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when I was investing a couple of months as a scholar in home at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi. That is Sri Vishwanath temple on the school of BHU. Sri Vishwanath Temple BHU Varanasi– A Model Temple Now, Varanasi has lots of temples, some understood, some not so well known. You come across small temples at every nook and corner, every step of the ghats as you walk around the earliest living city in the world. It is not within the confines of the city bound by Varuna and Assi rivers that I found my answer. I discovered it in the BHU school itself. Yes, I am talking about the Vishwanath temple in the middle of the university school and not the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi.
For two months, I walked to this temple every early morning from my guest home. Slowly, I began discovering the different elements like the smaller temples that surround the main Vishwanath temple, the temples on the first floor or the Nataraja temple on the side, the Yagnashalas and the plants around it.
Saraswati. One side of Vishwanath is Mata Parvati with Ganesha and on the other side is a Chaturmukhlinga. On the very first floor, you see another Shiva temple right on top of the ground flooring one, surrounded by Mahamaya and Lakshmi Narayana on either side. Slowly, I started dropping in front of the rising Sun that illuminates the temple as it increases. It appears almost like a deity from the first flooring. Behind the temple are trees like Amla that are worshipped too.
The walls of the temple have lots of small snippets and verses from Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas and words of saints like Swami Ramakrishna with photos sculpted in marble panels. Scenes from bibles are portrayed on some panels. The whole of the Bhagawad Gita is engraved on the back of the first flooring temples. It ended up being a routine for me to read one sculpture and the words engraved on it every day. It was like getting a job to consider an ancient wisdom nugget and see how it applies to our lives today. A great thought for the day, a sluggish Swadhyaya for those who go to the temple.
In the lawns of the temple, on benches and small canopied sit-outs, I would see people doing meditation, pranayama and yoga. In the Yagnashala, a group of senior citizens would be chanting stotras or singing bhajans. Trainees of the visual arts show their art for those who may wish to purchase it. Soothing devotional music plays in the mornings, which would be perfect if the trainees of music were singing live. Inside the temple, I observed a boy doing Durga Saptashati Course in front of the Mahamaya temple on the first flooring.
The temple is well-visited throughout the day. Early morning, you see the morning walkers stopping by, in the evening and on holidays, it has lots of travelers and pilgrims. Then there are trainees who come for a cold coffee or a freshly made samosa chaat. Chai, like in other places in Kashi, is never ever too far. My personal favorites are the 2 bookshops and souvenir stores that are on either side as you go into the temple. In the morning, it is calm and tranquil with only flowers and Prasad stores open, however at night, the area is pulsating with energy, with eateries being more in focus. All this belongs of the temple, however still outside its primary entryway.
Do go to the Vishwanath Temple as and when you go to Kashi. You can take a couple of lessons that you can apply to your area temple. See how the temple provides space for everyone to be a part of the temple and yet comprehend that it belongs to everybody else as much as it comes from me. The tidiness and the walkability enable people to walk around even when there are a lot of individuals. Yes, it is a relatively huge temple, while our own area temples might be extremely little in contrast, but the number of people visiting them regularly would also be small. See if you can make a cultural space together with being the spiritual one, where young and old can check out with equal ease.
Sri Vishwanath temple at BHU Varanasi comes closest to my creativity of how a temple need to be in our times. A space for individuals to have individually discussions with the devatas, in addition to a place for us to connect with those who live within the precincts of the temple and those visiting it from distant places.