What is the Trimbakeshwar temple?

A ling is usually one upright stone, for Shiva alone. The ling in the shrine here has three faces, for Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva together, and the jyotirling at Trimbakeshwar tells the story of how it came to be here.

It does not stand up out of the floor the way a ling usually does. It sits low, in a hollow in the floor of the shrine, and you look down into it. On Mondays a jewelled crown is put on the ling, and the crown goes out of the temple on the image in the palanquin. On the first day of Kartik a golden mask is put on the ling in the evening.

The temple keeps three pujas a day: the morning puja is Brahma’s, the midday puja is Mahadev’s, which is Shiva’s, and the evening puja is Vishnu’s. Each is a full puja of its own, and the day runs from one to the next.

Monday is Shiva’s day, and every Monday the god leaves the temple. In the afternoon the image is put into the palanquin with the jewelled crown on, the palanquin is decorated with flowers, and it is carried out of the temple and through the lanes of the town to Kushavarta. A कुण्ड kund is a tank or pool with stone sides and steps, fed by the river or a spring, and Kushavarta is the square kund in the middle of Trimbakeshwar. Puja is done at the kund, and then the palanquin is carried back. People follow it the whole way, and the lanes fill up behind it.

A पुरोहित purohit is the priest who performs a rite for a family and makes the offerings in the family’s name. The purohits of the town, the Purohit Sangh, organise the Monday procession, and the priests at Trimbakeshwar has who they are. The procession is old. In the 1880s the god was being fed three times a day and dressed at night, and every Monday he was taken out in his palanquin.

Two fairs are the biggest days of the year. One is Mahashivratri, in the month of Magh. The palanquin of Trimbakraja — the king Trimbak — is carried right through the village, and at night there is kirtan in the temple. The other is the full moon of Kartik. For three days, the thirteenth, the fourteenth and the full moon, there is kirtan in the temple, Trimbakraja goes out in his chariot, and there is puja at Kushavarta. When the chariot comes back to the temple the lamp-pillars in front of it are worshipped and every lamp on them is lit. A दीपमाळ dipmal is a lamp-pillar, a tall stone column with branching brackets all the way up it, each bracket holding a lamp.

The rest of the year has its own days. On Gudhi Padva, the first day of Chaitra, the trustees do a special puja early in the morning, the deity goes out in procession in the evening, and gudhis are hoisted. In Shravan the god is specially dressed for Nagpanchami and for Narali Purnima, and on Pola, the no-moon day of that month, the bullocks go in procession. Ganesh Chaturthi is kept for ten days in Bhadrapada. On the eighth day of Ashwin, in Navratri, the goddesses — Bhuvaneshwari, Kolambika, Nilambika and the others — are given a sari and choli. On Dasara the weapons are worshipped and in the evening the gods go out to cross the boundary of the town. On the first day of Kartik the trustees do a special puja in the morning and the golden mask goes on the ling in the evening. On Vasant Panchami, in Magh, the god is specially dressed again. And in Falgun there is Holi, the god is dressed for Dhulivandan the day after, and on Rangpanchami colour is thrown over him.

The temple is built of black stone, and it is heavy. The whole building is set on a plan that is a square with the corners pushed in and out, and at every angle there is a buttress that spreads at the bottom, so that the temple looks as if it has been rooted into the ground. Every buttress has hollows cut down its face, and every hollow has a carved figure in it, men and animals, with flowers and scrollwork crowded round them. Above the ledge that runs round the top of the walls there are small spires all the way round, each the same shape as the big one, and the big spire goes up behind the hall over the shrine, in layers, with a carved ornament on each layer and a kalash, a pot covered in gold, at the very top.

In front of the shrine is a square hall, the mandap, with a door in each of its four faces and a porch at each door. The doorways are carved, and a double band of carving runs round the porches and the hall above them. In front of the temple doors are the dipmals, and between them and the door, under a small carved stone pavilion with its own roof, sits the Nandi, the bull, facing the shrine.

The temple has a gate on each of the four sides — east, west, south and north — and each gate is given a meaning here. East is the beginning, west is maturity, south is completion, and north is revelation. The Peshwas and the temple has who built the temple and when.

Come in through one of the four gates and go round to the front, where you see the whole of it at once — the lamp-pillars, the Nandi in his pavilion, the doors of the hall behind him and the spire going up behind that. Stop at the Nandi. He is facing the shrine, the way a Nandi always does, and you are standing where he is looking.

Inside, the hall is dark after the sun, and the shrine is at the far end of it. Go up to the door of the shrine and look down, not ahead. The ling is below the level of the floor, in a hollow, and the three faces are in there. That is the thing people have come to see, and it takes a moment to see it.

Then go out into the town. Kushavarta is a short walk away through the lanes, a square kund with steps down into the water on all four sides, and people bathe there first and come on to the temple, which is also the way the Monday palanquin goes. Kushavarta is the kund. The Godavari rises on Brahmagiri, the hill above Trimbakeshwar. People say she disappears into the hill and comes out again at Kushavarta, and the source of the Godavari tells the whole of that story. Brahmagiri is the hill itself, which you can see from the temple gate. An अखाड़ा akhada is an order of sadhus with its own head, its own rule, its own property and its own place in the bathing order at a Kumbh. In a Simhastha year the Shaiva and Udasin akhadas bathe at Kushavarta and come on from the kund to this temple, while the Vaishnav akhadas bathe at Ramkund in Nashik, and why the Kumbh is at two places has that arrangement.

One more place in the town belongs with the temple. Sant Nivruttinath, the elder brother of Sant Dnyaneshwar and his guru, took samadhi at Trimbakeshwar, and his samadhi is here. Lakhs of Varkaris come to Trimbakeshwar for his yatra on his punyatithi, the day of his death, and the town is full of them.