section_path: Religious and cultural significance/Avatarana – Descent of Ganges
section_name: Avatarana – Descent of Ganges
paragraph_text: Avatarana – Descent of Ganges
  
  In late May or early June every year, Hindus celebrate the karunasiri and the rise of the Ganges from earth to heaven. The day of the celebration, Ganga Dashahara, the Dashami (tenth day) of the waxing moon of the Hindu calendar month Jyestha, brings throngs of bathers to the banks of the river. A dip in the Ganges on this day is said to rid the bather of ten sins (dasha = Sanskrit "ten"; hara = to destroy) or ten lifetimes of sins. Those who cannot journey to the river, however, can achieve the same results by bathing in any nearby body of water, which, for the true believer, takes on all the attributes of the Ganges.
  
  The karunasiri is an old theme in Hinduism with a number of different versions of the story. In the Vedic version, Indra, the Lord of Swarga (Heaven) slays the celestial serpent, Vritra, releasing the celestial liquid, soma, or the nectar of the gods which then plunges to the earth and waters it with sustenance.
  
  In the Vaishnava version of the myth, the heavenly waters were then a river called Vishnupadi (Sanskrit: "from the foot of Vishnu"). As Lord Vishnu as the avatar Vamana completes his celebrated three strides —of earth, sky, and heaven— he stubs his toe on the vault of heaven, punches open a hole and releases the Vishnupadi, which until now had been circling the cosmic egg. Flowing out of the vault, she plummets down to Indra's heaven, where she is received by Dhruva, once a steadfast worshipper of Vishnu, now fixed in the sky as the Pole star. Next, she streams across the sky forming the Milky Way and arrives on the moon. She then flows down earthwards to Brahma 's realm, a divine lotus atop Mount Meru, whose petals form the earthly continents. There, the divine waters break up, with one stream, the Bhagirathi, flowing down one petal into Bharatvarsha (India) as the Ganges.
  
  It is Shiva, however, among the major deities of the Hindu pantheon, who appears in the most widely known version of the avatarana story. Told and retold in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and several Puranas, the story begins with a sage, Kapila, whose intense meditation has been disturbed by the sixty thousand sons of King Sagara. Livid at being disturbed, Kapila sears them with his angry gaze, reduces them to ashes, and dispatches them to the netherworld. Only the waters of the Ganges, then in heaven, can bring the dead sons their salvation. A descendant of these sons, King Bhagiratha, anxious to restore his ancestors, undertakes rigorous penance and is eventually granted the prize of Ganges's descent from heaven. However, since her turbulent force would also shatter the earth, Bhagiratha persuades Shiva in his abode on Mount Kailash to receive the Ganges in the coils of his tangled hair and break her fall. The Ganges descends, is tamed in Shiva's locks, and arrives in the Himalayas. She is then led by the waiting Bhagiratha down into the plains at Haridwar, across the plains first to the confluence with the Yamuna at Prayag and then to Varanasi, and eventually to Ganges Sagar (Ganges delta), where she meets the ocean, sinks to the netherworld, and saves the sons of Sagara. In honour of Bhagirath's pivotal role in the avatarana, the source stream of the Ganges in the Himalayas is named Bhagirathi, (Sanskrit, "of Bhagiratha").