The debt to the dead

Everything the treatise has said so far has been about a person’s own crossing: their death, their liberation, their ripening. But there is a second reason the living come to Kashi, and it has nothing to do with their own release and everything to do with someone else’s. They come for the dead who went before them. And behind that lies one of the most beautiful ideas in the whole tradition: that the crossing is not only a thing you make for yourself, but a thing a living hand can reach back across the river and give to another.

To understand it, you have to start with a debt.

The debt you are born owing

The tradition holds that a human being is born already in debt, and not in the ordinary sense. The Vedic texts speak of three debts, the rina-traya, that come with the fact of being born at all. The Taittiriya Samhita, one of the oldest layers of the Yajurveda, names them: a person owes a debt to the gods, which is repaid by sacrifice; a debt to the sages, repaid by the study of the sacred word; and a debt to the ancestors, the pitri-rina, repaid by continuing the line, by begetting the next generation, and by faithfully performing the rites for those who have died.

That third debt is the one that concerns us here, and its logic is quietly staggering. You exist because they existed. The unbroken chain of the dead, stretching back out of memory, made you, and you owe them for it, and the debt is not cancelled by their dying. If anything it deepens, because once they are dead they can no longer act for themselves, and the discharge of the debt falls to the living. A person who neglects the rites for their ancestors is not merely forgetful. In the tradition’s eyes they are in default on the oldest loan there is, and they leave their own fathers stranded on the wrong side of the river.

So the rites for the dead are not sentiment, and they are not optional. They are the repayment of a debt that made your very existence possible, and the tradition worked out, in enormous detail, exactly how the repayment is made.

Building a body for the dead

Here three words must be told carefully apart, because they are constantly run together, and each does something distinct.

Shraddha is the whole rite, the entire ceremony of devotion to the departed, and it takes its name from shraddha, faith, because it is the act performed faithfully for those who can no longer see it done. The great law-book of Manu counts the offering to the ancestors among the five daily sacrifices every householder owes, and the full shraddha unfolds in a sequence, the resolve, the libation, the offering of rice-balls, the feeding of brahmins and the gift that follows.

Pinda-dana is the heart of it, and it is the strangest and most concrete of the rites. A pinda is a ball, moulded of cooked rice and barley mixed with sesame and honey and clarified butter, and it is offered to the dead. What the offering is held to do is the astonishing part. In the ten days after a death, the Garuda Purana, in the book it devotes to the departed, the Preta Khanda, teaches that one pinda offered each day builds, limb by limb, a new subtle body for the deceased. Head on the first day, neck and shoulders on the second, and so on, the offerings of the living quite literally constructing, over ten days, a fresh body in which the soul can travel. Until that body is built the dead person is a preta, a raw, unhoused, hungering ghost, and the whole purpose of the ten pindas is to carry them out of that stranded condition and into a settled one. This is the mechanism the tradition imagines behind the grief: a body being built for the dead by the hands of the living, one rice-ball a day.

Tarpana is the third, and the simplest: the libation of water, poured out with sesame and sacred kusha grass and the murmuring of names, “to satisfy” the dead, to quench the thirst of the ancestors and refresh them where they are. It is offered not only to the pitrs but to the gods and the sages too, the three classes of beings to whom a life is owed, and it can be a daily act, a quiet pouring of water at the river’s edge for all the dead who made you.

The circuit of the dead

The full transformation takes a specific turn on the eleventh and twelfth days after a death, in the rite called Sapindikarana, when the newly built pinda of the recent dead is ritually merged with the pindas of the three ancestors before them. That merging is the formal admission of the newcomer into the company of the settled dead. The raw, dangerous preta becomes, at last, a pitr, an ancestor, one of the honoured forefathers, and from then on is fed not with the frantic daily pindas of the crisis but with the calm annual shraddha and the great yearly offering of the fortnight of the ancestors, Pitru Paksha, the dark half-month in the autumn when every family turns to feed its dead.

