The never-forsaken

Kashi has many names, and most of them praise it. The City of Light. The Forest of Bliss. The Great Cremation Ground. But there is one name that does more than praise. It makes a claim so large that the whole strange architecture of the city rests on it, and it is the name we left the streets to open.

Avimukta. The Never-Forsaken.

Say what it means before taking it apart, because the plain sense is already startling. Mukta is “released, let go”. A-vimukta is “not let go, never abandoned”. It is the name of the ground that Shiva is said never to leave, and it carries, folded inside it, the promise that whatever else falls, this place will not. To understand a city built around liberation, you have to understand its one indispensable name, and to understand the name you have to read the oldest text that uses it. Which is where the surprise begins. Because that text does not put Avimukta only on a riverbank.

A place in two worlds at once

The Jabala Upanishad is a short, late-Upanishadic text of the Shukla Yajurveda, and it is the earliest scripture to name Avimukta. It matters here because it predates the whole Puranic cult of the city, and because it says something that most guidebook accounts of Kashi quietly drop.

The sage is asked a simple question: where is Avimukta established? And the answer comes back doubled, in the same breath, as if the two halves were obviously one thing. Avimukta, the text says, is established “between the varana and the nasi.”

On its face that is a geography lesson. The old sacred city does sit between two watercourses, the Varana to the north and the Asi to the south, and later tradition reads the line exactly that way: Avimukta is the land between the rivers. But the Upanishad is not finished, and its own gloss goes somewhere the map cannot follow. “The varana,” it says, “is so called because it wards off (varayati) all the faults committed by the organs. The nasi is so named because it destroys (nashayati) all sins.” And then, plainly, the second location: the place between the varana and the nasi is “the meeting place of the upper part of the nose and the centre of the eyebrows.”

Read that again, because it is the intellectual heart of this entire treatise. The Upanishad has just placed Avimukta in two locations at once. It is a tract of land between two rivers. And it is a point inside the body of the seeker, at the junction of the nose and the brows, the spot the yogic tradition calls the bhrumadhya, the space behind the middle of the forehead. The text does not treat this as a riddle or a coincidence. It states both, side by side, and moves on.

And it tells you which of the two it holds to be the greater. That inner point, it says, is “the juncture of heaven and this world.” A threshold. A seam where the ordinary and the divine are stitched together, carried not on a river but behind your own eyes.

The ford between the brows

Here is where the two promises of Kashi, the one made to the dying and the one made to the living, turn out to be a single promise.

In its first section the Jabala Upanishad describes what happens at that inner Avimukta, the point between the brows. “This is the spot,” it says, “where, when the vital airs depart from the living person, Rudra imparts the mantra, the Taraka Brahman, by which, becoming immortal, he attains liberation.” And then the injunction the whole city is in some sense obeying: “Hence one shall resort to the Avimukta. One shall not desert the Avimukta.”

Notice what the oldest text actually locates at the moment of death. Not a place on the Ganga. A place in the body, between the eyebrows, where the ferry-word is whispered and the crossing is made. The taraka mantra we met in the last chapter, the sound that carries the soul across, is here delivered at an inner ford, in the subtle geography of the seeker, at the seam of heaven and earth behind the forehead.

Which means the crossing was never only about dying. The same point that receives the whisper at death is the point the meditating yogi turns his attention to while fully alive. The bhrumadhya is where the concentrated mind is gathered in meditation, the inner Avimukta the seeker “resorts to and does not desert” by the daily discipline of turning inward. To die at that ford is to be ferried across. To reach it in life, in the stillness of realization, is to be ferried across while still breathing. It is the same ford. It is the same crossing. One soul makes it at the end of a life and one makes it in the middle of one, and the tradition calls the second, the awakening reached while alive, jivanmukti.

So the deepest reading of Avimukta, the reading the oldest text presses, is that the true never-forsaken ground is not on any bank at all. It is within. The city on the river is the outer shell of an inner place, a vast public map of a point you carry behind your own eyes, and the pilgrimage a person makes across India to stand in the Ganga is the outward form of a shorter and harder journey inward. This is why a city can be, at the same time and without contradiction, the place the dying are carried to and the place the living come to wake. Both are ways of resorting to the Avimukta. One does it with the feet. One does it with the attention.

