A storybook in 7 pages
A Tantric path within Hinduism that holds nothing as impure, practiced among Varanasi's cremation grounds since the 17th century; a 20th-century teacher in the same lineage turned that vow outward into a leprosy-care mission.
As the tradition tells it, Kina Ram was born in the 17th century near Varanasi and became an ascetic early in life. He is remembered as the founder of the modern Aghor lineage, which scholars link — though not as a direct descent — to the older, largely vanished Kapalika sect of medieval Shaiva tantra.
Kina Ram settled beside a pond in Varanasi called Krim Kund, where he lived out his life and where his shrine still stands. As the tradition tells it, he lived to a great age. Sadhus of his lineage still keep the site, welcoming anyone turned away elsewhere in the city.
Central to Aghor teaching is that ultimate reality is one undivided whole, so nothing in it — decay, a corpse, what a city casts out — can be truly impure or separate. As the tradition holds it, treating anything as untouchable is treating reality as broken. Aghoris were known for welcoming people of low caste whom the city's temples turned away.
Varanasi has burned its dead on the Ganges' banks for centuries, in full public view. Aghor ascetics practice there deliberately, sometimes using what the ground provides, including human remains, in ritual — which the tradition explains as facing death without flinching, not as desecration. Outsiders have sensationalized this; practitioners describe a discipline, not a performance.
Aghoreshwar Bhagwan Ram, born in Bihar in 1937 and head of the Kina Ram lineage, founded Sri Sarveshwari Samooh in 1961, a social-service organization. He extended Aghor's teaching that nothing is impure to a disease everyone else refused to touch: leprosy.
In January 1962, Aghoreshwar opened a leprosy treatment center at Parao, Varanasi, at a time when leprosy patients were commonly expelled from their families and homes. The organization says the center went on to treat more leprosy patients than any other, and that Guinness once listed it.
Kina Ram sat at the cremation ground and called nothing impure. Three centuries later, Aghoreshwar carried that same vow into a leprosy ward the rest of the city wouldn't enter. Both were doing the same thing: refusing to look away. This page is the next link in that chain, however small.
It is yours. Touch the chain.