Viśvanātha of Kāśī

Vishwanath of Varanasi

The presiding Shiva of Kashi

Kashi Vishwanath is the principal Shiva temple of Varanasi, the city known in Sanskrit tradition as Kashi or Varanasi — one of the sapta moksa-pura, the seven places where, in the received view, death is said to carry a soul more easily toward liberation. The shrine is counted in most lists as one of the twelve Jyotirlingas, though, as at Ellora, the numbering of that list varies between sources and the local enumeration is not the same as the popular one. The linga here is held to be svayambhu — self-manifested — and the temple's whole ritual life is organised around the belief that what happens at the abhisheka in this room determines the devotee's passage.

Kashi is a kṣetra in the fullest sense: the city is itself the sacred body. Its innumerable shrines are not independent temples but limbs and points of one deity. The ghat at Dashashwamedh, where the ganga-arti is performed at dusk, is part of the same complex, and so is the cremation ground at the ghats upstream, because in the Kashi view death and liberation are the same event approached from opposite ends.

Worship and the modern city

The bhoga-arti and dehkotā-arti of the Vishwanath linga are the daily centre of the temple's life, and the second is performed in a hall open through the night, which is a distinctive feature of this shrine. The larger Kashi pilgrimage is a network, not a single temple: the Vishwanath circuit, the 112 Shiva shrines of the Kashi khetra, the 56 Sai Baba shrines, and the Ganga ghats together make up what a pilgrim means by "doing Kashi."

The site's modern history is inseparable from contested sovereignty. The earlier temple was destroyed during the Mughal period, and the Gyanvapi mosque is said to stand on part of the earlier temple site; the present building was reconstructed in the late eighteenth century under the patronage of Ahilyabai Holkar. Legal proceedings over the title were heard by the Supreme Court of India, which in 2019 directed a fresh inquiry by a larger bench rather than deciding the matter — so the dispute is unresolved, and this entry takes no position on it. What is not contested is that the corridor built and opened in 2021, running from the Dashashwamedh ghat towards the shrine, has substantially changed the approach for pilgrims and the physical space of the old city.

Sources and what is still unverified

This entry draws on Kashi-related scholarship and the Varanasi district gazetteer tradition, on temple-inventory and Jyotirlinga enumerations, and on published reporting of the corridor project and the title litigation. A human guardian from a Varanasi or Kashi-tradition source should check: the current status of the title litigation, which changes; the exact dating and attribution of the eighteenth-century reconstruction, which popular sources state with more confidence than the record supports; and the current list of shrines counted within the Kashi kshetra. Any statement here about pilgrim numbers, ritual timings, or the extent of the kṣetra should be treated as needing local confirmation. This entry should not be used as a source on the Gyanvapi dispute.