Varanasi

Delhi is endlessly fascinating; squalor and splendor are inseparable companions. But there is another place, a night’s train ride to the east, that is fascinating beyond anything I’d ever imagined.

The city of Varanasi as seen from the river in the golden light of dawn is the most wondrous, spiritual, revolting, inspiring, filthy, and above all the most sensuous experience I’ve ever encountered. It is a place of ageless temples and endless prayers. Its shrines are heaped with exotic flowers, the air filled with billowing clouds of sweet incense and the overwhelmingly pungent smell of humanity. The ancient stonewalls echo the constant chanting of prayers and ringing of bells. Each morning from the unceasing earthly drama of life and death in this warren of impossibly old and narrow lanes, long flights of steps or “ghats” lead thousands of worshipers down to the river to pray and to bathe in the holy waters of the Ganges. It is like the great migrations on the plains of the Serengeti and quite probably as old.

Varanasi, or Benares; this place that Hindus call Kashi, the City of Light,

this place of endless temples and ashrams, this place of transcendence and liberation, as Mark Twain once observed “is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend”. Varanasi is said to be the earthly city of Shiva, founded at the dawn of creation. To die here, and to have your earthly remains cremated on one of the many funeral pyres and your ashes scattered on the Mother Ganges is said to bring an end to the otherwise endless cycle of suffering and life.

But this is also a place of renewal, a pilgrimage of rebirth. Bathing in the Ganges washes away a lifetime of sins. This city is a passage, a threshold, a place of crossing over, the river Styx of the Eastern philosophy. It is appropriate I suppose that in the Hindu religion the place of the dead is also the place of being reborn. They are the same.

There are other cities that, like this one, have existed since long before the tenth century BC, but their reason for being seems to have evolved over the millennia; changed as societies changed, agriculture developed and economies grew, populations expanded and religious and cultural beliefs evolved. Here, the flames of the funeral pyres crackle day and night as they have for thousands of years, the old and the frail still journey here to live out their final days, thousands of candles still light the stone steps and float endless prayers each evening down the sacred river. Naked, ash covered Sadhus still murmur prayers and whisper visions of the future, incense still burns day and night in the countless temples, and thousands come every day to bathe and be reborn in the sacred waters. It truly seems that nothing has changed here for thousands of years.

I can’t quite escape the feeling of being a spectator here; a voyeur. One must be born to the Hindu faith. The Hindu tradition seems to have imagined and re-imagined god in a thousand different ways. It is adept at discovering the divine everywhere and integrating that spirituality into every aspect of everyday life. It is a tradition that understands life and death as an integrated whole. Life and death exist here, together.

We hired a small, wooden boat late one evening and rowed our way out onto the Ganges. We lit four candles wrapped in lotus leaves and surrounded by marigolds and incense, whispered a prayer, and floated them down this holy river; one for Dad, one for Mom, one for Noelle, and one for the rest of us. Life and death exist here, together.