History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v5.c74.43
History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v5.c74.43
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v5.c74.43.1
Numberless tīrthas and holy shrines have been mentioned from ancient times. The Matsyapurāṇa states¹²⁶⁸ that Vāyu declared that there are 35 millions of tīrthas in the sky, in the ærial regions and on the earth and all of them are centred in the Ganges; while the Vāmanapurāṇa 46. 53 states that there are 35 millions of Liṅgas. The Brahmapurāṇa says that the number of tīrthas and shrines is so large that they cannot be enumerated in detail even in hundreds of years. The Vanaparva¹²⁶⁹ remarks that Naimiṣa is the (best) tīrtha on the earth and Puṣkara in the ærial region, while Kurukṣetra is the most distinguished in all the three worlds and that all the ten thousand crores of tīrthas are present in Puṣkara (chap 82.21) New tīrthas were added from time to time and the monetary benefits derived by the permanent residents and particularly by the tīrtha priests led them to prepare numerous māhātmyas of an apocryphal character and father them on Vyāsa, the reputed author of the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas. Most of the writers of digests on tīrthas follow a process of selection. The Tīrthakalpataru of Lakṣmīdhara, one of the earliest digests (about 1110-1120 AD), devotes more than half the work to Vārāṇasī and Prayāga alone, assigns only two or three pages to such famous tīrthas as Puṣkara, Pṛthūdaka, Kokāmukha, Badarikāśrama, Kedāra.
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The Nṛsiṁhaprasāda (Tīrthasāra) mostly deals with tīrthas in the Deccan and southern India such as Setubandha, Puṇḍarīka (modern Pandharpur), Godāvarī, Kṛṣṇā-veṇyā, Narmadā. The Tristhalīsetu of Nārāyaṇabhaṭṭa devotes two-thirds of it to Benares and its sub-tīrthas and the rest to Prayāga and Gayā. This unequal treatment arose from various causes, such as the localities where the authors lived, their familiarity with the holy places and their predilections. There was also another tendency among the authors of Purāṇas, Māhātmyas and digests viz. that of great exaggeration and over-statement which is often repellent. If a man reads the description of one tīrtha and does not discount much as sheer hollow laudation, he is likely to feel that a pilgrimage to a certain tīrtha will yield all the desires in this life as well in the next and that after visiting a holy tīrtha like Kāśī or Prayāga he need not go to any other tīrtha, nor need he perform any *yajña* or act of charity and the like. A few striking passages may be cited here. The Vanaparva remarks that¹²⁷⁰ even gods and sages secured perfection at Puṣkara and that whoever takes a bath there and devoutly worships gods and his pitṛs secures rewards ten times of what the performance of Aśvamedha might give. About this very tīrtha viz. Puṣkara, the Padmapurāṇa says that there is no holier tīrtha in this world. The Vanaparva (83.
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145) in its eulogy of Pṛthūdaka asserts that Kurukṣetra is holy, that Sarasvatī is holier than Kurukṣetra and that Pṛthūdaka is holier than all other tīrthas The Matsyapurāṇa puts the ¹²⁷¹ comparative holiness of several tīrthas thus 'the waters of the Sarasvatī purify after (one bathes for) three days, those of Yamunā in seven days, those of the Ganges at once, while the water of the Narmadā purifies a man at sight of it.' In its eulogy of Vārāṇasī the Kūrma-purāṇa states 'there is no place higher than Vārāṇasī nor will there be one' (I. 31 64). The inveterate habit of exaggeration goes so far that it is said that by merely residing in Kāśī till one's death not only does a man become free from the great sin of brāhmaṇa murder but from the never-ending cycle of births and deaths and is not born again.¹²⁷² The Liṅgapurāṇa says the same thing. The Vāmanapurāṇa remarks ¹²⁷³ that *mukti* (release from *saṃsāra*) can be secured in four ways, viz. by knowledge of Brahman, by śrāddha at Gayā, by loss of life in repelling the carrying away of cows and by residence in Kurukṣetra and that those who die in Kurukṣetra never come down (to the earth) Mere residence in Kāśī was so much lauded that the Matsya (181 23), the Agni (112. 3) and other Purāṇas say that after repairing to Kāśī one should smash one's feet with a stone (in order that one may not be induced to visit another tīrtha)¹²⁷⁴ and stay in Kāśī forever.