Jyeshteswara: The Eldest God: Kashmir's Oldest Temple

Above the Boulevard and the shikaras of Dal Lake, a bare stone temple stands on a hilltop a thousand feet up, watching over Srinagar the way it has watched over every version of Srinagar there has ever been. Most visitors climb the steps for the view — and it is one of the great views in India, Dal on one side, the Jhelum on the other, Hari Parbat across the water. Then they come down.

 

They climb a viewpoint. What they've actually climbed is the oldest sacred place in the city  and a temple whose real, ancient name almost no one who visits it knows.

 

The Eldest God

 

Kashmir's first historian, Kalhana, writing in the twelfth century, called the hill simply Gopadri — Gopa's hill. He records that a king named Gopaditya, perhaps around 371 BCE, gave the land at its foot to learned Brahmins newly arrived in the valley; that settlement is still there today, its ancient name Gopa Agraharas worn down over the centuries into the modern Gupkar. And on the summit, tradition says, Gopaditya raised a shrine to Jyeshteshwara — “Shiva as the Eldest”, the senior god, older than all the rest.

 

That is the temple's true and oldest name — Jyeshteshwara, not Shankaracharya — and it tells you what this hill has always been: the seat of the most ancient Shiva, set on the highest rock above the valley. And what a valley to watch over. In Kashmir's own telling, this whole land was once a great lake, Satisar, drained by the sage Kashyapa; its holy river, the Vitasta, was the goddess Uma herself, called forth by Shiva's trident at Verinag. From this summit, the Eldest God looked down on a world newly won from the water.

 

Later ages layered their own kings onto the story — Jalauka, said to be a son of the emperor Ashoka; the Hun king Mihirakula; the great builder Lalitaditya. Historians still argue about when the stone building you see today was actually raised, with estimates spread across a thousand years. But on one thing the traditions agree: worship on this rock is older than the city of Srinagar itself.

 

The philosopher on the hill

 

The name on the signboards now comes from a later visitor. In the eighth century, tradition holds, the young philosopher Adi Shankara — the great teacher of “Advaita” the doctrine that the soul and the absolute are one and the same — journeyed all the way to Kashmir to carry the path of Vedanta and the worship of Shiva into the valley.

 

By then the hill itself had passed through more than one faith: for a time it had held a Buddhist monastery, and Kashmiri Buddhists knew the summit by their own name for it. Shankara climbed to renew the older devotion — to the Eldest God waiting in the stone. On this rock he sat in meditation before the Shiva lingam; the seat they still call his tapasthali, and the small cave where he is said to have withdrawn, are shown to pilgrims to this day. Here, the tradition says, he passed into the very realization at the heart of his teaching — that the self and Shiva are not two — and here he did the most to root the worship of Shiva across the valley.

 

From that stillness the hill took his name. A philosopher who climbed to the oldest shrine in Kashmir and found, at the top, only Shiva — and himself. There is no more Kashmiri story than that.

 

And the hill went on doing this. Twelve centuries after Shankara, the yogi Paramahansa Yogananda climbed to the same temple and, by his own account, fell into an ecstatic trance — seeing in it a vision of a hilltop mansion in a far country. Years later, standing before the building that would become his Self-Realization Fellowship headquarters above Los Angeles, he knew it at once: he had first seen it here, on Shankara's hill.

 

The thousand lingas of clay

 

The hill carries yet another ancient name — Sandhiman-Parvata — and behind it lies one of the most Shaiva stories Kashmir tells. Sandhimat was a sage and minister to a jealous king, who had him cast into poverty, imprisoned for ten years, and at last executed on a stake. But when his teacher — a devotee of Shiva — came to perform the last rites, he found a prophecy that a throne still awaited the dead man. Restored to life, Sandhimat became king and ruled as Shiva's servant, consecrating a thousand lingas every single day; and once, when the thousand could not be carved in stone in time, they were shaped instead from clay. At the height of his power, faced with revolt, he simply laid down the crown and walked away an ascetic — abandoning fortune, he said, before it could abandon him.

 

From that vow descends a rite still kept today. On Shravan Poornima — the high full moon of the Shiva month — devotees take the mineral-rich volcanic clay from the foot of the hill and shape it into small Shiva lingas: Parthishwar, the Lord made of sacred earth. They worship them, and by evening return them to the river. The hill does not only hold Shiva in stone. Once a year, it lets you make him from its own soil — and let him go.

 

The temple on the rock

 

Climb the 243 steps up the hill — and then, at the top, a final flight to the sanctum of thirty-six more, in three sets of eighteen, twelve and six: one step for each of the thirty-six tattvas, the elements from which Kashmiri Shaivism holds the whole cosmos to be built. The shrine itself is austere and ancient: a tall octagonal base of grey stone bearing a square chamber, all raised on a spur of volcanic rock older than the Himalaya. Inside, past a low doorway, the chamber is dark and round; four columns ring a basin; and in the basin stands a Shiva lingam encircled by a serpent — the naga again, the same serpent-power that guards the spring at Verinag and coils through all of Kashmir's oldest faith.

 

The stones remember every age that has climbed to them. Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin repaired the roof after an earthquake brought it down; a Persian inscription inside dates from the reign of Shah Jahan; the Dogra king Gulab Singh rebuilt the steps; the lingam now worshipped was set in place in the nineteenth century; and a statue of Adi Shankara was installed only in 1961. Older still, and long gone, was a great stone stairway that once descended all the way down to the Jhelum.

 

And then there is the light. Standing higher than anything around it, the temple is the first thing in Srinagar the dawn touches — the rising sun striking the summit while the valley below still lies in shadow, and pilgrims climbing in the dark to meet it there. In 1925 the hill was given a second crown of light: the Maharaja of Mysore, on a visit to Kashmir, had electric searchlights installed at the temple — five ringing the shrine and one blazing from the very top — and paid for the electricity himself, so that after nightfall the oldest temple in Kashmir would burn like a lamp above the sleeping city. Sun by day, fire by night, the hill has never quite gone dark.

 

How to stand at Shankaracharya

 

Go early, before the heat and the crowds, and climb slowly — the steps are steep and the air is thin. At the top, don't just turn to the view. Stand at the sanctum and remember what this rock has held: the Eldest God of a people two thousand years gone, and the seat where the great teacher of oneness sat in meditation and knew the self and Shiva to be one. Then turn to Dal Lake and the Jhelum below — the valley the sage Kashyapa drained, its river born of Shiva's own trident — and understand that you are standing on the one spot from which every Kashmir there has ever been looked back at itself.

 

A viewpoint gives you the city. This hill gives you all of its lives at once.