Manikarnika
मणिकर्णिका maṇikarṇikāThe principal and most sacred cremation ground of Kashi, on the Ganga; its name means 'jewel of the earring', and the tradition reads it as the navel where creation and dissolution meet.
Where this term appears
- Eighty-five titles and no text: the Saura tantras and how a tradition disappears Lineages
Saura was the tradition of the Sun: a priesthood, a canon of scriptures, and royal devotees, recognised as a peer by its rivals. A Śaiva text preserved in a…
- A city made of gods Treatise
…e exact theological twin of the burning ground we are walking toward. Manikarnika promises a good death, the death that liberates.
- A walk down the ghats Treatise
…nd is one of two places in Kashi that claim the title of the original Manikarnika, a reminder that in this city the holiest names are contested by more than one stone.
- The ascetics of the burning ground Treatise
Why the burning ground Set that beside everything the treatise has said, and the burning ground becomes the perfect and the necessary school. Everything the Aghori's path requires converges at Manikarnika.
- The body of the city Treatise
Manikarnika, at the middle, is the navel, the point from which a world is spun out and into which it is drawn back.
- The city that will not die Treatise
It is the burning ground that never goes cold, the pyres of Manikarnika, the Doms who keep the fire, the ash-smeared ascetics who have made the cremation ground their home to break the last fear.
- The jewelled earring Treatise
This is Manikarnika , the supreme cremation ground of Kashi, and it is the still centre of everything this treatise has been circling.
- The keepers of the fire Treatise
Every pyre at Manikarnika must be lit, and by unbreakable custom it can be lit only from one source, a perpetual flame that is held, tended, and dispensed by a single community.