Varanasi at dawn

Varanasi — Kashi, Benares — is older than history, said to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. When the newly awakened Buddha walked from Bodhgaya to Sarnath to give his first teaching, he passed through this city, already ancient then.

A boat at first light

The great experience of Varanasi is the river at dawn. We take a boat onto the Ganges before sunrise and drift past the ghats — the broad stone stairs where the city bathes, prays, launders and mourns. Pilgrims stand waist-deep facing the rising sun; priests perform the morning rites; at Manikarnika the cremation fires burn without pause, as they have for centuries. It is life and death held together in one unbroken shore, and there is nothing else quite like it on earth.

Why we include it

We are clear that Varanasi is a Hindu holy city, not a Buddhist one. We include it because it completes the ground of the first teaching — the world into which the dharma was first spoken — and because to sit on the river at dawn is to feel the sheer age of the spiritual life of this land. The evening Ganga aarti, a fire ceremony of lamps and bells, closes the day before we turn to Sarnath.