Tuesday 9 January 1991. The entry is "Pashupatinath". This is a little distance from Thamel, about 3 miles. I don't know where I hired the Rickshaw but that was how I got there. Mind you I didn't ride as a passenger all the time. It was quite a hilly journey and the driver and I had to get off and push a couple of times. The Rickshaw is much heavier than you might expect. Although the driver is smiling he really wants me to get behind the Rickshaw and push (whilst paying for the privilege!).
I don't know for sure but it could be that this temple is the Jayabageshwori Temple. It might not be but I think it is.
This close up might give someone who knows a clue and they could confirm whether I am right or wrong. I still think I am correct, but what is this? It looks to me like a peacock on a stone pillar. I can't for the life of me find another image on the internet to identify it. It has to be somewhere near Pahupatinath if only because of where the photograph appears on the negative strip.
You see, Pashupatinath is a sacred site. Furthermore the Bagmati river is a tributary to the Ganges and therefore this is a popular place to be cremated. Cremations are going on all the time. It is the way it is. It is a matter of fact and a fact of life.
"It is the ultimate wish of a Hindu to die and be cremated along a riverbank; the holier the river the better for the departed soul. Many Hindu holy shrines are built along famous riverbanks. Banaras, situated along the holy river Ganges, is the holiest of them all, considered so holy that every Hindu wishes to be anointed by the Ganges river's water at his death's door. Indeed, the desire to die on the bank of the Ganges river is so irrepressible that even today there are pious Hindus in India who make provisions to move to Baneras at an old age for the sole purpose of waiting to die on the bank.". So it says in an article by Mr Uday Lama entitled "Funeral Rites of the Hindus and the Buddhists" at Webhealing.com. I do recommend you visit the site.
I like the photograph below. I think it evokes both the spiritual and somehow at the same time the commonplace aspects of the process. Here the corpse has gone and I am assuming that the man having his head shaved is the deceased's eldest son. It is the eldest son who is responsible for observing the last rites. I read somewhere that the head shaving is done because he is held to be a highly "polluted" state for the 11 days mourning period after the cremation. This mourning period may in fact be longer because in this interesting article by Kalyan on Welcome to New Nepal the mourning period could be 13 days.
I cannot say exactly how soon after the cremation this may be taking place. References I have seen say "soon after" the cremation. I expect this has to be the case because there are a great number of cremations every day and it doesn't seem likely that you could have the use of the platform for the whole 11 to 13 day period. The young man sitting on the platform is wearing and playing with his Brahmin string (at least that is what I suppose).
I found this reference to Hindu rituals associated with death on the web at a website called Indian Mirror. There (for balance) you can also read similar short paragraphs concerning the rituals of all the world's major religions. I can't say whether the information is correct but it seems consistent with what I saw.
"When a person dies, a lamp is lit and placed near the dead body. The body is placed in the north-south direction with the head towards the north. The eyes are closed and the feet are tied together. The eldest son is supposed to do the last rites. The body is bathed and is covered with new clothes. Then the members of the family apply oil on the forehead of the deceased. Then the body is decorated with flower garlands and is taken to the cremation ground. Usually the sons and other male members carry the dead. Women are not allowed to go to the ground. They bid farewell to the deceased at the home itself.
At the cremation ground, the son applies ghee at seven important places in the body and also places coins on the forehead. Grains of rice and til are put into the mouth of the body. Wooden logs are placed over the body and ghee is sprinkled all over. The son goes round the body seven times with a pot of water and at last the pot is broken near the feet of the dead. Then as the priest chants the mantra, the son takes the Agni or fire and places it on the heart of the body.
Then on the 3rd or 5th day day after cremation, the relatives visit the crematorium and pour milk over the place , so as to pacify the dead soul. Then a simple lunch is arranged for the members."
The photograph above and the one below rank among my favourite photographs. The size of the Buddha Image is not easy to gauge from the first photograph but the little children (with their cheeky smiles) put it into perspective. The Lonely Planet Guide refers to it thus: "Just outside the [Bachhareshwari] temple entrance right at the end of the western embankment, is a half buried, but quite beautiful, 7th Century Standing Buddha image." Try as I might I cannot find much more information about it anywhere. The Rough Guide to Nepal (on Google books) says "A small eleventh-century (some say fifth-century)Buddha statue, looking rather out of place in this Hindu Lourdes, sticks out of the embankment in front of the next to last building."
The thing that amazes me is that the statue is half buried. There is a good portion of it under the ground. Shouldn't someone excavate it and preserve it or is it doomed to disappear from sight gradually?
Below is a Linga or Lingam in a brick battlement also believed to date from the fifth-century. This brings me on to what I have learned about Pashupatinath's origins. It is one of the most important sites on the Indian Subcontinent for Hindus and particularly for devotees of Shiva. Shiva is also called the Destroyer and in another incarnation is Pashupati, Lord of the Animals.
If anyone does ever read this I would refer you back to my posting about Pushkar in Rajasthan. The origin of the lakes there and the appearance of Vishnu in the form of a deer (was it?) have similarities to the origins of this place.
