Journey

Shared & layered sites

Places where more than one tradition worships, in several cases at the same object: one footprint read four ways, one cave claimed by a Hindu guru and a Sufi, one boiling spring cooking for a langar and a prasad. It is the strongest argument against reading any of these networks as exclusive.

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Stops (24)

Adam's Peak / Sri Pāda · four traditions, one footprint
A single depression on a summit in Sri Lanka, read as the Buddha's footprint, as Shiva's, as Adam's and as St Thomas's, with Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Christian pilgrims climbing the same steps in the same season for four different reasons. There is no clearer case in the subcontinent, and the climb is done at night to reach the top at dawn.
Kataragama · four communities, one grove
Kataragama is Murugan for Tamil Hindus and Kataragama deviyo for Sinhala Buddhists, has a mosque and a Sufi shrine inside the same precinct, and recognises Vedda custodianship of the older cult beneath all of it. The fire-walking and the kavadi are done by people of more than one religion at the same festival.
Muktināth / Gandakī · Vishnu, Shakti and a gompa
Muktinath at three thousand eight hundred metres in the Kali Gandaki: a Vishnu shrine with a hundred and eight waterspouts, a Shakta pitha, and a Buddhist gompa in which the same natural gas flame is worshipped as Chumig Gyatsa. It is also the source region of the shaligram stones used in Vishnu worship across India.
Manikaran · one boiling spring
Manikaran in the Parvati valley, where a gurdwara and Shiva and Rama temples share one bank and food is cooked in the same boiling spring water for the langar and for the prasad. The Sikh tradition attaches the place to Guru Nanak's visit and the Hindu to Shiva and Parvati, and the kitchen is common to both.
Bābā Budangiri · a cave and a coffee plant
A ridge above Chikkamagaluru holding a cave shrine claimed at once as the seat of the Hindu Dattatreya and as the dargah of the seventeenth-century Sufi Baba Budan — one of the sharpest surviving cases of a genuinely shared south Indian shrine, and litigated for decades. Baba Budan is also credited with bringing the first coffee seeds to India from Mocha.
Nāgore Dargah · a dargah with gopurams
Shahul Hamid's shrine on the Coromandel coast, funded in part by the Thanjavur Maratha rajas and attended by Hindu and Muslim fishermen alike, whose minarets read as Tamil temple gopurams because that is what the masons who built them knew how to build. Architectural borrowing here is not metaphorical; it is the same workforce.
Dharmasthala · three traditions, one administration
Dharmasthala in the Tulu country: a Shiva temple administered by a Jain family, with Vaishnava Madhva priests conducting the worship, and Annappa Panjurli among the local spirits attached to it. The arrangement has no parallel anywhere else in India, and it has run continuously for some eight hundred years. The arrangement has no parallel anywhere else in India and has run for some eight hundred years.
Ellorā · three religions, one escarpment
Thirty-four excavations cut into a single basalt escarpment over five centuries — twelve Buddhist, seventeen Hindu, five Jain — in sequence rather than in competition, with the same quarry, the same masons' techniques and in places the same iconographic vocabulary. It is the purest available example of a layered, non-exclusive sacred landscape.
Ellorā · the monolith
The Kailasa temple at Ellora, cut downward out of one basalt hill under the Rashtrakutas by removing some two hundred thousand tonnes of rock — subtractive architecture at building scale, with a gateway, a court, a shrine, a Nandi pavilion and elephants all released from the same piece of stone.
Khuldābād · a necropolis beside a jyotirlinga
Khuldabad, the Deccan Chishti burial town, four kilometres from the Grishneshwar jyotirlinga and from Ellora's caves. Aurangzeb is buried here in an open grave with no dome, paid for by his own copying of Qurans. A jyotirlinga, a three-religion cave complex and a Sufi necropolis lie inside one afternoon's walk of each other.
Dhamnar caves · two religions, one quarry
The Dhamnar caves in Mandsaur district, where some fifty rock-cut Buddhist excavations with a large reclining Buddha sit beside the monolithic Dharmarajeshwara temple cut from the same rock face in a later period. Two traditions quarrying one cliff, several centuries apart, is Ellora's pattern at a smaller scale. Two traditions quarrying one cliff several centuries apart is Ellora's pattern at a smaller scale.
Champaner-Pavagadh · a sultanate capital on a goddess's hill
Champaner at the foot of Pavagadh and the Kalika Mata temple on its summit: a pre-Mughal Islamic capital of mosques, gateways and step-wells laid around and below a hill that was and is a Shakta pilgrimage site. Both are still in use, and the ropeway to the temple runs over the sultanate city.
Rājagriha / Rajgir · three traditions, one set of hills
