Varanasi, the one city you go to die

Every year, in the clear months after the rains, the trains and the buses carry into one city on the Ganga a particular kind of passenger. They are old, most of them, or they are ill, and they have travelled a long way, and they have come with a purpose that would stop a stranger in the street if it were said aloud. They have come to die.

Not to be cured. Not to bathe and go home. To die, here, on this ground, within these bounds, and nowhere else.

This is the fact that startles every newcomer to Kashi, and it is the fact this whole treatise hangs from. So it has to be said at the start, plainly and with care, because it is sacred and it is also about real death and real grief. The tradition holds that to die within the sacred limits of this city is to attain moksha, release, the end of the long round of birth and death and rebirth. For the devout this is not morbid. It is the best news there is. It is the reason a family will bring a dying grandmother a thousand kilometres by train, and lodge with her in one of the plain houses that wait near the river to receive exactly such travellers, and sit with her, without hurry, until the end comes.

To understand why anyone would do this, we have to begin not with the city at all, but with the thing the city claims to answer.

The one problem every religion is trying to solve

We die. Every tradition on earth begins there, whether it flinches from the fact or stares it down, and Sanatana Dharma stares it down.

It does not treat death as the end of a single life. It treats it as one door in a long corridor of doors. Birth, and death, and birth again, the same self passing through world after world, driven on by its own acts, its karma, the residue of everything it has ever done. The tradition calls the whole turning wheel samsara, from a root meaning “to flow together”, “to wander through”. To be caught on that wheel is the ordinary condition of every living thing. It is not imagined as a punishment. It is simply how things are: a vast, patient machinery of coming and going, without a visible beginning and without, for the ordinary soul, a visible end.

And against that endless wandering the tradition sets one hope, and rates it higher than any other good a human life can reach. To step off the wheel. Finally, and for good. Release. The far shore. Moksha.

The classical texts arrange the aims of a human life into four, the purusharthas, the “goals of the person”. There is dharma, right conduct, the order a life should keep. There is artha, prosperity, the wealth and security a householder must earn. There is kama, desire and its rightful satisfactions, love and beauty and pleasure. These three are good, and the tradition says so without embarrassment. But they all operate inside the wheel. They are goods you gain and lose and gain again, life after life. Only the fourth aim ends the wheel itself, and so the tradition sets it above and beyond the other three and calls it the parama-purushartha, the supreme goal, the aim past which there is no further aim.

What moksha actually is, the schools argue about, and an honest account should say so rather than flatten it. For the Advaita of Shankara, liberation is the direct realisation that the innermost self, the Atman, was never separate from the one reality, Brahman, at all, so that the bondage was only ever a case of mistaken identity, and can even be undone in this very life. For the devotional theologies it is something warmer, an eternal nearness to a personal God, given at the last by grace. The philosophies diverge on what the far shore is, and on how a soul reaches it. They do not diverge on its worth. On that they are one. Release is the thing worth more than long life, more than wealth, more than any pleasure the world can hand you.

Hold that. Because Kashi’s entire claim is a claim about moksha. The city says, in effect: the thing every school agrees is the highest human goal, and that most traditions place at the far end of many disciplined lifetimes, is available here, at death, to anyone who dies within these bounds. That is an enormous thing to promise. The rest of this treatise is, in one sense, the long examination of that promise: where it comes from, what it rests on, who guards it, what it costs, and what it has made of the city that makes it.

The god who is not afraid of death

Every claim needs an authority behind it, and the authority behind Kashi is Shiva.

He is the strangest of the great gods to set at the head of a city of liberation, because he is the god most bound up with death. He is worshipped as Mahakala, Great Time, and time is the one force that kills everything it touches, so to call him Great Time is to call him Great Death. He haunts the cremation ground. He wears ash. His companions are ghosts. And yet he is worshipped, in the very same breath and often in the very same hymn, as Mrityunjaya, the Conqueror of Death. The two names are not a contradiction the tradition is embarrassed by. They are the point. The one who is death is the only one who can grant release from it.

The oldest voice of that hope is Vedic. Buried in the seventh book of the Rigveda is a single verse, sung to Rudra, the fierce archer of the storm whom the later tradition received as Shiva, and it has become, across three thousand years, the great mantra against death. It is Rigveda 7.59.12, the Mahamrityunjaya, the “great death-conquering” verse, and its heart is an image taken from a farmer’s field:

Tryambakam yajamahe sugandhim pushti-vardhanam, urvarukam iva bandhanan mrityor mukshiya ma amritat.

Translate it slowly, because the tradition has leaned on every phrase of it. Tryambakam yajamahe. We worship the three-eyed one. Sugandhim pushti-vardhanam. The fragrant, the increaser of nourishment. And then the plea, in the image of a ripe gourd loosening on its own from the stalk that held it: urvarukam iva bandhanat. As the cucumber is freed from its binding. Mrityor mukshiya. So may I be freed from death. Ma amritat. But not from deathlessness.

