What is Varanasi?
Varanasi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and the holiest city in Hinduism. It stands on the west bank of the Ganges in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. Hindu tradition names it Kāśī, the city of light, and holds it as the earthly abode of Śiva. It is one of the seven sacred cities of Hinduism (Saptapurī) and home to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, one of the twelve Jyotirliṅgas, the most sacred shrines to Śiva.
Varanasi vs other sacred cities
The seven sacred Hindu cities (Saptapurī) are Ayodhyā, Mathurā, Māyā (Haridwar), Kāśī (Varanasi), Kāñcī, Avantikā (Ujjain), and Dvārakā. Each is a tīrtha, a crossing place where the human and divine worlds are especially close. Varanasi holds a specific position among them. It is the city most directly associated with mokṣa, final liberation from the cycle of rebirth. Other sacred cities confer merit and accelerate spiritual progress. Varanasi is the city where dying itself is held to end the cycle. The tradition distinguishes this from mere sanctity. Haridwar and Rishikesh, also on the Ganges and major pilgrimage sites, do not carry the same claim.
The city in Hindu tradition
The tradition's central claim is specific: Śiva himself is said to whisper the tārakā mantra, the mantra of liberation, into the ear of each soul dying within the city limits. This account comes from the Kāśī Khaṇḍa, a section of the Skanda Purāṇa composed probably between the 10th and 14th centuries CE. It presents Varanasi not as a city containing sacred sites but as a sacred site in its entirety: Śiva's own territory, not territory set aside for Śiva. The ghats, the stepped stone embankments running down to the Ganges, are the city's ritual fabric. Dashashwamedh Ghat hosts the Gaṅgā Āratī each evening, a coordinated fire-offering to the river performed by priests at the water's edge. Manikarnika Ghat is the main cremation ground, and its funeral fire is said in tradition to have burned continuously since the city's founding. The Ganges at Varanasi is understood by Hindu tradition not as a river that flows through the city but as a goddess whose presence the city was built to serve.
Varanasi and Buddhism
Sarnath, about ten kilometres northeast of Varanasi, is the site of the Buddha's first sermon after his enlightenment at Bodh Gaya. He delivered the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Dharma, to five ascetics in the Deer Park there. This makes the area sacred to Buddhism independently of its Hindu significance. The Dhamek Stupa at Sarnath, built under the Maurya emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, marks the traditional site of the sermon. Varanasi and Sarnath together form one of the densest concentrations of sacred history in the world: a city where the two largest contemplative traditions of Asia each have foundational events.
Varanasi in the index
Sadhguru returns to Varanasi and its Śaiva significance across several teachings. His account of Kashi draws on the southern Indian Śaiva inheritance: the city as a living field, the Ganges as a spiritual current, the ghats as sites of practice rather than spectacle. Paramahansa Yogananda's *Autobiography of a Yogi* places Varanasi within the wider sacred geography of India the book traverses. The city appears as one node in a network of sites, teachers, and lineages that Yogananda moves through in his account of a contemplative life lived inside that geography. Both treat Varanasi not as a historical monument but as an active site.
