The good death

Not everyone the city receives is already dying. Many come while there is still strength in them, and health, and years perhaps, and they come on purpose, to wait. They arrive in old age, having set their affairs in order elsewhere, and they take up residence in Kashi with the deliberate intention of living out whatever remains and dying within its bounds. They have not come to be cured, and they have not come to sightsee. They have come to make a good end, and to spend the time before it well.

This is where the whole treatise’s argument comes home, and where the founder’s own instinct is proved right: Kashi is not merely a place to die. It is a place to die well, which means it is first of all a place to live the end well, and the two cannot be separated.

Coming in good time

The tradition has a word for the practice of settling in Kashi to see out one’s life: Kashivas, “dwelling in Kashi”, taken up as a vow. And it has a word for the person who does it in the right spirit: the mumukshu, “one who desires liberation”, from mumuksha, the longing for release that the tradition regards as the necessary first step of the whole spiritual path. A mumukshu is not someone who has given up on life. He is someone who has finally wanted the one thing worth wanting more than life, and who has come to the one city where that wanting is met, to prepare.

The distinction matters, because from the outside Kashivas can look like a morbid death-watch, an old person sitting by the river counting down. It is meant to be almost the opposite. It is meant to be a ripening. The last stretch of a life, freed at last from the business of the world, given over to devotion, to the river, to the daily darshan, to the loosening of the grip on everything one is about to leave, so that when death comes it comes to a person already half-released, already turned toward the far shore, already, in the tradition’s hope, awake. The mumukshu comes to Kashi not to hurry death but to become ready for it, and readiness, here, is a kind of liberation practised in advance.

The houses of liberation

To make room for such people, the city keeps a set of institutions that exist nowhere else in the world, and they are among the most quietly astonishing things in Kashi.

They are the bhavans, the houses of the dying. The Mumukshu Bhavan houses those who have come to dwell as mumukshus, to live out their years in the city in devotion. And the Mukti Bhavan, the “house of liberation”, most famously the Kashi Labh Mukti Bhavan, is something stranger still: a plain lodging, near the great temple, where the actively dying come with their families in their final days, to die in the city and be given the last rites without hurry.

The Mukti Bhavan keeps a rule that has become quietly famous, and it captures the whole strange practicality of the place. A dying person and their family may stay only about a fortnight, fifteen days or so. If death comes in that time, the house has done its work. If it does not, if the person rallies, or lingers, the family is gently asked to leave and make room, because the demand is endless and the beds are few. There is something almost unbearable in the arithmetic of it, a house whose hospitality is measured against the arrival of death, whose guests are welcome exactly as long as they are dying and no longer. And yet the families come, and wait, and read the scriptures aloud, and keep the lamp lit, and hope that the crossing will be granted inside the fortnight. A recent Indian film drew the whole world’s attention to one such house, and to the odd tenderness of a place organised entirely around the good death, but the houses themselves are old, and they are not fiction, and on any given day they are full.

The ripe death and the unripe

Behind all of this stands a distinction the tradition draws sharply and the modern world has almost lost: the difference between a good death and a bad one.

A bad death, apamrityu, is the untimely one. The violent, the sudden, the unprepared: the accident, the murder, the drowning, the death by fire or snakebite or one’s own hand, the death that takes a person before their work is done and their mind is ready, that leaves the soul shocked and unhoused and the rites disordered. The whole tradition recoils from it, and we have already met the shrine, Mrityunjaya Mahadev, the Conqueror of Death, whose entire office is to guard against exactly this, to keep the unripe death from the door.

A good death is the ripe one. It is timely, and it is prepared, and above all it is conscious: the dying person aware, the mind gathered, the name of God on the lips, the family around, the rites in order, the whole thing arriving like the last note of a piece of music rather than a wire cut mid-phrase. And the image the tradition reaches for is the one we heard in the very first chapter, in the great death-conquering verse: the ripe gourd loosening from its stem. A good death is a fruit that falls when it is ready, cleanly, of its own weight, not one torn green from the vine. Everything Kashivas is for is the ripening of that fruit, the long, patient loosening that lets the end, when it comes, be a falling and not a tearing.

The art of dying well

So there is, in Kashi, an actual art of dying, a set of practices around the deathbed as detailed as any around a birth, and the mumukshu spends years learning to meet it.

As death approaches, the dying person is laid on the ground, or turned so the feet face the south, the direction of Yama, the god of death, so that the soul departs the way it must go. A little Ganga water is placed on the lips, and a leaf of the sacred tulsi, the basil beloved of Vishnu. And above all there is the sound, because the tradition holds that the last thing in the mind at the moment of death shapes the crossing, and so the family and the dying one keep, on the lips and in the ear, the name of God, the Ram-nam, the taraka whisper, repeated and repeated so that consciousness leaves the body riding on the holy name. To die with God’s name on the tongue, in the city of liberation, feet to the south, the river’s water on the lips: this is the good death fully performed, and the mumukshu has come to Kashi, and lived his last years there, precisely to be ready to die it well.

Read rightly, none of this is about death at all. It is about attention. The art of the good death is the art of keeping the mind, at the hardest moment a human being ever faces, turned toward the one thing that matters, and that art cannot be learned at the last minute. It is the fruit of the whole discipline of Kashivas, of years of loosening, so that the final loosening comes easily. The good death is the examination the mumukshu has spent his last years studying for, and the city is the school.

The fruit that falls freely

This is the deepest answer to the question the treatise opened with, and it vindicates the correction that reshaped its first chapter. The dying do not come to Kashi to be morbid. They come to ripen. And ripening is a form of the very awakening the living seeker pursues, the same loosening of the grip on the self, the same turning toward release, practised now against the near horizon of death. The good death and the enlightenment in life are, once more, one thing seen at two distances. The jivanmukta wakes in the middle of a life and lives on free. The one who dies well in Kashi wakes at the end of a life and crosses. Both have done the same inner work. Both have let the fruit loosen. The city serves them both with the same grace, and calls them by the same promise.

And an honest chapter must set one dark truth beside the tender ones, because the good death is an ideal, and ideals are not always what happens. Not everyone brought to the houses of the dying comes willingly or is wanted. Among the aged of Kashi are some who were carried here and left, abandoned by families for whom a holy death was also a convenient disposal, old people spending their last months in a strange city not out of a mumukshu’s longing but because no one at home would keep them. The city’s beautiful theology of the good death has, like every human institution, its shadow, and the shadow is old people dying among strangers because it was easier than dying at home. This treatise records the ideal in full, because the ideal is real and moving and one of the most humane things any tradition ever built. It records the shadow too, because to leave it out would be to prettify, and the whole method of this book is to refuse that.

The good death is the ripe one, the patient one, the fruit that falls when it is ready. But there was, in the history of this city, another idea entirely, a dark and desperate one: that if liberation is guaranteed to whoever dies within these bounds, then a person might not wait for the fruit to ripen at all. A person might seize the crossing by force, and end their own life on purpose, here, to claim the promise now. The tradition of ritual self-killing for liberation, the Kashi Karvat, is the shadow-twin of everything this chapter has praised, and it is one of the strangest and most troubling things the city ever held. The next chapter follows it, carefully, into the dark.