Kashi Vishwanath Temple

"“When I go to the Vishwanath Mandir in Benares and listen to the most powerful, magical aarti I hear from the priests that the knowledge of it will probably die because the temple is now controlled by secular bureaucrats”."

"Om! Glory be to Ganapati. In Ayodhya lived formerly Sadhesadhu, the speaker of truth, beloved of good men, whose delight consisted in the welfare of all beings. His son was the famous Sadhunidhi, whose son Padmasadhu, of steadfast virtue, on the north side of the entrance to the Visvesvara temple at Kasi built a solid and lofty temple of god Padmesvara, on Wednesday, the twelfth day of the waning moon of the month of Jyaishtha, in the year of Plava: Samvat 1353, on which day this eulogy was written."

"Even if the linga of Vishveshvara here is taken off somewhere and another is brought in and established by human hands, on account of the difficulty of the times, whatever is established in that place should be worshipped… And if, owing to the power of foreign rulers, there is no linga at all in that place, even so, the dharma of the place itself should be observed, with rites of circumambulation, salutation, etc, and in this way the daily pilgrimage [nityayaatraa] shall be performed"

"In some cities, Varanasi or Lucknow, for example, mosques dominate the landscape. In Varanasi, of course, deemed by many the Hindu city par excellence, small temples literally dot the ghats and city, although most of them date no earlier than the late eighteenth century It is particularly interesting that Rani Ahilya Bai Holkar’s newly constructed Vishvanath temple, the focal tirtha in all Varanasi, is notably smaller than the adjacent mosque constructed during Aurangzeb’s reign from the spoils of an earlier Vishvanath temple.” Yet the Rani was a woman of considerable resources, and the temple was built in 1777 when Hindu political power dominated in Varanasi.” Had she wished to build a larger temple, rather than one almost lost in the interior gullies of Dasashvamedh Ghat, she could have done so."

"Even if the linga of Viśveśvara here is taken off somewhere and another is brought in and established by human hands, on account of the difficulty of the times, whatever is established in that place should be worshipped, or the spot where it was should itself be worshipped … these acts of worship have to be performed with regard to the different linga that has come to occupy that spot even though the primary Viśveśvara Jyotirlinga is not present there…and if, owing to the power of the wicked foreign rulers (Mlecchaadi Dushta Raja), there is no linga at all in that place, even so, the dharma of the place itself should be observed, with rites of circumambulation, salutation etc and in this way the daily pilgrimage (nitya yatra) shall be performed … Such performances are to be construed as similar even in situations of replacement of linga or the replacement of the pratimaa (image)"