A section from the journey

Bathing and Ritual Purity

No people of the ancient world cared for water like these cities did. Wells beyond counting, private bathing rooms, and the great watertight tank at Mohenjo-daro. Many read this as more than washing — as ritual purity, a making-clean of body and spirit. In later Hinduism, bathing in sacred water and approaching the holy clean run very deep. We follow that thread, gently.

Of all the wonders of these cities, let us return to the one that may run deepest of all. It is their love of water. We have seen it before, in their drains and wells. Now let us feel what it might have meant to their hearts.

Think how much water these cities wanted. They sank wells by the hundred, far more than thirst alone could explain. Almost every house had its own small room for bathing, with a floor that drained out into the street. To be clean, in flowing water, mattered to these people more than to almost anyone else in the ancient world.

And at the very centre of Mohenjo-daro they built the . It is a sunken tank of fine brick, made watertight so not a drop would leak away. Steps lead down into it from two sides, and rooms stand all around. It was not a well, and not a drain. It was a place, it seems, for people to enter the water together.

The archaeologist John Marshall studied all this with care. And he came to feel that water here meant more than getting clean. He read it as ritual purity — a washing that touched the spirit as well as the skin, a making-ready before something holy.

Now feel why this stirs us so. In later Hinduism, this very feeling runs deep and wide. There is the bath before prayer. There is the dip in a sacred river. There is the old, strong sense that one should come before the holy clean. To approach the divine with a pure body and a quiet heart — that is woven all through the later worship we will one day call .

There is another old word we should let brush against this. Remember , the deep order of things, which we will meet fully in the age of the hymns. To keep clean, to keep the water flowing in its channels, to put each thing in its right place — there is a feeling of order in it. Some wonder whether the cities' love of clean, ordered water is a far-off seed of that great idea. We only wonder. We do not claim.

So here, perhaps, is one of the deepest threads of all reaching toward us from the cities — a love of purity, of clean water, of readiness before the holy. We hold it as a possibility, warm and likely, but not yet proven. The cities cannot tell us in their own words. Until they can, we follow the thread gently, and we do not pretend to be sure.

Think of a time you washed not only to be clean, but to feel ready — before a festival, a visit, a quiet moment of prayer. That readiness is very old. Where in your life does washing become something more than washing?