Char Dham
Every Vishnu temple in the directory, grouped by state.
A guide is written where we have one, and the temple is named where we do not. Bookable pujas appear where we have verified pandits in the temple's city.
The Char Dham are the four abodes set at the compass points of India — Badrinath in the Garhwal Himalaya, Dwarka on the Gujarat coast, Puri on the Bay of Bengal and Rameswaram at the southern tip. The grouping is attributed to Adi Shankara, and the circuit is meant to be completed rather than sampled.
It is routinely confused with the Chota Char Dham, which is a different and much later circuit lying entirely within Uttarakhand — Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath. Only Badrinath belongs to both. A yatra advertised as Char Dham in Haridwar almost always means the Uttarakhand four.
The 108 Divya Desam are the temples praised in the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, the four thousand verses of the twelve Alvar poets. A hundred and six are on earth, most of them in Tamil Nadu, and two are not — Tirupparkadal, the ocean of milk, and Paramapadam. Srirangam is counted first among them.
Three carry most of the traffic and none is in the Char Dham. Tirumala in Andhra Pradesh receives more visitors than any other temple in the world and counts its donations by the tonne of hair. Ranganathaswamy at Srirangam is the largest functioning temple complex anywhere, seven concentric walls with a town living inside the outer ones. Padmanabhaswamy in Thiruvananthapuram shows the reclining form through three separate doors — the head, the torso and the feet — because no single opening takes in the whole image.
Temple collections
- Char Dham
- 108 Divya Desam
