Editing Dharmic Circuits: The Tale of Many Kailashas (section)

==== A Circular View of Time ====
While Mount Kailash is at the center of an international circuit of Hindus, the sacred circuit repeats itself many times at many smaller levels. The legends that are true at a bigger level mutate and reappear slightly differently but markedly similar in meaning and purpose at every level, like fractals. The same sacred web of meaning and myth is recreated at many levels.

The Hindu view of time is not just linear. In one lifetime and in daily chores, the linear time has relevance and the common man obviously knows the past from present and future. But his larger sense of time, encompassing long time spans and great civilizations, is circular.

Things, events and even individuals come back on each other in great loops of time, in ever repeating, ever different yet universal themes of myths and meaning. That a beginning can follow an end doesn’t bother a Hindu too much. He takes it in his stride. This view of time is woven in his rituals, his mythology and his scriptures. The Mahabharata starts in many ways at the end, or long after its end, and then the story loops back on itself many times.

A culture with this circular view of time has not much use of chronology. He is scarcely bothered with what came before and what came after. Meaning is far more important to him than chronology or provenance. And to such a devotee the concept of ‘original teertha’ and its copies doesn’t strike too much. For him, every teertha is original. Every kshetra is sacred.