the four compass points; the
Seven Sacred Cities and their primary temples; the Jyotir, Svayambhu, and
Pancha Bhutha Linga temples; the Shakti Pitha temples; the Kumbha Mela
sites; major Vaishnava sites; the Nava Graha Sthalas (temples of the
planets); the seven sacred rivers (Ganga, Yamuna, Saraswati, Godavari,
Narmada, Kaveri, and the Sarayu); the four Mutts of Sri Adi Sankaracharya (Badrinath/Joshimath,
Puri, Sringeri, and Dwarka); the Arupadaividu (the six sacred places of Lord
Kumara); and certain other shrines that do not fit into any of the
categories listed here.
Photographs and information concerning many of these holy places are given
in the Explore the Sacred Sites section of www.sacredsites.com. For
additional information, consult the writings of Molly Aitken, Surinder
Bhardwaj, J.H. Dave, David Haberman, Roger Housden, B.C. Law, B. P. Mazumdar,
V. Meena, Alan Morinis, T.S. Sastry, D.C. Sircar, and Srikant listed in the
bibliographies of www.sacredsites.com.
In discussing pilgrimage places in the Hindu tradition, it is important to
say a few words about the number and diversity of deities in Hinduism and
about the iconic and aniconic forms in which those deities are found. The
personification of the mysterious forces of the universe into the
anthropomorphic deities of the Hindu tradition involves both a convergence
into certain supreme deities (the main three deities today are the gods
Shiva and Vishnu and the goddess Shakti) and a splintering into a myriad of
lesser deities. Certain writers call this polytheism, but the term is
inaccurate in this case. No Hindu seriously believes in the multiplicity of
gods but rather is aware that each of the many gods and goddesses are merely
aspects of the One God (who is also the god of all other religions). The
majority of Hindus ally their beliefs with one or the other of the three
cults, worshipping Shiva, Vishnu, or Shakti as the highest principle. In
doing so they do not deny the existence of the other two deities but regard
them as complementary, though minor, expressions of the same divine power.
Hinduism is thus, in its essence, monotheistic; a Hindu's worship of a
particular personal deity is always done with the awareness that all deities
are simply representations of one unconditioned, transcendental, supreme
existence, known as Brahman. Each of the greater and lesser deities is
understood as a sort of window or lens through which the whole of reality
may be glimpsed.
The primary intention of a pilgrim's visit to a holy site is to receive the
darshan of the deity resident in the temple's inner sanctum or open-air
shrine. The word darshan, difficult to translate into English, generally
means the pilgrim having a sight and/or experience of the deity. Hindus
believe that the deity is actually manifest in the image, statue, or icon of
the temple. To receive the darshan of the deity is to have a spiritual
communion with it. The image of the deity may either be an iconic, or
representational, image that bears some resemblance to its mythic subject;
or an aniconic form that merely symbolizes the deity.
In a large number of celebrated shrines in India there are no beautiful
statues of the gods and goddesses to be found, rather only aniconic blocks
of stone or stumps of wood. This tradition of aniconic images derives from
the rural folk religions of ancient India and bears witness to the great
antiquity of the sanctity of certain places. The shrine in its initial phase
may have been only a crude little hut covering a stone that both represented
and contained some spirit of the natural world. As millennia passed and the
small rural village slowly grew into a larger and larger town, both the
myths concerning the stone and the shrine surrounding that stone were richly
elaborated. It is therefore important when studying or visiting the
monumental pilgrimage shrines of India to remember that many of them had
their architectural genesis in the simple nature sanctuaries of the archaic
rural folk.
The myths and legends of these sacred places have their roots in the ancient
peoples' felt experience of the characteristics or qualities of the natural
place. The various mythological personality characteristics of the deities
in pilgrimage shrines may therefore be interpreted as metaphors for the way
in which the spirit of the place has affected human beings. This spirit of
place is not just a fanciful story, it is an actuality, an energy, a
presence that touches human beings and affects them profoundly. Why are
certain places said to be the dwelling place of a feminine deity and others
the dwelling place of a masculine deity? Is it not perhaps because some
ancient rural people, deeply in touch with the earth as a living entity,
sensed either a feminine or masculine presence at a place and spoke about it
in anthropomorphic terms? These terms were then given representational form
by the artistic rendering of a statue or image.
Looking deeper into this matter, let us then ask why there are not simply
male and female deities but, more precisely, why there are different kinds
of male and female deities? Conventional explanations refer to such things
as the fanciful human imagination, the rich and varied proto-religious
inputs into formative Hinduism, and prehistoric deification of charismatic
human figures into legendary archetypes. While all these things did occur,
they are not the only explanations. The central premise of my theory is that
the different personality characteristics of the deities derive from the
various characteristics of the Earth spirit as it manifests at different
geographical locations. To understand the quality, character or power of a
specific place, we need only study the nature of the deity enshrined there.
Encoded in the deity's mythological form is a clear message indicating how a
particular sacred site may affect us.
Martin Gray is an
anthropologist and photographer specializing in the study of sacred sites
and pilgrimage traditions around the world. Traveling as a pilgrim, Martin
spent twenty years, visiting and photographing over 1000 sacred sites in
eighty countries. Web Site
