Significance of Mt. Kailash

Traditionally, Indians have embarked on many difficult yatras and, in the process, found that some places radiate and elemental energy not felt elsewhere.

Physically the journey culminates in a definite destination, a tirth sthana or a place that enables one to 'cross over'. The symbolic crossing is from ignorance to knowledge, from mortality to immortality. The tirtha sthana holds a special significance either because it is associated with a religious event or it may have a special location which evokes an experience outside the dull and gross phenomena of daily life. It is usually a place that lifts the mind out of its limited functioning, stretching it to grasp new meanings.

Kailash and its surroundings vibrate with an unearthly energy where the transcendent and the immanent, the noumenon and phenomenon appear to fuse together in surreal complicity. It evokes an awe that stirs the mind to surrender and offer itself in oblation. Petty and disparate waves of thought subside when faced with the vastness that surrounds the spire of Kailash, which stands as a connecting link between heaven and earth, the ethereal and the terrestrial , the spiritual and the mundane, coalescing them into one unified whole.

Kailash is not a thing to be grasped by physical conquest or by intellectual progression. It can only be discovered. Its power resides in the individual's capacity to experience. And paradoxically, Kailash itself helps to sharpen that capacity.