Badrinath

(“Lord of Badri”) Sacred site (tirtha) in
the Himalayan area of Chamoli district
in the state of Uttar Pradesh, near the
headwaters of the Alakananda River,
the largest tributary of the Ganges.
Badrinath is high in the mountains at an
altitude of over 10,000 feet. It is connected
to Tibet by the Mana Pass, one of the traditional land routes by which Chinese
goods have come into India. Badrinath’s
high altitude also means that it is only
accessible between late April and
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Badrinath
Temple to the god Vishnu in the Himalayan town of Badrinath.
Parts of the temple’s architecture suggest that it may have originally been a Buddhist temple.
October, after which it is closed for the
winter months; this pattern is echoed at
Yamunotri, Gangotri, and Kedarnath,
the three major Himalayan pilgrimage
sites. The town’s name comes from its
presiding deity, Vishnu, whose temple
is the reason for the site’s existence. The
main image in the temple is claimed to
have miraculously emerged full-formed
from a shalagram, a particular type of
black stone containing fossilized
ammonite, which is itself considered a
“self-manifested” form of Vishnu.
Badrinath has a long history as a venerable sacred site. Scholars believe that
it was occupied by a Buddhist temple
until several centuries into the present
millennium, based on the architecture
of some of the temple’s older parts. Local
tradition reports that until the middle of
the twentieth century when the Chinese
sealed the Tibetan border, Buddhists
came from Tibet for the temple’s closing
rites in the fall, bringing a hand-woven
blanket to drape around the image. In
Hinduism, Badrinath is one of the four
dhams (“divine abodes”) connected
with the philosopher Shankaracharya.
Shankaracharya reportedly chose one
Hindu sacred center in each corner of
the subcontinent to combat the spread
of Buddhism and revitalize Hindu religion. At each center he established a
Dashanami Sanyasi monastic center
(math) to train learned monks.
Badrinath is associated with the sacred
center Jyotir Math in the Himalayan
town of Joshimath, forty miles south.
Each winter, the image at Badrinath is
symbolically transported to the
Narasimha temple in Joshimath.
According to Badrinath temple
records, for several hundred years temple worship was performed by the
Dandi Sanyasis; they were a group of
ascetics devoted to the god Shiva who
were also Nambudiri brahmins, the
same caste into which Shankaracharya
is supposed to have been born. When
the last of these ascetics died without a
successor in 1776, the local king who
served as the protector of the shrine
invited a non-ascetic Nambudiri brahmin
to serve as the temple’s priest. In deference to his ascetic predecessors, this
priest was given the title rawal
(“deputy”), and his extended family has
run the shrine since then. The rawal is
the only person allowed to touch the
image, and as a consequence he is
required to remain a bachelor, lest the
ritual impurity (ashaucha) arising from
the birth of a child (sutakashaucha)
render him unable to attend to his
duties. For a long time, the rawals had
sole rights to the offerings given at the
shrine, but since 1939 the temple has
been managed by a committee, and the
rawal has been restricted to ritual duties.