Meditating at Manikarnika Ghat: Why the Aghoris Sit Where Kashi Burns

There is a place in Varanasi where the fire has not been allowed to go out for as long as anyone can remember. Families carry their dead down narrow lanes to the river, and the smoke rises day and night. Most visitors look for a minute and leave. The Aghoris come here to sit.

People ask me whether the burning ground is haunted. Folk belief in Varanasi certainly says so: restless spirits, ghosts, demons that gather where the dead are burned. My answer is that something does meet you there. It is just not what you think. The demons that rise in the burning ground are, almost always, the energy we brought with us.

The fire burns the body. Sitting beside it shows you what you are still carrying.

About this article

• Place: Manikarnika Ghat, Varanasi (Kāśī, Banaras), on the western bank of the Gaṅgā. With Harishchandra Ghat, one of the city's two cremation ghats.
• Tradition: Shaiva Hindu belief about Kāśī as the city of liberation, and Aghor, the ascetic path that practises in the cremation ground. I wrote about the Aghoris themselves in Who Are the Aghoris?; this article is about the place, and about sitting there.
• Sources: the stories of Manikarnika as told in the Kāśī Khaṇḍa tradition (part of the Skanda Purāṇa) and by the city's priests, Jonathan Parry's study Death in Banaras, and Diana Eck's Banaras: City of Light. Where stories differ, I say so.
• What this is not: instructions for cremation-ground ritual. Those belong to initiation and a living teacher. The practice at the end is mine, and is done at home.

The words of the burning ground

Five Sanskrit words open up this place. Each one has a plain meaning, and each one says more than it seems to.

Hold on to bhūta. We will come back to it.

Why Manikarnika is so sacred

The jewelled earring

The best-known story says that before the city existed, Vishnu dug a pool here with his discus and filled it with the sweat of his austerities. Shiva came to see, and shook with delight, and his jewelled earring fell into the water. In other tellings it is Parvati's earring, and in another it fell from the goddess Sati. The versions differ. The pool, the Chakra Puṣkariṇī Kuṇḍ, is still there at the top of the ghat, and the name has stayed: the place where the jewel fell.

The city of liberation

Kāśī is believed to be the one place on earth that Shiva never leaves, even when the world ends. Hindu tradition holds that whoever dies here is freed from rebirth, and that at the moment of death Shiva himself whispers the tāraka mantra, the mantra that "carries you across", into the dying person's ear. That is why people travel to Varanasi to die, and why families bring their dead from far away to be burned at Manikarnika. For them it is not a sad place. It is the most auspicious end a life can have.

The fire that is kept

The Dom families who have tended the cremation ghats for generations keep a sacred fire there, and pyres are lit from it. Tradition says it has burned without a break for thousands of years. I can't verify the number, and I don't think that matters. What anyone can see is that the fires go on day and night, and that the people who keep them carry a role that is both essential and, unfairly, looked down on. They deserve respect.

Why the Aghoris sit here

Aghora means "not terrible", or as the tradition explains it, going beyond what we find terrible. For an Aghori, the cremation ground is the one place where nothing can be hidden: not death, not decay, not grief, not the smell of burning. If God is everything, God is here too. So this is where they practise.

Three things make Manikarnika in particular the Aghori's ground:

• Shiva lives in the śmaśāna. In the texts and the temple images, Shiva sits in the cremation ground, smeared with ash, surrounded by his gaṇas and bhūtas. The small Mashan Nath temple at the ghat honours him as lord of the burning ground. The Aghori goes to sit where Shiva sits.
• The ash is the teaching. Bhasma, sacred ash, is what remains when everything that can burn has burned. To wear it is to remember that the body is temporary and that what witnesses it is not.
• Fear is the practice. The burning ground brings up everything we avoid. The Aghori does not run from it. He stays until it loosens.

To be accurate: the living Aghor lineage's main seat in Varanasi is the Baba Kinaram ashram at Krim Kund, and you are as likely to meet Aghori and other sadhus at Harishchandra Ghat as at Manikarnika. Once a year, a few days before Holi, both ghats hold Masan Holi, a Holi played with pyre ash instead of colour, when sadhus and devotees celebrate Shiva as lord of the cremation ground.

The demons are the energy we carry

Here is what happens to most people who sit near the pyres for more than a few minutes. First, discomfort. Then a wave of something: grief for someone you lost years ago, fear for your own body, the face of a person you never forgave, a heaviness with no name. Some people feel watched. Some feel something "attach" to them and carry the feeling home.

