Vaidyanath (Baidyanath)

As Vaidyanath, the healer, the lord is sought for recovery from illness and affliction, and the shrine's great season is Shravan, the monsoon month, when for weeks on end lakhs of saffron-clad kanwariyas carry Ganga water drawn at Sultanganj — more than a hundred kilometres away — on foot to bathe the lingam, in one of the largest pilgrim gatherings on earth. Many go on from here to Basukinath.

The identity of the Vaidyanath Jyotirlinga is, however, genuinely contested: three shrines claim it — Deoghar in Jharkhand, Parli Vaijnath in Maharashtra, and Baijnath in Himachal's Kangra valley — and no government body has ever officially settled the question. Deoghar, the ancient Chitabhoomi, is the most widely accepted, but the debate is old and unresolved, and each site keeps its devotees.

Many pilgrims complete the vow only by carrying their offering onward to Basukinath, some forty kilometres away, so that the two shrines are spoken of together. Within the courtyard the daily round of worship goes on unbroken — the pre-dawn opening, the abhishek, the binding of the Shiva and Parvati spires with a length of cloth — and the union of Jyotirlinga and Shakti Peetha in one place gives Deoghar a devotional weight matched by few other shrines.

Baba Baidyanath Dham stands at Deoghar — the name means 'abode of the gods' — in the Santhal Parganas of Jharkhand. Shiva is worshipped here as Vaidyanath, the 'lord of physicians', the divine healer, and the shrine is among the most thronged of all the Jyotirlingas.

Its legend is Ravana's. The demon-king, having won a boon through fierce penance and the offering of his heads, sought to carry Shiva as a lingam to Lanka on the condition that it never touch the ground on the way; but he was delayed, and the lingam was set down here — in one telling by a cowherd who was Vishnu in disguise — and became rooted forever. Frustrated, Ravana is said to have pressed it with his thumb, leaving a mark shown to this day.

Deoghar is also counted a Shakti Peetha, the place where Sati's heart is said to have fallen, worshipped at the Jai Durga (Hridaya) shrine — so that the complex holds both Shiva and Shakti, the two joined by a sacred thread strung between their spires.

The temple is a north-Indian shikhara shrine, its pyramidal tower rising to about twenty-two metres and crowned by a tri-pointed punchsula and, at its apex, an eight-petalled lotus gem said to have been given by Ravana.

It stands at the heart of a walled courtyard that gathers some twenty-one subsidiary temples around it, joined by the sacred thread that binds Baidyanath to the Parvati shrine opposite. Raja Puran Mal is named in tradition as builder of the present structure; its fabric is plain and much-renewed, shaped by centuries of continuous, crowded worship rather than by fine carving.