Going Around the Sacred
Pradakshina, the Boudhanath Counters, and the 5,000 Labyrinths Selling a Misattributed Walk
Why a Hindu walks clockwise around the sanctum, the peepal tree, the temple hill, and sometimes a whole river. Tibetan pilgrimage texts from the fourteenth century already document 108-round circumambulation at Boudhanath. Hillman in 2008 and Chevalier in 2012 vindicated the underlying mechanism, in two different journals, with two different sets of measurements. The same walk now sells as 5,000 labyrinths worldwide and a $600 million Camino tourism industry, with the original word and the original direction left out.
The Walk Around the Tree
A temple courtyard in Madurai, on a Friday evening in 1989. A grandmother, sixty-four years old, in a deep maroon cotton saree with a thin gold border, walks slowly around the inner sanctum of the Meenakshi Amman shrine. Her granddaughter, age seven, follows her, dragging a small foot every few steps. The granddaughter has been told to count to nine. She has lost count twice already and is starting again from one.
They are walking pradakshina, the clockwise circumambulation of the deity. The grandmother's bare feet make a soft slap on the cool granite. Her right shoulder stays toward the inner shrine the entire time. Each round takes roughly forty seconds. After the ninth round, she stops, puts her palms together, touches her forehead to the floor, and stands up. The granddaughter copies her, arrives at six, decides that is close enough, and bows. The grandmother does not correct her.
Outside the temple, on the same evening, a young software engineer from the same family is jogging on a treadmill at a gym in T. Nagar. He is doing thirty minutes of cardio, recommended by an article on heart health. He does not know that his grandmother, in the temple, is doing a piece of the oldest documented walking-meditation system in continuous use, vindicated by two papers neither he nor she has read, and that the Camino de Santiago tourism industry, six thousand miles away, is selling six hundred million dollars a year of a walk that is, in its essential structure, what she is doing for free.
What Pradakshina Actually Is
Pradakshina is the Sanskrit word for clockwise circumambulation. The word breaks into pra (forward) and dakshina (right side, south). To walk pradakshina is to walk so the sacred object remains on your right side throughout. The deity, the tree, the hill, the river, or in some traditions the elder, stays to the right. The body keeps turning, but the relationship between the body and the sacred object stays fixed.