Amarnath is the name of a cave shrine of Shiva high in the Himalaya of southern Kashmir, at close to 3,900 metres above the Lidder valley. Its object of worship is unlike any other of the great Shiva shrines: a liṅga of ice, a stalagmite formed by water freezing as it drips from the cave roof, which takes shape in the warm months and dwindles away again. Tradition holds that the ice waxes and wanes with the moon. Shiva is worshipped here as Amareshvara, the immortal lord, and the annual pilgrimage to the cave is among the largest in the Indian Himalaya.
The tradition
The legend attached to the cave concerns the secret of immortality. Parvati asked Shiva why he alone did not die, and Shiva, resolving to tell her where no living creature could overhear, travelled into the mountains, shedding his companions as he went; pilgrim tradition reads the stages of the route as the marks of that journey, Nandi left at one halt, the moon at another, the serpents at the lake of Sheshnag. In the cave he narrated the Amar Katha, the tale of immortality. A pair of pigeons, the story runs, overheard it and became deathless, and pilgrims who sight pigeons at the cave take them for the same pair. The shrine is an old one in Kashmiri memory: a pilgrimage to Amareshvara figures in the valley's Sanskrit tradition, including mentions commonly identified with this cave in the Rājataraṅgiṇī, and a later folk tradition credits a Muslim shepherd, Buta Malik, with rediscovering the cave; his descendants long held a customary share in the shrine's offerings.
The yātrā
The Amarnath yātrā is held in the summer month of Shravana, concluding on the full moon, when the ice liṅga is honoured with the year's principal worship. Pilgrims approach by two routes: the traditional path from Pahalgam by way of Chandanwari, Sheshnag and the Mahagunas pass, a walk of several days, and the shorter, steeper route from Baltal. The Chhari Mubarak, the holy mace of Shiva, is carried in procession from Srinagar to the cave to mark the pilgrimage's culmination. The yātrā now moves under heavy administration and security, with tens of thousands on the trails in season; at its end stands what pilgrims have climbed for, a form of the god made of nothing but the mountain's own water, present for a season and gone.
Further reading
- Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin, 2009
- Flood, Gavin. An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge University Press, 1996
- Samuel, Geoffrey. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra. Cambridge University Press, 2008
- Sax, William S. Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Himalayan Pilgrimage. Oxford University Press, 1991
- White, David Gordon. The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India. University of Chicago Press, 1996
See also
This entry was last revised on 31 July 2026.