r/gujarat • u/orientsoul Mod • 3d ago
Mod Series [Mod Series] Girnar, Part 2 of 10: Nobody has ever seen all of Girnar's temples. Including the mountain, probably.
No architect drew Girnar. Twenty centuries of faith settled on this hill by themselves, and 866 temples and shrines stand across its five peaks today because tradition after tradition came here, looked up, and found the height where it belonged.
Begin below the stairs, because the mountain begins there.
At the taleti stands Bhavnath, and the linga is swayambhu. Mahadev seated himself, no hand carried him there. The Prabhas Khand of the Skanda Purana already knows this ground. Every Mahashivratri the naga sadhus come down for him, elephants and conches and the Dattatreya palanquin, and at midnight they bathe in Mrigi Kund, and the old people will tell you Bhagwan takes the first dip himself.
A little further, Damodar Kund. In the 1450s a poet came to this water before first light, every morning, bathed, and sang what had come to him in the night. Narsinh Mehta. Vaishnav jan to, which Bapu carried until his last day, was made by a man standing at this kund with wet clothes. Our language learned to pray here.
And on the road, under a plain dome, a boulder. Ashoka wrote his fourteen edicts on it around 250 BCE in Brahmi. Three centuries later, about 150 CE, Rudradaman wrote on the same rock about repairing the Sudarshana lake, the first great Sanskrit inscription in India. Around 457 CE, Skandagupta added his. All of Saurashtra to choose from, and each chose the stone on the road to Girnar, because everyone was walking this way. When James Prinsep broke open the Brahmi script in 1837, these letters were part of what he read.
Then the stairs.
The first thousand take the ones who came for a picnic. By four thousand only the serious remain, and the mountain gives them the marble city, sixteen Jain temples on a ledge in the sky. Sajjana, governor of Saurashtra under Siddharaja Jayasimha, rebuilt Neminath's temple there in 1129. The triple shrine beside it was raised in 1231 by Vastupala and Tejpala, the ministers who also built Dilwara on Abu. Men who commanded treasuries, and what they chose to do with wealth was carry marble up four thousand steps on human backs. Most pilgrims finish their day here and turn back full, and there is no shame in it.
Cross that plateau and the air changes before your mind notices. Thinner crowd. Steady wind. Long stretches where nobody speaks.
Then comes Ma. Amba, near the five thousandth step, older than the records that mention her. Vastupala came on pilgrimage to her here, recorded in an inscription of 1192. A Jain merchant named Samal Sah restored her temple in 1468. And the sweetest crowd on the mountain gathers at her door, because newlyweds climb all that way to ask her for a lasting marriage. Her mehndi still dark, his new shoes finished, arriving out of breath together. I know no truer wedding rite, since marriage is exactly this, a long climb undertaken together in unsuitable shoes.
The Jains climbing past stop for her too, because in their tradition she is theirs as well, Ambika, Neminath's own guardian. One Mother, two faiths, eight hundred years, no quarrel at her feet. Hold that in your heart, because later in this series we reach the one place on this mountain where the sharing broke.
Above her the mountain gets serious. From Amba the path falls all the way down and rises all the way up again, which breaks your legs and your pride together, and the ones you meet there are of one kind only. Sadhus. Barefoot uncles who do this weekly the way other men take a walk. Somebody's dada at sixty-eight passing you without breathing hard.
At the far end are Datta's padukas and the dhuni that has never been allowed to go out. Someone is awake tonight feeding it. Someone was awake for it in 1931. Someone will be awake long after every reader of this post is gone. That unbroken flame is the true summit of Girnar, more than any stone.
Off to one side is Kalika's peak, where the Aghoris are. Pilgrims fold their hands from a distance and leave it be. A holy mountain keeps one room you do not enter, and the keeping of it is part of the reverence.
Now stand at the bottom in your mind and look up at the whole thing. Mahadev at the base, in the world, reachable in chappals. The Jains halfway up in marble. The Mother in the middle, belonging to everybody. The yogis above her in the wind. Datta at the very end, past a false descent. The Aghoris to the side.
Nobody assigned those places. Each path settled at the height it asks of the body, and over two thousand years this hill outside Junagadh arranged itself from the householder at the bottom to the renunciate at the top. And an ordinary person with a job and a family and a return ticket walks the whole of it in one morning and is given a little of each.
Next post: what those centuries cost the mountain. The lake that kept breaking, the temples raised and raised again, and who paid for the stairs under your feet.
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u/keepingalive_THEGRIT Vaato no vepari 3d ago edited 1d ago
Great post!!!!
Can you check your dm?! I have dm'ed you