As we talk about the popular sacred place of or in India, the foremost city is the burning ghat of Varanasi. In mythological stories and books mention the place, temples, and the river Ganges flowing beside the temple. Sacred are the temples and the burning Ghats or the cremation areas. All visitors explain they rejuvenate themselves, souls feel alive while listening to the chants and hymn that priests utter from the Vedic sacred lines or mantras for peace.
You can find a new life while you move around among the souls not bounded to the laid or burned bodies with emerging smokes of the burns. Peace lays around the burning ghat while people taking a sacred bath, performing rituals for peace of soul of their dead ones. Visualizing dead bodies burning with pure chants, people moving around widows, old grey hair who do not find any pleasure adapts to sannyasa gives unexplained console. Pilgrims from different parts spend months on the lap of mother Ganga. Few decide to spend the rest of their life in the oldest city of India to live in the serenity and eternal peace to death.
What makes this ancient city so wonderful?
Pilgrims and visitors from different parts of the world travel all along to India in order to feel the spirit of the sacred Hindu city. Manikarnika Ghat is known as the burning ghat, where deaths are cremated. It is the holiest place believed by the Hindu religion as it is the place when freedom from rebirth and death occurs to Moksha.
You cannot deny escaping from the fire lit all around the day till the evening, as evening prayers offered in the form of chants and hymns. It is the Ghat or bank of the river that is lightened up with the burning of wooden beds of dead bodies. Manikarnika Ghat is known as the ‘gateway to heaven’, that is filled with the sound of such chants continuously as chanted by the priests. Somewhere this is one of the reasons that visitors and tourists are intimated to this sacred place, the burning ghat of Varanasi.
Burning Ghat of Varanasi and its mythological importance
Manikarnika Ghat is a place when a person can watch the holy journey from the earth to heaven. According to Hindu mythology stating about the importance of this ghat known as Manikarna Ghats which means ear-rings. The ear-rings of Lord Shiva fell down on the earth, while he was performing ‘Tandava’. It is a dance form that we can see has been inspired by the dance of Shiva who was angry, supposed to destroy the Universe so performed ‘Tandava’. This is when the ear-ring felt on the earth and based on the incident the burning ghat of Varanasi is called Manikarnika Ghat.
Moksha, that one receives after death is the strongest belief that can be acquired at the holy banks of the burning Ghat. Here is the reason to see survival from the ancestors ‘Dom’ around the burning ghat of Varanasi, as somewhere an intense Hindu religious belief stays that cremation should be near the sacred river. Doms that work here owned profession from the ancestors, still work in traditionally due to the belief that one can attain Moksha if cremated near the holy river the Ganges.
