Maya by C. W. Huntington

Banaras for almost ten years, but when the Fulbright came through, I got his address from our common friend. In early December, when I began making travel plans to Banaras, I decided to write to Ed and ask if I might come for a visit. A week later I received a pale blue Inland Letter containing an invitation to stay at his place in the Shivala neighborhood.
    It was appropriate that this first pilgrimage to the holy city came when I had just begun to contemplate the significance of being threatened and being saved, of death and resurrection, for Banaras is traditionally known both as the Great Cremation Ground and the Forest of Bliss.
    The first epithet goes back to a collection of tales preserved in the Puranas, where the story is told of a minor deity who conspired to enhance his prestige by hosting a grand Vedic sacrifice in the holy city. He invited more or less everyone in the universe of any mythological stature except Lord Shiva, the Great Destroyer. Shiva had been intentionally left off the guest list because of his notoriously erratic behavior. This was to be a genteel affair, not the sort of gathering where one wants a known miscreant tricked out in leopard skin and dreadlocks, stoned off his ass, just waiting for the chance to hit on every goddess in the place and finish off the evening with his infamous dance of cosmic annihilation. Such is Shiva’s reputation. Unfortunately, when word got around that he hadn’t been invited, it caused a stir. A Vedic sage named Dadhichi stood up and publicly denounced the whole business, declaring that without Lord Shiva, the sacrificial arena was nothing more than a polluted cremation ground.
    In the Kashi Khanda , a medieval chronicle, we are told that Banaras is the “graveyard of the cosmos” because even the most exalted deities come there to die at the end of the Kali Yuga, when Shiva crushes the world under his dancing feet.
    People say that in Banaras death is welcomed as a long-awaited guest. Death in Banaras is the end of rebirth, and so it is also the end of re-death. In Banaras, the texts say, the mighty tree of samsara, which grows from the seed of desire, is cut down with the axe of death and grows no more. Shops in the old city behind Chowk do a brisk trade providing bamboo biers for carrying the dead. Corpses routinely float through the crowdedbazaars of the city, born aloft on the shoulders of village men who carry their deceased relatives from far away to be cremated here on the banks of the Ganges. It’s not uncommon to see such a litter with its macabre cargo strapped disconcertingly upright into a rickshaw, wheeling its way to the cremation ghats, or to catch a glimpse of somebody’s grandmother strapped flat across the roof of the family Ambassador like a freshly cut Christmas tree.
    In Banaras, only the flames of the funeral pyres never die. The cremation fires are the many mouths of Agni, oldest of the gods. Agni devours our offerings and cleanses this moribund flesh, unleashing the soul from its bondage to the wheel of samsara.
    Banaras is not only the Great Cremation Ground but also the Forest of Bliss. And Lord Shiva is not only the Great Destroyer, the supreme yogi unmatched in his ascetic fervor; he is also the greatest of lovers, unmatched in the enormity of his sexual passion. In what may be Shiva’s earliest surviving representation, a terracotta relief excavated along the banks of the Indus River, we see a male figure seated in the classic lotus posture, legs crossed, deep in meditation, a massive erection rising to his navel. My lingam is everywhere, Shiva proclaims in the Kashi Rahasya , like sprouts rising up in ecstasy.
    In Sanskrit the lingam is the male organ, and when Lord Shiva boasts that his lingam is everywhere in Banaras, he is not exaggerating. The city is littered with stone units. There’s a hard-on in the inner sanctum of his temples, a love pump tucked under every other tree or standing proudly