best shows on earth. But always, there 
is another open courtyard, and in every 
direction are those huge towers reach- 
ing up into the sky, leading the pilgrim 
on to the innermost shrine. 
At the very entrance to that shrine, 
in the darkest recesses, the holiday- 
making atmosphere may still prevail. 
But there is a different quality to the 
sound and to the light, the aroma of in- 
cense or fresh jasmine pervades the 
shadows, and the stone floors feel espe- 
cially cool to the pilgrim’s bare feet. 
Most delay their entrance into the 
shrine by making the final parikrama. 
This last inner court, covered by a 
heavy stone roof, sometimes painted 
and always rich with carvings, is lit 
mainly by openings that pierce the 
walls at the ceiling, letting in shafts of 
sunlight. Today there is an occasional 
fluorescent light, fed by straggling 
wires, sputtering away as if gently 
mocking the futility and inadequacy of 
modern technology. 
The pilgrim may walk around that 
inner courtyard several times, prepar- 
ing for the ultimate experience of the 
pilgrimage, but there is nothing sancti- 
monious about this. In most cases the 
scene looks more like a crowd of people 
milling around, finding something to 
do until the box office opens and admits 
them into the movie house. And when 
the pilgrim emerges there is still no 
smugness. I saw no one who appeared 
to have achieved instant enlighten- 
ment, but a transformation had taken 
place. The most common manifestation 
was a quality of effervescence. Those 
with cameras immediately got their 
friends or some bystander to take a pic- 
ture of them at the entrance, beside the 
sign that says “No Photography Be- 
yond This Point.” Not once did I see 
anyone photographed before going into 
the inner shrine. 
There are, of course, many different 
kinds of man-made shrines other than 
temples. Frequently, Muslim, Hindu, 
Buddhist, and Jain shrines can be found 
huddled together, combining their di- 
verse efforts to sanctify the same place, 
as at Rajgir, nestled in the hills between 
the ancient Buddhist university of Na- 
landa and the place of the Buddha’s en- 
lightenment, at Buddh Gaya. There it is 
impossible, to be exclusive about reli- 
gion, and gaudy pictures of Christian 
figures and saints are on sale alongside 
similar pictures of Indian deities. A 
Muslim mosque looks across to hot 
springs, sacred to Hindus, lying at the 
base of a hill sanctified by Jains and 
Buddhists alike. 
Sometimes man glorifies himself, 
perhaps unconsciously, by carving gi- 
gantic images of holy people, such as 
the enormous sitting, standing, or 
recumbent figures of the Buddha and 
other teachers. One of these, at Sravan- 
abelagola in a remote, hot, and dusty 
part of southern India, is reached by 
climbing a precipitous flight of six hun- 
dred steps cut into the rocky mountain- 
side. The sixty-foot high image of a Jain 
epic hero, Gommateswara, is set back 
on the summit and cannot be seen from 
below: even on reaching the top, the pil- 
grim has to pass several other shrines 
and through the wall of a large court- 
yard before reaching the ultimate goal. 
There two immense feet planted in a 
huge lotus seem to dare the pilgrim to 
look upward and meet the eyes of Gom- 
mateswara. A priest at this shrine told 
me that some pilgrims never look up; 
they perform puja at the feet and find 
that is enough. “It is not everyone that 
wants to look up and reach that high,” 
he said. And indeed, as pilgrims, young 
and old, arrived, some of them barely 
gave the gigantic figure as much as a 
glance. That was not what they had 
come for; they had come to worship 
where pilgrims had come for a thou- 
sand years. It is the power of these im- 
ages — or of living saints and other 
sacred people — to inspire devotion in 
the living that draws the pilgrims; the 
pilgrimage is a manifestation of that de- 
votion and is more important and per- 
haps even more sacred than the shrine 
itself. 
This helps explain the attraction of 
so many of India’s pilgrims to “holy 
men,” some of whom are known to be 
charlatans, brazen tricksters, or com- 
mercial performers and who seem to be 
anything but holy. Like the tourist who 
knows that he has been taken, the pil- 
grim has at least had an experience he 
would not have had otherwise. The 
tourist determined to find enjoyment 
will find it no matter what; pilgrims 
who seek spiritual growth or some oth- 
er kind of religious gain can win by pit- 
ting themselves against the quacks and 
frauds they are bound to meet on the 
pilgrim trail. Many a shrewd trickster, 
claiming to be divine, asserts that he de- 
liberately assumes a gross form and sur- 
rounds himself with the trappings of 
degeneracy in order to test his disciples. 
It is a difficult argument to counter. 
Thirty years ago, the best-known of the 
living teachers assiduously refrained 
from any semblance of trickery, pre- 
tended to no miracles, and were un- 
touched by the slightest scandal. But 
today the best-known gurus are highly 
controversial, some openly perform 
sleight of hand when they appear in 
public and even make sexual advances 
in private. 
There is no precise counterpart in 
tourism to this third kind of pilgrimage, 
the pilgrimage to sacred people. Tourist 
resorts do indeed sometimes grow up 
around the place of the birth or death of 
famous people and become sites of sec- 
ular pilgrimage to honor heroes. But 
there is nothing quite like the pilgrim’s 
quest for contact with a living person 
touched with power. 
The extent to which India’s gurus 
open their homes, or ashrams, to the 
public varies. In the course of my re- 
search at Benares Hindu University I 
visited most of the best-known ashrams 
and, probably because of my work, was 
readily given access to the teachers 
themselves. But that is not always the 
case. Anandamayi, for instance, who 
was my teacher for two years, went to 
great lengths to escape the public. At a 
moment’s notice she would make her 
way to the nearest train station and 
take off for some destination, perhaps 
hundreds of miles away. It took a par- 
ticularly devoted pilgrim to follow that 
kind of trail. 
Down in Mangalore, on the west 
coast, Swami Ramdas used to tell pil- 
grims who sought him out to go and 
climb a nearby mountain every dawn 
and learn from watching the sunrise. 
That was just about as far as I ever got 
with him, but at least his disciples made 
me welcome, and I, together with other 
pilgrims, was free to participate in all 
ashram activities (provided I had 
watched the sunrise from the moun- 
taintop). In Tamil Nadu, however, the 
disciples of Sri Raman Maharishi kept 
tight control over all pilgrims seeking 
their master out in his retreat near the 
sacred mountain Arunachala. In his 
old age Maharishi never moved from 
his quarters, and even disciples seldom 
got inside to see him. Perhaps that is 
what made it possible for the great man 
to be so warm and easy with those who 
did make it through the defenses, giving 
them so much of his time, wisdom, and 
strength. 
When I last saw Maharishi, he was 
dying of cancer, and so last year, nearly 
thirty years after his death, I went back 
to see what had happened to his ashram 
as a place of pilgrimage. Even the town 
of Tiruvannamalai, with its magnifi- 
cent temple covering some twenty-five 
acres, had changed. Because it is still as 
inaccessible as ever, the number of pil- 
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