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Kashi is the city of Shiva. In Hindu culture, there are different kinds of sacredness- auspicious, and holy. The former summarizes everything good and valuable while the latter questions the regular distinctions between good and bad, valuable and valueless. This latter type of sacredness is Shiva. On the oldness of Banaras, Mark Twain highlights, “Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!”
When lord Shiva married Parvati, scanning the entire earth from the high Himalayas to find a suitable home for the two of them, he chose the city of Varanasi.
Lewis Mumford, in The City in History, highlights this particular city as “energy converted into culture.” There is hardly any city place in the world that could be compared with the impressive beauty of Varanasi. Kashi in a religious or ritual sense is linked with the sciences of Mandala, a ritual circle of Tantric tradition, symbolic of focusing attention and represented as a tool for spiritual guidance establishing sacred places. Kashi with all its divine inhabitants is one such mandala. All the sages and gods have been situated within this sacred circle of Shiva. Kashi has been the city of many gods since time immemorial and a habitation of various important deities like Vishnu, and Bharama, Ganesha and the ganas, kala bhairava, goddesses like Vishalakshi, the “wide-eyed” goddess, Annapurna Bhavani, Durga, Sankata devi, shala devi. The goddesses have a significant history in Varanasi and during the “Nine Nights” of the Goddess (Navratra), these goddesses were celebrated twice. In the Kashi Khanda, fifty-six Ganeshas are listed at the eight-directional points in seven coordinated circles with Dhundhiraja near the Vishvanath temple. These are the fifty-six Vinayakas. How Kashi became the city of so many gods is answered in a long myth cycle in Kashi Khanda.
No other city is as famous as Banaras for Death, more than the temples, the magnificent ghats more than her silk. In Kashi, life is lived in the everlasting presence of death. For death, it is believed in the Kashi, as transformed. As the saying goes “Death in kashi is liberation”- kashyam maranam muktih.
It is believed that death, which is under the authority of Yama, is free from the fear of him in Kashi, as for Yama the entry is restricted within the boundaries of Kashi. The glory of dying in Kashi is well known to those who have been there to die. There are thousands of verses highlighting the honor of dying within the limits of this city. One of them goes, ‘Even the yogis practicing yoga with minds controlled are not liberated in one lifetime but they are liberated in Kashi simply by dying.’
When one dies in Kashi, they believe it is the Shiva himself as a guru who whispers in one’s ear the mantra of crossing. In Hindu tradition, it is generally a guru who passes Mantras to qualified students as the means of wisdom. These gurus mediate the type of wisdom that cannot be learned through any of the written text but can be conveyed from generation to generation only through personal instructions. Here in Kashi, Shiva himself is a guru.
It is said that when the great saint Ramakrishna came to Kashi he went into a deep stupor of meditation as he passed by the Manikarnika by boat later which describes what he saw in his moments of vision: The goddess Annapurna held in her lap the body of dead while shiva whispering mantras in dead’s man ear.
Though Sureshvra, author of the Kashi Moksha Nirnaya, and Narayana Bhatta, compiler of the Tristhalisetu, have taken objections in their discussion to the liberation in Kashi, which mentions it is not the physical act of dying making liberation or the word of mantra but the wisdom of mantra one receives at the time of death. Which further goes on by a quote in the Kashi Khanda “Creatures are released by the knowledge of Bhraman and never in any other way.”
There is a special spirit among citizens who call themselves Banarasis, whether they are rickshaw pullers or merchants in the market. The place holds an art of living, with a touch of passion and carefree. It is a delight in culture, the drunkness of Holi the glitter of Diwali, famous for the art of living and dying. Also recognized with the title of City of Dharma with the belief it brings all rites to fulfilment a place with the power to augment any ritual result. To a visitor and indeed to most Hindus Kashi may appear as disordered, crowded and a place filled with temples but to those whose vision is taped in the majesty of Kashi see the city as a mandala, structured universe with its divine and own constellations of deities which is incorporated in the sacred geography of the city.
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