“Varanasi, which most residents prefer to call Banaras or Kashi, has been a city for 6,000, perhaps as long as 10.000 years. It was originally a city where you came to die or to do sadhana. It was also a place where people came to be alone… as it encourages the kind of interiority that enables people to get a better reality that they might have when they are constantly in the current of human life… Continuously moving, continuously in flux, even Banaras’s greatest temple, the Vishvanath, has not stayed in one place, but has traveled along, moving as the energies and focus of the city have moved. What has remained, though, is an awareness of the vitality of human life and of the finality of death. In this sense, Banaras is completely unchanged from the moment of its founding.” -Robert Svoboda