As Kashmir tells it: Shandilya's road
Sharada Mahatmya · Sharada Peeth, Kishanganga valley · 3 min read
There was a sage named Shandilya, the son of Matanga, who wanted one thing only. He wanted to see the goddess Sharada with his own eyes.
Sharada is the name Kashmir gives to Saraswati. For years Shandilya gave himself to hard vows, and for years he saw nothing. Then a voice from heaven told him where to go.
"Travel to the country called Shyamala," it said.
He set out on foot.
At a village called Ghosha the Great Goddess appeared to him on the road. She did not come in the form he was seeking.
"You shall see me as I truly am," she told him. "But not here. Come to the forest of Sharada."
She walked ahead of him for a little way. At the next village she vanished, and he was alone on the path again.
He went on, and came to a spring high on the hillside, the spring of Krishna Naga. He went down into the water to bathe.
When he came out, half of his body had turned to gold.
The old text explains the sign. He was halfway out of the dark. Half of him already belonged to the light he was walking toward, and half was still an ordinary tired man with a long climb ahead. People still call the village below that spring the Gold Village.
From the spring the path went straight up the mountain. Near the top, in a high meadow among the trees, Shandilya stopped. Goddesses were dancing there. He watched them, and then he climbed on over the pass.
He came down the other side, through a forest, to the bank of a great river. A sage named Gautama had his hermitage there. Shandilya went on. He crossed one more hill, and on its eastern slope he saw the god Ganesha.
Beyond the hill lay the forest of Sharada.
Shandilya stood among the trees and sang a hymn. He praised her by three names.
"Sharada," he sang. "Saraswati. Vagdevi, goddess of speech."
And she came. At that spot the goddess showed herself to him as she is, and it was the reward for all his years of trying. She invited him to her own home on the mountain called Shrishaila.
Before he left, the spirits of the ancestors came to him.
"Perform the rites for us," they said.
He went down to the great river to fetch water for their offering. As he lifted it, half of the water turned to honey. The honey ran down and became a stream of its own, which is called the Madhumati, the honey river, to this day. It joins the big river just below the shrine.
A temple was built on the place where she appeared. A scholar who reached it in 1892 found no carving inside. There was a single large, rough slab of stone on the floor. It is said to cover the spring out of which Sharada rose in front of Shandilya, and pilgrims bow to that stone.
As Basar tells it: three handfuls of sand
Temple tradition · Basar on the Godavari, Telangana · 1 min read
Far to the south, on the bank of the Godavari, the temple at Basar tells of another sage.
When the great war of Kurukshetra was over, the temple says, the sage Vyasa, the poet of the Mahabharata, wanted to be somewhere quiet. He took the sage Shuka and his students and came into the Dandaka forest, looking for a peaceful place.
He found it on the bank of the Godavari, and he settled there to pray.
The Divine Mother appeared to him.
"Make a home here for the three of us," she told him. She meant her three forms, Saraswati, Lakshmi and Kali.
Vyasa had no stone and no chisel. Every morning he went down to the Godavari to bathe. Every morning when he came up he carried three fistfuls of wet sand from the riverbed. He set them down in three small heaps.
Out of those heaps he shaped three goddesses, and he worshipped them.
The image of Saraswati at Basar is said to be that same figure of sand. She sits holding a veena, and her face is covered in turmeric paste. Lakshmi stands near her, and Kali has a shrine close by.
The place was called Vyasapuri, the temple says, and then Vasara, because Vyasa lived there, and in time the name wore down to Basar.
Parents bring small children here before they start school. The children practise their first letters in front of the goddess and offer her books, pens and pencils. The ceremony is called Akshara Abhyasam, the practice of letters. Many families take home a pinch of the turmeric from her face, in the belief that tasting it sharpens the mind.