The tradition has words for these presences: bhūta, preta, piśāca. And remember what bhūta means first: "what has been". The ghost is, literally, the past.

That is my whole point. The burning ground does not put anything into you. It takes away the distractions that normally keep your past quiet. No phone, no noise, no busy-ness can compete with a fire that is burning a body. So what you have been carrying stands up and shows itself. The unfelt grief. The fear of death you have never looked at. The anger you swallowed. Those are the bhūtas that haunt us, and we brought every one of them with us.

The yogic tradition calls these stored imprints samskaras: memories and feelings that were never allowed to finish, still running under the surface of our lives. (I wrote more about them in Unpacking the Samskaras) The cremation ground is simply the place where they can't stay hidden.

And this is why Shiva is Bhūtanātha, the lord of the ghosts. He is not afraid of them. He doesn't fight them or banish them. He sits among them, fully present, and they become his attendants. That is the practice, for the Aghori and for us: not to exorcise what rises, but to sit with it so completely that it stops ruling you. What is fully felt can finish. What finishes, burns, and what burns becomes ash.

You don't fight the ghost. You sit with it until it remembers it is only the past.

A practice: the cremation ground inside

This is my own practice. It is not an Aghor initiation, it involves no cremation-ground ritual, and you can do it at home.

1. Light one flame. A candle or a ghee lamp. Sit where you can see it. Take three slow breaths, each out-breath longer than the in-breath.
2. Let one ghost in. Ask yourself: What have I been carrying that I haven't let myself feel? Don't choose the answer. Wait for whatever rises first: a person, a fear, a heaviness.
3. Find it in the body. Where is it? Chest, throat, belly? What is its texture: tight, hot, hollow? Stay with the sensation, not the story.
4. Ask the inquiry question. Is this happening now, or is this what has been? Notice the answer. Most of what haunts us is bhūta, the past, replaying in the present.
5. Offer it to the fire. Breathe out towards the flame and let the feeling be there as fully as it wants to be, without pushing it away and without feeding it with new thoughts. If it helps, silently say Om Namaḥ Śivāya.
6. Sit in what remains. When the wave passes, it always does, rest for a minute in the quiet afterwards. That quiet is the ash: what remains when what could burn has burned.

Ten minutes is enough. Try it for 21 evenings, one "ghost" at a time, and write one line each night about what you noticed.

Meditation is a spiritual practice. It may support calm and self-understanding, but it is not medical or psychological treatment. If grief, fear of death or old trauma feels overwhelming, please stop the practice and reach out to a qualified professional.

If you go to Manikarnika: sit with respect

• It is a place of grief for real families. Never photograph or film cremations. Many families find it deeply hurtful, and it is widely forbidden at the ghat.
• Find a quiet place to sit. The upper steps, a neighbouring ghat, or a boat on the river at a respectful distance. Stay out of the way of the bearers, the wood stacks and the mourners.
• Dress modestly and stay quiet. Sit as you would at a funeral, because that is what it is.
• Ignore "guides" asking for money. A common scam asks tourists to pay for wood for poor families or for a "hospice". If you want to give, give to a known organisation.
• Don't buy "Aghori rituals". The tradition does not sell them to tourists.
• If it feels like intrusion, leave. You can do this practice anywhere. The ground you most need to sit in is the one you carry.

Sources and a note on accuracy

The stories of the earring, the pool and the tāraka mantra are told in several versions; I have given the best-known one and said where others differ. The claims about the unbroken fire are the tradition's own, not a historical record. History and present-day practice follow the scholarly sources below rather than travel media. If you are from Varanasi, from the Dom community, or from the Aghor tradition, and see something to correct, please write to me.

• Jonathan Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
• Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (Knopf, 1982; Columbia University Press reprint)
• Ron Barrett, Aghor Medicine: Pollution, Death, and Healing in Northern India (University of California Press, 2008)
• Kāśī Khaṇḍa of the Skanda Purāṇa, for the Manikarnika and Kāśī liberation stories
• Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, for bhūta, preta, śmaśāna and maṇikarṇikā

Sit with what you carry

The burning ground doesn't haunt you. It shows you what has been haunting you all along.

Timeless Teachings shares sacred texts and places for study and reflection, with respect for the traditions they come from. Arvin Walters is not an initiate of the Aghor tradition; for guidance on its practices, please seek a teacher of that lineage.