About two months ago, I made a program to visit Vaijnath at Deoghar in Jharkhand, which is one of the twelve Jyotirlingas though there is some controversy about it as some devotees believe that Vaijnath at Parli in Andhra Pradesh is a real Jyotirlinga instead of that one. Anyhow, people, lakhs in number, every year visit Vaijnath which is in Jharkhand. I asked some of my friends about the trip whether they were interested to go with me. In the end, we four were agreeable to go there but we added one more place in our trip at the suggestion of one of our group members; it is called Gaya which is about two hundred and sixty kilometers away from Deoghar – it is also a Hindu religious place. We got four tickets of Rajdhani train that runs between Delhi and Howrah every Friday only, for 27th January 2012. Jaisidh is the railway station that is the nearest station to go to Vaijnath and the Rajdhani train stops there.
On the scheduled day, we gathered at the New Delhi railway station. The train left the station at right time, 5 O’ clock. The following day in the morning we arrived at Jaisidh. Coming out of the station we drove away to the ‘Dharamshala’ that was already booked for us. Reaching there we got warm welcome by a man called ‘Master Ji’ as if we were known to one another. After that we took bath and got ready to go to the Vaijnath temple. Before narrating the story of my trip further, let me introduce my companions – their names were Rajinder, Ram Bhagat and Raj Kumar.
We hired the taxi for full day and went to Vaijnath temple. One Pandit ji, called ‘Panda’, received us there. His name was Kalia, who was assigned for us and this arrangement was done by Ram Bhagat’s friend who also lives in his society appartments. After the prayer and Darshan we came out of the temple. There was a huge crowd and a long queue of devotees inside the temple premises. We got Darshan of our deity on the day of Basant Panchami – it is a sacred day for the Hindus. The people of Bihar, Jharkhand and some adjoining area perform Saraswati ‘Pooja’ in these days – Saraswati is the Goddess of Education in Hindus. All the educational institutes were decorated and illuminated with lights. After that we went to Basukinath temple that is also devoted to Lord Shiva. The time was about three in the afternoon so we had lunch there that was fresh and tolerably tasty too.
We then proceeded to a recreation place where there was a rope- way. By the time we reached there it was 4.30., but the rope –way was closed as its closing time was 4. RP, one of our companions tried to get the tickets by making some tricks and got succeeded in getting the same. So we enjoyed in the rope-way but RB refused to go in as he was afraid of it though he was pretending to accept it. This rope-way was on the Trikut hills where Ravana killed Jatayu when he challenged Ravana.
In the following course of our trip of that day we visited the place called Tapovan; it is a hill where Hanuman statue is engraved on the rock. At the end of the day we went to a temple called ‘Naulakaha temple’. Naulakaha means nine lakhs; the temple was built up at the cost of nine lakhs though neither of us was agreeable at this point. Coming back to Dharamshala we had dinner and went to bed.