Kedarnath — High in the Snow

The fifth Jyotirlinga is Kedarnath, high in the Garhwal Himalayas, in what is now the state of Uttarakhand. At about 3,500 metres elevation, beside the Mandakini river, it is one of the highest of the twelve.

The story behind it begins after the great war of the Mahabharata.

The Pandavas — Yudhishthira and his brothers — had won the war at Kurukshetra. They had killed their cousins. They had killed teachers, elders, kin. The war was over. They had a kingdom. And they had a burden — the sin of having killed so many of their own people.

They wanted to seek Shiva’s blessing to be cleansed.

But Shiva, knowing they were coming, did not want to see them. The brothers had committed real wrongs in the war (we read about them in the Mahabharata guide — the lie about Drona, the foul blow against Duryodhana). Shiva felt the cleansing should not be too easy. He decided to make them work for it.

He took the form of a great bull and fled into the Himalayas.

The Pandavas followed. They tracked him. They climbed high into the mountains. Through forests, through snow, across rivers. They came at last to the Kedar valley, where they saw the bull.

The bull, seeing them, tried to disappear into the ground.

Bhima — the strong brother — leapt forward and grabbed the bull as it went down. He caught it by the hump. The bull’s body went into the earth, but the hump remained above the ground. The other parts of the bull’s body, the Purana says, came up in different places in the Himalayas — the head at Rudranath, the arms at Tunganath, the face at Madhmaheshwar, the navel at Mallikarjuna in Andhra (a southern echo), the matted hair at Kalpeshwar. Together with Kedarnath, these five high-Himalayan sites are the Panch Kedar — the “five Kedars” — and many pilgrims attempt to visit all of them.

At Kedarnath itself, the hump of the bull remained as the linga — a slightly rough, conical shape that you can see in the inner sanctum of the temple today. It is not a smooth carved linga. It is the actual hump of the bull Shiva took the form of.

After the bull’s body was caught, Shiva at last forgave the Pandavas and gave them his blessing. The brothers, cleansed, were able to continue their reign and, eventually, to make their great northern journey we read about in the last book of the Mahabharata.

A few practical notes for any pilgrim:

• The temple is closed in winter. From November to April, the Kedarnath valley is snowed in. The deity is moved down to Ukhimath for the winter and brought back when the snows clear in late spring.
• The 2013 floods. In June 2013 a glacial-lake outburst caused catastrophic floods at Kedarnath; thousands died in the valley. The temple itself, remarkably, survived — the building was struck by a great boulder that diverted the flow around it. The story is still spoken of in the region.
• The climb. Kedarnath is reached by a 16-kilometre uphill walk from Gaurikund. It is a real walk. Pilgrims have done it on foot, on horseback, in palanquins. Helicopters now serve those who cannot walk.

For a reader, Kedarnath is the Jyotirlinga of the one who hides from those he forgives. The Pandavas had to climb the Himalayas, follow the bull, catch its hump. The cleansing was not handed to them. Shiva wanted them to put in the work first. Many devotees who climb those sixteen kilometres on foot, even today, feel the journey itself is the larger part of the blessing.

The next Jyotirlinga is back in the Western Ghats — at a forest where Shiva ended another demon.