Rajgir, the Magadhan capital: the Vulture's Peak where the Buddha taught and the first Buddhist council was held, a major Jain landscape with temples on all five hills, and hot springs that are a Hindu tirtha. Three traditions attach to the same ring of hills because all three began in this kingdom.
Vaishālī · a Buddhist and Jain origin point
Vaishali, where the order of nuns was founded and the second Buddhist council held, and — as Kundagrama — the Svetambara Jain birthplace of Mahavira. The two renunciant traditions that changed Indian religion both begin in the same small republic, within a generation of each other. The two renunciant traditions that reshaped Indian religion both begin in the same small republic, within a generation of each other, and both councils were held within fifty kilometres.
Anurādhapura · a transplanted tree
Anuradhapura, the Sri Lankan monastic capital, holding the Sri Maha Bodhi grown from a cutting of the Bodh Gaya tree brought by Sanghamitta in the third century BCE. It is the oldest documented planted tree in the world, and it makes the island's ritual centre a living copy of a Bihar one.
Nainātivu Nāgapooshani Amman · an island pitha
Nainativu off the Jaffna coast, reached by boat, where the Nagapooshani Amman temple sits beside a Buddhist vihara on the same small island. The temple's serpent traditions belong to one of the oldest layers of South Asian worship, and the island is a Shakta pitha in a Buddhist-majority country. Serpent worship is among the oldest layers of South Asian religion, and this is a Shakta pitha in a Buddhist-majority country.
Girnār · a mountain of clusters
Girnar, a single massif carrying Jain temple groups on one summit, the Dattatreya shrine on another, a Shakta shrine, an Ashokan rock edict at its foot and the Nathpanthi Bhavnath fair below. A regional pilgrimage made by ascent and clustering rather than by a single sanctum. An Ashokan rock edict stands at its foot and the Nathpanthi Bhavnath fair is held below it, so the mountain carries four traditions and an imperial inscription.
Pachmarhī / Mahādeo hills · prehistory under a pilgrimage
Painted Mesolithic shelters on the same Satpura massif as the Chauragarh Shiva shrine, where pilgrims still carry iron tridents to the summit and leave them. Prehistoric marking and living pilgrimage on one hill, a few hours' walk apart, is continuity of sacred use without continuity of meaning. It is continuity of sacred use without continuity of meaning, which is the most honest thing that can be said about most of these hills.
Mount Kailāsa · the reference mountain
Kailasa, the paradigmatic abode of Shiva, and a mountain no tradition permits to be climbed. It is sacred to Hindus, to Buddhists as Kang Rinpoche, to Jains as Ashtapada where the first Tirthankara attained liberation, and to Bon — four traditions circumambulating one peak from different starting points. Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Bon practitioners circumambulate it from different starting points, and nobody climbs it.
Mānasarovar & Rākshastal · the lake below it
Manasarovar, walked as part of the same circuit as the mountain, and the catchment from which the Indus, Sutlej, Karnali and Brahmaputra all rise. The pilgrimage is shared by the same four traditions, and the hydrology is the reason the place was noticed by all of them. The hydrology is why all four traditions noticed the place, and the lake parikrama is walked with the mountain's.
Kālī shrine at Vindhyāchala · a cave in a triad
The Kali shrine at Vindhyachal, the dark cave that is the third point of a circuit with Vindhyavasini and Ashtabhuja — a triune goddess landscape in which the pilgrim must complete all three. Cave shrines of this kind are usually the oldest layer at any goddess site, and the circuit is walked in one night.
Daulatabad · a fort in the same valley
Daulatabad, four kilometres from Khuldabad and from Ellora, is the fourth thing in that valley: a Yadava hill fort rebuilt by a sultanate, made an imperial capital for a few years, and left. Rock-cut religion, Sufi burial, a jyotirlinga and imperial fortification occupy a single small landscape. Rock-cut religion, Sufi burial, a jyotirlinga and imperial fortification occupy one small valley.
Halesi Mahadev · two liturgies, one cave
Halesi in the eastern hills of Khotang, a limestone cave worshipped by Hindus as Shiva's and by Buddhists as Maratika, the cave in which Padmasambhava and Mandarava are held to have attained deathlessness, with Kirat communities holding their own claim on it. There is no image in the main hall — the rock itself is the object — and both liturgies are performed in it on different days.
Ross Hill & three sacred hills · Visakhapatnam — three hills, three faiths
Three hills over one harbour, each with a different faith on it: the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes on Ross Hill, the dargah of Baba Ishaq Madina on Darga Konda, and a Venkateswara temple on the third. Most of the shared sites in this journey are one place claimed by two traditions, sometimes in court. Visakhapatnam is the other arrangement — three shrines on neighbouring ridges, visible together from the water, which nobody disputes because nobody has to.