Again in order to allow oneself to accept what is said as if it were a fact you must have complete faith. This history comes from the www.nepal-kathmandu.com website:
"One of the legend about Lord Shiva is that once Shiva took the form of an antelope being weary of throngs of worshipping demigods and wandered in the Mrigasthali Forest on the Bagmati river's east bank. The Gods were looking for him and finally found him as an antelope and they grabbed him by horn and forced him to come back to his divine form. The broken horn was worshipped as a linga, and it was buried and lost. Centuries later an astonished farmer found him cows showering the milk on the earth. Digging deep in the site, the farmer is believed to uncover the divine linga of Pashupati."
Another version in slightly better English goes as follows:
"According to a legend recorded in local texts, especially the Nepalamahatmya and the Himavatkhanda, the Hindu god Shiva once fled from the other gods in Varanasi to Mrigasthali, the forest on the opposite bank of the Bagmati River from the temple. There, in the form of a gazelle, he slept with his consort Parvati. When the gods discovered him there and tried to bring him back to Varanasi, he leapt across the river to the opposite bank, where one of his horns broke into four pieces. After this, Shiva became manifest as Pashupati (Lord of Animals) in a four-face (chaturmukha) linga."
Let's be clear about this. The linga mentioned above is not this particular linga, I don't think. This one is supposed to be fifth-century and the Pashupatinath Temple now there is said to date from about that time too. However it seems that the first temple on the site could have been 1000 to 1400 years before that.
To be honest, although my photographs are probably unlikely to withstand critical appraisal by a proper photographer, I do like this little sequence. It has something to do with the texture of the photographs and the fact that I felt less constrained to ration use of the film. This allowed pictures of people like this lady washing a metal vessel, perhaps an urn. People in Nepal did not seem to mind having their photographs taken and they didn't throw themselves in front of the camera the way they tended to in India.
Above a view from further downstream. Below ... I am not sure. It is a stone sculpture of a Goddess set flat on the ground and seems to be deliberately filled with of water (there are pipes). It could be Parvati, Shiva's consort. There is a temple, the Guheshwari (several other spellings are also used) Temple which is dedicated to Kali too so it might be Kali.
Once more things get a little difficult. The Rough Guide has it in a nutshell when it says: "The legend behind this temple is one of the all time masterpieces of Hindu surrealism"
Says Spiritual Guides: "When Lord Siva was carrying away the body of Parvati after she burned herself to death, her yoni, the female sexual symbol, which is the female counterpart of a linga, fell here. It has a kalash in a pit that has liquid in it (RG). The temple name comes from guhya (vagina) and ishwari (goddess)." The word "kalash" means vessel and the Rough Guide says the liquid is "odiferous" which is to say it emits an odour.
We'll come to exactly what lingas or lingams may represent a little later.
Above, a landscape view upstream. I think I was walking along the western bank of the Bagmati river in order cross a bridge to the other side. This is because it is not possible to enter the Pashupatinath Temple unless you are a Hindu. Apparently that means unless you are obviously Nepali or from the Indian subcontinent/South Asia you cannot go in. This excludes Tibetans too, it's not just Europeans that are excluded. This picture could have been taken from the bridge.
Although you may not go into the Temple you can see into it from across the river on the eastern bank.
On the eastern bank I met this man and his daughters. He was very friendly indeed and this picture is another good one. If anyone knows who this chap is please let me know.
I was almost hijacked by this very hospitable man who insisted that I meet his wife, pictured here stringing blossom onto a garland. I am not sure what these people were doing. They may have been staying in the area because they had an aged relative in the "hospice" across the river.
This seems to be a sort of graveyard. Not everyone is cremated. Not everyone is a Hindu.
A little earlier I quoted the Rough Guide when it referred to the place as a "Hindu Lourdes". This comparison is wrong, I think. I think people come to Pashupatinath when they are close to death because a little earlier the Rough Guide explains that to die here and be cremated here is to be released from the cycle of rebirths. Perhaps people do come to bathe in the river to purify themselves too and perhaps seek cures for ailments but I don't think that is the main point.
The small statue of Garuda is situated outside the Ram Janaki Mandir. Mandir means Temple and perhaps I should have been using it throughout all of this, never mind. The temple is built at the location of the birth Sita (another name for Janaki). Sita was Ram's wife. Please refer to earlier postings concerning the troubles there were in India while I was there about a Mosque erected on the site of a temple erected on the site of Ram's own birth. Basically if they say that is where Sita was born then who am I to doubt it. All I can say is that it is a jolly good thing that no-one of another faith has decided to build a religious structure on top of the site. I do not seem to have been particularly impressed with the temple because I didn't take a picture.
On the other hand this might be a bell at the Ram Janaki Mandir...
... and this is very probably cow dung patted into cakes being dried out against a wall to be used as fuel. I am not sure the texture is quite captured in the photograph.
So from the eastern side you can observe what is going on around the Pashupatinath Mandir complex. On that side someone being cremated with the male relatives in attendance. At some point the ashes will be collected into a container that must not be placed on the ground and during the mourning period the ashes will be tipped into the river.
On this side are some women doing their laundry in the same water.
