Kedar Nath & Badri Narayan - Swami Vivekananda

A PILGRIM'S DIARY 71and that every village not otherwise named isRampur or Rambarra, or Ramnagar.Whether this was so or not, it is fairly certainthat in the age when a knowledge of the Mahabharatrepresented ideal culture, a great and authoritativeeffort was made, to associate this whole region withthe Pandavas. That the attempt was undertaken,with an eye to the -work as literature, and not on thebasis of ancient, pre-historic traditions, is shown bythe little chapel dedicated to Vyasa, in the valley ofVyasagunga. Here the pilgrim about to follow upthe stations of the Mahabharata could first makesalutation to the master-poet. Of all the elementscontained in this particular stratum of tradition, thepersonality of Bhima—or. as the people call him,*Bhim Sen*—the strong man of Hinduism, stands outas most pre-historic. There is here somethingunique, something that has a sanction of its own, inthe popular mind, not derived from its place in thenational epic. **Bhima/* as a member of our ownparty exclaimed, "is undoubtedly the genuinearticle !**If there really was a prior movement for connectingHimawant with the ideas of the Ramayana,succeeded by the Mahabharata-epoch,—bringing inthe worship of Satya-Narayan—then before either ofthese came the great era of Devi. There is a chapelof the nine forms of Devi still, at Kedar Nath, andthe oldest and most active of the seven minor templesat Joshi Math contains the same images. In order