Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- 1 Living Fossils: Impressions of a Once and Future World
- 2 Spiral Notebooks: A Multi-Local Shaligram Ethnography
- 3 Picked-Up Pieces: Constructing a History of Mustang
- 4 A Mirror to Our Being: Locating Muktinath, Finding Śālagrāma
- 5 A Bridge to Everywhere: The Birth/Place of Shaligrams
- 6 Turning to Stone: The Shaligram Mythic Complex
- 7 River Roads: Mobility, Identity, and Pilgrimage
- 8 Ashes and Immortality: Death and the Digital (After)Life
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Turning to Stone: The Shaligram Mythic Complex
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- 1 Living Fossils: Impressions of a Once and Future World
- 2 Spiral Notebooks: A Multi-Local Shaligram Ethnography
- 3 Picked-Up Pieces: Constructing a History of Mustang
- 4 A Mirror to Our Being: Locating Muktinath, Finding Śālagrāma
- 5 A Bridge to Everywhere: The Birth/Place of Shaligrams
- 6 Turning to Stone: The Shaligram Mythic Complex
- 7 River Roads: Mobility, Identity, and Pilgrimage
- 8 Ashes and Immortality: Death and the Digital (After)Life
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Shaligram origin stories are as variable as the stones themselves. Whether formed by the vajra-kita (thunderbolt worm) whose stone-carving capabilities continue to link religious creation stories with ammonite paleontology or by any number of curses levied at Vishnu for betraying the chastity of the goddess Tulsi, the mountain and river birth of a Shaligram is always preceded by a complex narrative of time, place, and personhood. The core conceptualization of bodies as landscapes, however, remains constant. The birth-death-rebirth processes of the landscape then becomes metonymic for the karmic birth-death-rebirth cycle shared by humans, their deities, and their Shaligrams.
Keywords: Shaligram, tulsi, myth, Himalayas, vajra-kita
“One who thinks the Deity in the temple to be made of wood or stone, who thinks of the spiritual master in the disciplic succession as an ordinary man, who thinks the Vaisnava in the Acyuta-gotra to belong to a certain caste or creed or who thinks of caranamrta or Ganges water as ordinary water is taken to be a resident of hell.”
− SB 4.21.12 from Padma PuranaAs the rickety bus barely rounded another corner, an audible gasp went through the passengers. A recent blizzard had taken out the road between the high Himalayan villages of Ranipauwa and Jharkot, leaving some 800 meters of mountainous mudslides between us and any number of severalhundred- foot dropoffs all the way down to the Kali Gandaki River Valley below. A few feet on our right were the steep walls of the Muktinath Valley and the 8,000+ meter peaks of Nilgiri and Dhaulagiri. To our left was a sheer vertical drop that began less than a foot away from the trundling wheels of our makeshift vehicle as we wound our way precariously along the peaks. More than once, our bus slid into the treacherous rocks, tilting almost completely sideways over the edge and holding us out over the endless expanse. It would take at least another hour white-knuckling to Kagbeni, the village along the river that would be our stopping point on the trip back to Jomsom, a few kilometers away.
Had I known the road was so poor at the time, I would have made my way down the mountain by my more typical choice of transportation – horseback. But the Himalayas are nothing if not unpredictable, and I hadn't anticipated the late-spring weather to be quite so fickle.
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- Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas , pp. 169 - 196Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020