Journey
Samadhis of saints
A samādhi is a grave that is also a shrine: the saint is held to be present in it rather than commemorated by it, so the place keeps drawing people who came for him. Six across four traditions and seven centuries — Varkarī, Dvaita, Vedāntin, nirguṇī, and one shrine neither Hindu nor Muslim will let the other have alone.
Stops (6)
- Ālandi · Dnyāneshwar — the samādhi entered alive, 1296
Dnyāneshwar is held to have gone down into the samādhi at about twenty-one, in full possession, and to be sitting there still; Eknāth reopened it two centuries later, found the tree root pressing on it, and cleared it. The palkhī that leaves each Āshādh carries his sandals, not an image, because the man is held not to have left.
- Maghar · Kabīr at Maghar — the grave and the samādhi
Kabīr moved to Maghar to die, in a place tradition said forfeited salvation, precisely to deny that geography could save anyone. His Hindu and Muslim followers are said to have quarrelled over the body and found flowers. A grave and a samādhi stand side by side there, built by the two communities, a few metres apart.
- Shirdi · Sāī Bābā of Shirdi — the samādhi mandir
Sāī Bābā lived some sixty years in a disused mosque he called Dwārkāmāi, kept a fire burning there continuously, and left no statement of which religion he belonged to. He died in 1918 and was buried in a Hindu devotee's unfinished temple. It is now among the most visited shrines in India and the fire is still alight.
- Shegaon · Gajānan Mahārāj — the Shegaon samādhi
A Vidarbha avadhūta who appeared in Shegaon in 1878 eating discarded food and left in 1910, with nothing known of where he came from. The samādhi has become one of Maharashtra's largest pilgrim destinations, and the trust that runs it is unusual in India for its discipline: free or near-free lodging, no queue-jumping for money.
- Mantrālayam · Rāghavendra Tīrtha — the brindāvana on the Tungabhadrā
A Dvaita scholar and head of the Kumbhakonam maṭha who is said to have entered his brindāvana alive in 1671 and to remain in it for seven hundred years. The stone came from the rock at Madhyārjuna. Pilgrims of every sect come, including Muslims — the local nawab is part of the shrine's own founding story.
- Belur Math · Vivekānanda's samādhi and the Order's house
Vivekānanda founded Belur Math in 1898 and died here in 1902, aged thirty-nine; his samādhi temple stands on the Hooghly bank beside Rāmakrishna's. The main temple was designed to read as temple, mosque and church at once from different angles. It is a monastic headquarters with a branch network, not only a burial place.