And this is where Kashi comes into it, because the greatest of these rites are not done just anywhere. There is a circuit, the Tristhali, the “three places”, Prayag and Kashi and Gaya, that the devout make for the sake of their dead, and Narayana Bhatta, the sixteenth-century Banaras scholar we met among the city’s books, wrote the classic manual for it. The three places divide the labour. Gaya is where the ancestors are redeemed, the pinda offered there held to release them powerfully. Prayag, at the confluence, is for merit. And Kashi is for the last thing, the onward liberation. Rites for the dead performed at ordinary tirthas settle the ancestor safely in the world of the fathers, the pitr-loka, a good and stable place. Rites performed at Kashi, the ground of moksha, aim past even that, at the ancestor’s final release from the wheel itself. To bring your dead to Kashi is to offer them not merely a comfortable seat among the fathers, but the same crossing you would seek for yourself.

The pool where ghosts are released

But some of the dead cannot cross by the ordinary rites, and for them the city keeps a darker and more specialised mercy.

We ended the last chapter with the pretas, the souls of those who died badly, by violence, by accident, by their own hand, by the untimely deaths the tradition calls apamrityu, or whose funeral rites were never properly done, souls stranded in the condition of the ghost and unable to move on. For exactly these, Kashi keeps a tank called Pishach Mochan, “the release of the ghosts”, a pool the Kashi Khanda remembers under an older name, where the presiding Shiva is worshipped and where the trapped and suffering dead are set free. Here the living perform special and heavier rites for the ancestors that the ordinary shraddha could not release: the Tripindi Shraddha, offered for lingering, unsatisfied dead across three generations, invoking Brahma and Vishnu and Shiva together, and the Narayana Bali, performed for those who met an unnatural end, to lift them out of the ghost-state and into the company of the fathers. Beside the pool stands an ancient peepal tree, honoured as the witness on which the ancestors are believed to sit and watch the rite that finally frees them.

It is, in its way, the tenderest thing the city does. Kashi promises liberation to those who die well within its bounds. But it does not abandon those who died badly, far away, unshriven, stranded. It keeps a pool and a set of rites specifically to reach back for them, to mend the deaths that went wrong, to release even the ghost who has been suffering for generations. The city that mends the good death also mends the bad one, and it does the second for the dead who can no longer ask.

The crossing you give another

Which returns us to the beautiful idea this chapter opened with, and to an image we have already met without recognising it.

The whole apparatus of the rites for the dead rests on a single conviction: that the living can act for those who can no longer act for themselves, that a son’s offering can build a body for his father, that a family’s shraddha can carry an ancestor across a river the ancestor cannot cross alone. The crossing, it turns out, is not only something you make. It is something you give. The most self-concerned thing imaginable, one’s own liberation, has a mirror-image that is the most selfless: the labour of releasing another, reaching back down the chain of the dead to free the ones who made you.

And the tradition’s oldest story of this is the story of the river herself. Remember Bhagiratha, whose austerity brought the Ganga down from heaven. He did not do it for himself. He did it for sixty thousand ancestors, burned to ash generations before he was born, stranded and unreleased, and his whole ferocious devotion was aimed at one thing: to reach back across the gulf of death and carry his own dead across. The Ganga that runs past Kashi came down, in the tradition’s account, as an act of exactly the devotion the rites for the dead enact every day. The river is Bhagiratha’s love for his ancestors made liquid, and every son who pours a libation at its edge for his own dead is doing, in miniature, what Bhagiratha did for his.

So the debt to the dead is not a burden the tradition lays on the living out of grimness. It is the tradition’s way of saying that death does not end our responsibility for one another, that love has work to do even after the beloved is ash, and that the crossing the whole city exists to offer is a gift the living can hand to the dead. You come to Kashi for your own release. You come, as much, to give release to those who went before.

We have followed death now to the edge of everything the householder can do: dying well, and freeing the dead. But there are those who go further, who do not merely visit the burning ground to grieve or to give, but move into it, and make the confrontation with death the whole of their path. They are the strangest and most misunderstood figures in the city, and they are the subject of the next chapter. We leave the householder’s grief for the ascetic’s fire.