नमस्ते भारत से

We climbed up a mountain, without a real trail.

There was an awesome view from the top. Also, there were many megaliths at the top. They're big stones that someone quarried from miles away, and dragged up a mountain to make huts out of. Noone knows why this was done, or who exactly did it. Some local legends say that the huts were houses of the Pandavas (the heroes of the Mahabharata), although they would have been built much later than the epic was set. It's pretty common, as you may have noticed from these posts, to attribute important structures to epic figures.

This is a place known as "Sita's Bath." It's said to be the place that Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana and the Hindu model of the ideal wife, dropped her jewelry. All of the little bundles attached to the tree are offerings to Sita from women praying for fertility.

At the top of the mountain, there was also a pond with natural lotuses! Lotuses are the national flower of India. They also symbolize the path to enlightenment, in Buddhism especially, because they grow in murky, inhospitable water before breaking through to the surface and blossoming. These flowers were one of the things that I most wanted to see in India, and I had almost resigned myself to not seeing any in their natural habitat at this point in the trip.

That morning, I woke up at 4:30 am to go hiking. It was necessary to get up at this hour so that seven other people and I could go to a nearby hill and then hike up it in time to see the sun rise at 6:00 over a temple at the top of the hill that is a popular pilgrimage spot. The actual climb was not exactly “hiking,” but instead walking up 1000 steps. Literally 1000 steps. It ended up being cloudy, so we didn't actually get a view of the sunrise, but we did get to watch it gradually become light in the mist at the top of the temple. It was fun to be at the level of the clouds. Also, after it became light, a busload of pilgrims dressed in black lungis drove up the mountain and arrived at the temple for a morning service. It seemed funny that we all had climbed the hill when they hadn't.

Since this was our last day in the hotel at Mysore, when we left the hotel at 8 am, the staff blessed us for our journey. This involved placing bindis on our foreheads and giving us the traditional gifts of a betel leaf, an areca nut, a banana, and a coconut. These things, incidentally, are what you also give the gods at a temple here.

Then, we climbed up more stairs to get to a famous outcrop at the most popular Jain pilgrimage site in India. This outcrop was only 380 steps to the top, although the mountainside was so steep that it hardly felt like walking on steps at all. This wasn't so bad on the way up. However, coming down the mountain felt like very slowly falling and was quite unpleasant.

While at the site of worship near the feet of the statue, we were blessed again with all the other tourists/pilgrims. Then, after making a small monetary donation, we were taken up on a scaffold that brought us up to about waist-hight in relation to the statue. This gave us the opportunity to photograph the surrounding landscape, which is very striking because there is a large mixture of geographical climates (arid, wet, and irrigated arid) all in the same region, and it looks impossible that they could all go together. Many people also took the photographic opportunity to get a picture of themselves at level with the statue's butt, which it turns out is quite, ah, anatomically accurate.

You've probably seen a picture of this place before; it's a giant naked man carved on top of a mountain. The naked man is the Mahavira, the founder and central figure of Jainism. Jainism is a lot like Buddhism in that it advocates nonviolence, renounces the idea of caste, and focuses on spiritual liberation, or moksha. The two religions also were founded at about the same period in time, and the iconographic portrayals of the Buddha and the Mahavira look quite a bit alike. You can tell the Mahavira from the Buddha, however, because he is depicted with broader shoulders and exposed genitalia, while the Buddha is usually covered up. The latter characteristic is included in the iconography because, ideally, in the Jain tradition, as you become enlightened toward the end of your life, you give up everything, including your clothes. Also, after doing this, you're supposed to renounce the world's pleasures so fully that you allow yourself to starve to death. Needless to say, not everyone who follows the religion gets to this pinnacle of holiness.