These monkeys are on the way up to the Gorakhnath Mandir. That is at the top of the hill on the edge of the forest where Shiva spent time as a stag. The point is the view to the other side into the Pashupatinath Temple.
More monkeys, monkeying around. They could be Hanuman's helpers. They could just be monkeys.
This is just a long shot using the telephoto lens.
One of the comments to this posting referred to quantity as opposed to quality. To be fair to myself the comment was written before there was any text inserted between the photographs. I do however have to accept that I am not exactly sure what the point of this shot is. If you click on it and enlarge it I suppose there may some interesting detail.
There are a few other versions of the photograph below out there, better ones too taken by better photographers. Never mind, I enjoyed trying to take the picture. I hadn't seen any of the others taken before.
What we have here is a line of votive shrines each containing a lingam or linga. A lingam is a representation of Shiva's sex organ. Pashpatinath Mandir, as mentioned before, contains a lingam of Pashupati which is three and a half feet high and has four faces sculpted on it.
So what is a linga or lingam. This explains the legend. Legend of Shiva Linga.:
"Shiva Linga is a wide spread Indian Phallic figure. It consists of a feminine base ‘Yoni’ or ‘vagina’ and a rising masculine portion ‘the Phallus’ or ‘penis.’ The Linga artifacts, dating from the first century BC to the third century AD, are shaped like realistic ‘Phalli’. Thereafter the shape becomes progressively more abstract. By medieval times, its observable portion, rising from the Yoni, forms a round block with domed apex.
Shiva, the lord of erect Phallus (urdhvalinga), is traced to the ithyphallic figure of Indus Valley civilization or to the phallic images found more generally in prehistoric India. The epics and Puranas tell how a great fire appeared from the cosmic waters, and from this flame Linga Shiva emerged to claim supremacy and worship over Brahma and Vishnu, when he was castrated because he seduced sages’ wives in the pine forests of Himalayas. He castrated himself because no one could castrate the Supreme Lord. Thus fallen phallus of the Supreme Lord destroyed all the worlds until it reached the Yoni of Uma/Parvati and cooled down. All procreation of worlds started after the worship of Yoni-Linga was restored and all Gods, including Vishnu and Brahma accepted supremacy of Lord Shiva."
So that's explained that. Does that make everything clear? I read this at lotussculpture.com:
"Shiva saw not sense in the transitory pleasures of life, so he rejected samsara, smeared his body with ash, closed his eyes and performed austerities.
Shiva's tapas generated so much heat that his body transformed into a pillar of fire - a blazing lingam that threatened to destroy the whole world. The gods did not know how to control Shiva's fire.
Suddenly there appeared a yoni - the divine vessel of the mother-goddess. It caught the fiery lingam and contained its heat, thus saving the cosmos from untimely destruction."
That probably hasn't made it any clearer, has it? Tapas is the performing of austerities, by the way.
Above, what I presume to be a party of pilgrims exiting the temple and making their way down to the bathing ghats.
The water at this time was not particularly deep nor very strong in its flow. The monkeys from the nearby forest which Shiva found to be an excellent place for a holiday when he was a stag, seemed to have had no difficulty picking their way across. Mind you, this is a very poor photograph.
Bathing in the holy waters of the Bagmati river is what they come for. adventureitbtravel says:
"Legend also mentions that the Pandavas after the great Mahabharat battle were told that only by sighting Shiva would they be absolved of their sins and it was at this very spot that they saw the Lord. Hence, this most sacred abode of Shiva, who is the God of the gods – Mahadeva – merits a visit by all Hindus, at least once in a lifetime, to be truly blessed and cleansed. It is belived that pilgrimage to the four dhams like Dwarika, Kedar, Rameshwor, and Jaganath of India become meaningful only after a final darshan of Pashupati and by a taking a holy dip in the Bagmati River and conducting a proper puja and circling the 525 Shiva Lingas in the temple premise will free a person from the cycle of births and rebirths."
Below are a few long distance shots of the Pashupatinath Mandir.
"It is a square, two-tiered pagoda temple built on a single-tier plinth, and it stands 23.6 meters above the ground. Richly ornamented gilt and silver-plated doors are on all sides.
On both sides of each door are niches of various sizes containing gold-painted images of guardian deities. Inside the temple itself is a narrow ambulatory around the sanctum. The sanctum contains a one-meter high linga with four faces (chaturmukha) representing Pashupati, as well as images of Vishnu, Surya, Devi and Ganesh."
At least that is what they say at sacred destinations The doors do look quite good even from a distance. It is a shame that you can't go in unless you are a Hindu.
You know, it is hard to say whether some of the people preparing to take a dip here are elderly or ill but some of them certainly are very thin.
This photo of a roof strut may have been taken on my return to the western bank. I think it is part of the Bachhareshwari Mandir dedicated to Parvati. It's all very Tantric. The little Buddha stands just outside.
This is as close as I could get to entering the temple. A huge figure of Nandi, Shiva's bull, is just inside the door. A symbol of fertility and I don't need to elaborate, do I? OK, just in case you can't see from a distance, here's a close up.
On the way back "home" I took a snap of a some men playing what seemed to be a popular board game. I don't know how the game was played. I think there were dice involved.