Read that last turn again, because it is exact and it is easy to miss. The verse does not ask to escape existence. It asks to be loosed from death the way a ripe fruit is loosed from the vine, gently, when it is ready, without being torn, and to fall not into nothing but into the deathless. The Vedic verse is addressed to Rudra and asks, in its plain sense, for a long life and a good end. The later tradition heard in it something larger, and made it Shiva’s own mantra of liberation, chanted for the sick, for the dying, and over the ash. Kashi is the place where that mantra is held to come true.

The word whispered at the end

There is a mechanism the tradition gives for how the release actually happens, and it is intimate to the point of tenderness.

At the moment of death within Kashi, it says, Shiva himself bends to the ear of the dying and whispers the taraka mantra. Taraka comes from the root tri, “to cross over”. A taraka is a ferryboat, the thing that carries you across a flood to the far bank. So the taraka mantra is the ferry-word, the sound that carries the soul across the ocean of samsara to the shore beyond it. The city is, in the tradition’s own image, the crossing-place: the last ford, where the crossing a pilgrim makes is the final one.

We will return, several chapters from now, to a careful question the popular accounts rush past: what, exactly, is the whispered word? The tradition is oddly unfixed about it. Some hold it to be the name of Rama, some the sacred syllable Om, and the oldest text to describe the whisper at all, the Jabala Upanishad, only calls it “the Taraka Brahman” and declines to spell it. What the tradition fixes is not the wording. It is the effect. Whatever the sound, it ferries the dying across. That the tradition is so sure of the crossing and so vague about the words is itself a clue to what kind of claim this is, and we will follow that clue when we reach it.

For now, one thing is enough. The whole vast apparatus of this city, its guardian and its river and its burning ground and its ten thousand shrines, stands on a single promise whispered at the end of a life: that here, in this one place, the wheel can be stepped off, and the crossing made.

To die, and to wake

It would be a mistake, though, to hear all of this as being only about dying.

The death of the pilgrim is the most startling face of Kashi’s promise, and so it is the face a newcomer sees first. It is the outer face of a larger claim, and the tradition is clear that the larger claim is the deeper one. Kashi is not simply a good place to end a life. It is held to be the best place on earth to wake up in one.

The tradition has a precise word for liberation reached while still alive and breathing: jivanmukti, the freedom of the jivanmukta, the one who is released here and now and lives out the remainder of the body’s days already free. Advaita Vedanta affirms it without hesitation. The knower does not wait for death to be liberated. Knowledge liberates now, and death, when it comes, only lays down a body that was already carrying a free person. And of all the grounds on which such knowing is said to dawn, the tradition holds Kashi to be the readiest.

That is why the city has always been filled, far more than with the dying, with the living who came in search of exactly this. The renunciate who takes sannyasa and settles by the river to finish his realization. The student who comes to sit for years at the feet of a teacher of the Veda. The ascetic who goes to the burning ground to burn away the last of his fear. The pandit, the poet, the seeker of every kind. For them, coming to Kashi is not the last stage of a journey toward death. It is Kashivas, the vow of dwelling in Kashi, taken up as a discipline in itself, because the same grace that ferries the dying across is held to work, quietly and continuously, on the living who stay.

And there is a hint here of something the next chapter takes up and the treatise never quite leaves. The oldest text to name this ground places it in two locations at once: on the bank of the river, and at a point deep inside the seeker, reached by turning inward in meditation rather than by travelling at all. The crossing the pilgrim makes at death, and the awakening the seeker reaches in life, turn out to be the same crossing, at the same ford, which is in the end an inner one. To die in Kashi and to wake in Kashi are two faces of a single doctrine.

So when this treatise speaks of Kashi as the city of death, hear the whole of what the tradition means. It is the city where death is disarmed, and it is, for the same reason and by the same grace, the city where a living person may hope to be set free.

Older than history

The traveller who wants to feel the weight of that promise before studying it could do worse than borrow the eyes of an outsider. In 1896 an American humorist came up the river, tired and unwell and largely unmoved by the pieties of the places he passed, and Kashi stopped him. “Benares is older than history,” Mark Twain wrote, “older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.”

It is a wonderful line, and we will spend a later chapter testing how much of it is true, because the city’s real age is a more interesting and more honest story than the legend of the “oldest city on earth”. But Twain caught something the archaeology cannot measure. What is unbroken at Kashi is less its brick and mortar than its ritual life. Empires have risen and fallen within sight of these ghats. The central temple has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times that no one can give the true count. And through all of it, every dawn, someone has walked down the stone steps to stand in the river and face the rising sun, and every dusk, the fires have burned at the water’s edge. The buildings come and go. The ground does not.

That is the city this treatise sets out to walk: on the tip of a trident, the myth says, lifted clear of the earth, so that even when the universe is dissolved at the end of an age, Kashi alone is not destroyed.

Which raises the question the next chapter takes up. How can a city stand outside the very death it trades in? What does it mean to call a place on a muddy riverbank “the never-forsaken”, the one ground the god will not let go of, even at the end of the world?

To answer that, we have to leave the streets for a moment, and open the strangest and oldest of the city’s names.