The tradition never lets go of this doubleness, and neither will this treatise. Every chapter that follows describes a real place on a real river, with a real history, and every one of them is also, in the tradition’s own reading, a feature of an inner landscape. The ghats are steps to the water and stations of the subtle body. The circuits round the city are circuits round the self. Keep both maps open. The city insists on it.

The city on the trident

But the outer city makes its own enormous claim, and it is time to state it, because it is the image most people carry of Kashi even when they have never heard the word Avimukta.

The claim comes from the Kashi Khanda, the long praise of the city that forms a book of the Skanda Purana, and it should be read as what it is, which is Puranic myth, crystallised late, around the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and not as Vedic scripture or as geography. Within those bounds it is unforgettable. The Purana holds that Kashi does not rest on the earth at all. It sits on the tip of Shiva’s trishula, his trident, lifted clear of the ground. In G. V. Tagare’s translation the city is “on Earth yet not on the ground,” a place “bound to the Earth but bestowing liberation, wherein creatures that meet death become immortal.”

And the trident carries a consequence that is the outer twin of the inner Avimukta. At the end of an age, when the whole universe is unmade in the cosmic dissolution the tradition calls pralaya, everything is drawn back into the darkness and destroyed. Everything but this. Shiva lifts Kashi on the trident and holds it above the dissolution, through the long night of unmaking, and sets it down again when creation begins anew. The scholar Diana Eck records the line the Purana draws from this: “even in the time of the pralaya that land is never let loose by Shiva and Parvati. Therefore it is called Avimukta.” There is the etymology, made cosmic. The never-forsaken is the one ground the god will not let go of, even when he is letting go of the world.

An older Purana gives the same etymology in Shiva’s own mouth. In the Matsya Purana, in a public-domain translation now more than a century old, the god says simply: “Because I never forsake it, nor do I let it go, this great place is therefore known as Avimukta.”

The tradition even maps the trident onto the ground. The city is held to have three khandas, three great zones, read as the three prongs: the domain of Vishveshvara, the Lord of All, at the centre; Omkareshvara to the north; Kedareshvara to the south. We will walk all three before this treatise is done. For now the point is the shape. A city held up on three points of light above a drowning world.

What kind of claim this is

It is worth stopping, once, to be clear about what sort of statement all this is, because the modern world has a ready and wrong translation for it.

The wrong translation is the one that reaches for the vocabulary of energy. Kashi as a “vortex”, a place that “vibrates at a higher frequency”, a spot where the veil between worlds is thin. That language is not the tradition. It is a recent overlay, and it flattens a precise theological claim into a vague atmospheric one. The tradition is not saying that the air over the ghats hums at a special pitch. It is saying something both humbler and stranger.

It is saying, first, a theological thing: that Shiva does not withdraw from this ground, that his presence here is unbroken and unconditional, so that the city is luminous because he is in it and never leaves. And it is saying, second, a metaphysical thing, the one the Jabala Upanishad pressed: that the real Avimukta, the true crossing-place, is interior, and the city on the river is its outward sign. Neither of those is a claim about physics. Both are claims about where liberation is found and who holds the ground on which it is found.

Held that way, the trident and the pralaya stop being a quaint story about a floating city and become what they were meant to be: an image of indestructibility, a way of saying that the place where release is possible cannot itself be dissolved, because the one who guarantees it will not let it go. The outer myth and the inner Upanishad are saying the same thing in two registers. There is a ground that death cannot take. It is on the tip of a trident above the end of the world. It is also behind your eyes.

The next chapter takes the second of those maps and follows it all the way out. If the city is the outer form of an inner place, then the tradition should have drawn the whole of it, every circuit and shrine and step, as a figure of the body and the cosmos together. It did exactly that. Kashi was laid out, its keepers hold, as a diagram of everything, a cosmogram, and to walk the city is to walk the body of the world.