pilgrimagejourney home where a pilgrim can verbally share their experience with
others.
Just as it does for Islam, pilgrimage plays an important role within
Hinduism where is it called a tīrtha-yatra (meaning “undertaking journey
to river fords”). Tīrtha implies crossing over as a verb and a crossing
place as a noun. A pilgrim symbolically crosses over to heaven, an event
symbolized by a ladder or a bridge, by journeying to a river that is
believed to originate in heaven and flows down to earth. The sacred
Ganges River is called, for instance, “the flowing ladder to heaven.” Such
waters are considered nourishing and purifying. When a person is puri-
fied he/she becomes a tīrtha for others.
Hindu pilgrimage is closely associated with the performance of life
cycle rites at holy places where the rites bring greater bountiful blessings.
In fact, ancestral and death rites are especially efficacious at these sacred
locations where there is believed to be a connection between earth and
heaven. Hindu pilgrimage can also become a substitute for other ritual
activity. Moreover, from a social perspective, pilgrimage is where one
can cross the boundaries between caste and sexual differences. Thus,
pilgrimage is open and accessible to everyone. It also enables a pilgrim
to cross beyond sins. The journey is both geographical and interior, a
matter of the feet and the heart, and is associated with truth, charity,
patience, self-control, celibacy, and wisdom.
Hindu pilgrims are motivated by a wide variety of reasons includ-
ing: being part of a sacred geographical order: accumulating positive
merit (good karma); the removal of sins; performance of important
life-cycle rites (to be cremated in Benares is especially desirable
because of the sacred nature of the city and its location on the banks
of the sacred Ganges River); personal mundane reasons (e.g. desire for
sons, higher business profits, better crops, or cure from an illness);
social value for certain castes; and having a direct experience of the
sacred. Because there is a hierarchy of sacred locations within the reli-
gious culture, not all places of pilgrimage in India are equal, but there
are so many sacred places in India that the multitude of locations unites
the country into an interconnected sphere of sacred locations. There
are also different types of pilgrimages in India that depend on whether
or not the places owe their sacredness to divine acts, destruction
of demons, acts of saints, and those sanctified theoretically by the
rulers of solar and lunar dynasties that pertain to the establishment of
a temple by a king.
Further reading: Bhardwaj (1973); Eck (1981, 1983); Gold (1988); Morinis
(1984); Peters (1994); Turner and Turner (1978)