Vishweshwar — Kashi

The seventh and most famous of the twelve Jyotirlingas is at Kashi — also called Varanasi, also called Benares — on the bank of the Ganga in northern India. The linga here is called Vishweshwar or Vishwanath: “Lord of the Universe.”

Kashi is special not for one story but for many. The Purana gives it its own central place — it is the city Shiva chose for himself.

Why Kashi. Shiva and Parvati, after their wedding, spent some time travelling through the worlds. They saw many cities. None satisfied them as a permanent dwelling. At last Shiva took Parvati to the bank of the Ganga at a particular bend in the river, where the city of Kashi had been built by a king named Divodasa. Shiva looked at the place and said, “Here. This is where I will live.”

The trouble was that Kashi was already inhabited. King Divodasa was ruling it. And he was, the Purana adds with respect, a good king — just, dharmic, beloved of his people. He did not want to leave. He had built the city. He had earned the right to be in it.

Shiva, who never displaces a just king by force, retreated. He went back to Kailash. He waited.

Over time, by various subtle means, Kashi was made open to him. A few sages were sent to slowly bring the king to a different stage of life. Vishnu came as a disguised teacher. The king, in his own time, came to understand that the highest devotion was to make way for the divine, and he gave up his throne and went to the forest. The city became available.

Shiva moved in. He brought Parvati. He brought Nandi. He set up his own household by the river. He has never left since.

The five truths about Kashi. The Purana lists them and they are worth keeping.

1. Anyone who dies in Kashi reaches liberation. Shiva, the tradition says, whispers the Taraka mantra into the ear of every being who dies within the city, and that whisper carries them past the cycle of rebirth. Many devout Hindus, knowing this, choose to spend their last days in Kashi if they can. The Manikarnika ghat on the riverbank, where cremations are performed, is one of the most-burning pyres in continuous use anywhere in the world — there is always a body being prepared.
2. The city is older than time itself. Kashi is, in the Purana’s own claim, not part of the destruction of the world. When the worlds dissolve at the end of an age, Kashi remains. Shiva holds it up on his trident. The current city of Varanasi is one of the continuously-inhabited cities on earth, with archaeological evidence of settlement going back at least three thousand years.
3. The Ganga curves backward at Kashi. The Ganga, which flows mostly southeast to its delta, curves northward at Kashi — flowing the wrong way for that stretch. The unusual geography is read as the river bowing to Shiva.
4. Bathing in the Ganga at Kashi washes away sin. The bathing ghats on the western bank — Dashashwamedh, Manikarnika, Panchganga, Assi — have been used continuously for this purpose for two and a half millennia.
5. The Vishweshwar Jyotirlinga itself is the heart. The temple has been destroyed, by Aurangzeb in 1669 most prominently, and rebuilt. The current temple structure was rebuilt by Ahilyabai Holkar in 1780. The Jyotirlinga inside has, the tradition holds, never been moved — it is the swayambhu form that Shiva placed in the city when he came to live.

A practical note. Many pilgrims to Kashi do the Panchakroshi parikrama — a long walking circumambulation of the city’s sacred limits. It takes five days. It is one of the great pilgrimage walks of India, and it is the proper way to “see” Kashi if one has time.

For a reader, Kashi is the Jyotirlinga of home. Of all the places Shiva could have chosen, this is where he chose. He did not take it by force. He waited until it was offered. And once he had it, he made it the place where any being who reaches it at the right moment is freed.

The next Jyotirlinga is at the source of a great southern river, where a sage was tricked into killing a cow.