History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v5.c74.43.1

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.