By Mohan Guruswamy
This is the beginning of the season when droves of believers trek to the Amarnath cave in Kashmir to have darshan of an annual natural ice formation that purportedly resembles Shiva’s ling.
The Amarnath temple is located in the Pahalgam tehsil of the Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir, India. It is a cave situated at an altitude of 3,888 m (12,756 ft), about 168 km from Anantnag and 141 km from Srinagar, and is reached through either Sonamarg or Pahalgam. It has become an important shrine in Hinduism after its “discovery” by Buta Malik, a Gujjar shepherd.
According to local folklore, the Amarnath Cave was discovered by a Muslim shepherd Buta Malik in 1850. According to the lore, he was roaming with his herds in the mountains, and a saint met him there.
The saint gave him a bag full of coal, and when he reached home, he opened the bag and found it full of gold instead of coal. He was overjoyed and ran back to the same place to thank the saint, but he did not find him. Instead, he found the cave and the ice Lingam.
He informed the villagers about this and shared his story, after which the annual pilgrimage to Amarnath Cave started.
Rajiv Khanna broke a million hearts when he found this. We now can start sniveling. The world’s biggest Shivling is near Salzburg in Austria. It is many times bigger than Amarnath.
The whole world knows about the Shivling of the Amarnath shrine, where the natural Shivling is formed by snow. However, do you know that like the Shivling of Amarnath, there is another Shivalinga that is visited by people from all over the world?
There is a 40-km-long ice cave in Werfen near the Austrian city of Salzburg, which has a natural Shivling-like figure and is several times larger than the Shivling of Amarnath. The cave has staircases for about one kilometer so that it can easily reach the ‘Shivling’ and the height of this ‘Shivling’ is about 75 feet. People have to go through dangerous paths to get inside the cave.
What’s more? It is the world’s longest snow cave and was discovered in 1879. Here you will find many shapes that look like Shivling. The snow cave is open from May to October. You will feel cold during the summer months. You will also feel like you’ve entered a different and new world in this cave.
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