Lokpal : The Place of Gods
Long before Sikhs began coming to Hemkunt, the lake was known to the people who lived in the nearby valleys as a place of pilgrimage. Its name was Lokpal, and its sanctity derived from its association with tales of the gods. Most notably, the god Lakshman, the younger brother of Ram, is said to have meditated or done penance at Lokpal. In a popular story told by local people and visitors alike, Lakshman was brought to the shore of Lokpal after being mortally wounded in a battle with the son of Ravana. Lakshman's wife wept and prayed that her husband be saved. The monkey god Hanuman was then able to find a life-giving herb. When the herb was administered to Lakshman, he miraculously revived. In celebration, God showered flowers from heaven, which fell to the earth and took root in the Valley of Flowers.
Another story is told about Lakshman's previous incarnation as a seven headed snake. In this form, so the local people say, he meditated under the water at Lokpal and lord Vishnu slept on his back. The name Lokpal refers to Vishnu, the sustainer, who looks after the earth. Lokpal is also rumoured to be the native place of yet another god: Shiva, the destroyer, and his wife Parvati. Stories like these, and the ones about Hemkunt related below, have written sources in the Puranas (ancient volumes of Hindu mythology) and the Hindu epics (the Mahabharata and the Ramayana), but as they are passed from person to person and from generation to generation, they change, taking on local references and becoming blended with elements from other stories with other sources.
Traditionally, Lokpal was visited on three annual festivals held during the summer season. The pilgrimage to the lake was made primarily by women, both Garhwali villagers from the valley below Lokpal and villagers of Bhotia (Indo-Tibetan) ancestry from neighbouring valleys. All who went to Lokpal recognized the sanctity of the lake. Out of respect for the purity of the water and its environs, they made the steep ascent barefoot, clad only in white cotton dhoti (an unstitched garment). The women left their clothes and shoes behind at a halting place set in a glade of fir trees. There they would spend the night singing songs of the goddess, and at dawn they would set out to scale the slope to the lake. This halting place became the site of what is today Gobind Dham or Ghangaria, named after the ghagara, or petticoats, which the pilgrims would leave there.
When the pilgrims reached Lokpal, they would make offerings of coins, coconuts, Brahma Kamal flowers, and parshad (a consecrated sweet). They would often bathe in the cold water, and pray to Lakshman for the blessing of a son or for the health of their menfolk. A story by the local people about a Bhotia man who had no children. He came to Lokpal and his faith was so strong that he crawled the circumference of the lake on his elbows. When he returned the following year he had a son.
Hemkhunt: The Place of Guru
In the late nineteenth century, Sikhs began to search for Hemkunt: a place, high in the Himalayan mountains, which their tenth Guru alluded to in the autobiographical Bachitra Natak. The title of this work roughly translates as the 'wonderful drama'. It is included in a compilation of writings attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, known as the Dasam Granth. In poetic language, the following story about the Guru's previous birth is recounted in chapter six of Bachitra Natak:
In these verses, the Guru tells of his origins. He describes the place Hemkunt Parbat Sapat Sring, the "lake of ice" "mountain" adorned with "seven peaks", as the same place where King Pandu, the forefather of the five Pandava brothers of Mahabharata fame, practiced yoga. There, the Guru did intense meditation and austerities until he merged with God. Because his earthly parents had served God, God was pleased with them and gave a commandment that the Guru to be born to them. In the world he would carry out a mission to teach the true religion and rid people of evil ways. He was reluctant to leave his state of union with the creator, but God compelled him. In this way the Guru took birth into the world.
The first Sikh to pen his speculations about the nature and location of the Guru's tap asthan was hagiographical writer Bhai Santokh Singh. In his fourteen volume Sri Gur Pratap Suraj [Prakash] Granth (originally published in 1843), Santokh Singh elaborated on the story of the Guru's previous life as told in the above passage from the Dasam Granth.
The search for and discovery of Hemkunt came out of the desire of the Sikhs to erect shrines to honour places consecrated by the visit of the tenth Guru during his lifetime or, in the case of Hemkunt, during his previous lifetime. Although Bachitra Natak was included in the Dasam Granth some time in the 1730s, Sikhs apparently did not consider looking for Hemkunt Sapatsring until the late nineteenth century. It did not become a place of pilgrimage until the twentieth century.
Pandit Tara Singh Narotam, a nineteenth century Nirmala scholar, was the first Sikh to trace the geographical location of Hemkunt. He wrote of Hemkunt as one among the 508 Sikh shrines he described in Sri Gur Tirath Sangrah (first published in 1884). Much later, renowned Sikh scholar Bhai Vir Singh was instrumental in developing Hemkunt after it had been, in a sense, re-discovered by another Sikh in search of the Guru's tap asthan.
Sohan Singh was a retired granthi from the Indian army who was working in a gurdwara (Sikh temple) in Tehri Garhwal. In 1932, he read the description of Hemkunt in Bhai Vir Singh's Sri Kalgidhar Chamatkar (1929). This account of the place and the meditation of a great yogi there was based on the tale of Guru Gobind Singh's life and previous life as told in Bachitra Natak and the Suraj [Prakash] Granth.
A Courtesy of www.sikhnet.com
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