A section from the journey
Why the Festivals Fall When They Do
Why does Diwali move around the calendar each year? Because it is fixed to the moon, not to a date. Most Hindu festivals are tied to a tithi, a lunar day. Ekadashi is the eleventh tithi. Holi is the full moon of a certain month. Diwali is the new moon of another. Once you know the five limbs, the dates stop seeming random and start to make beautiful sense.
Now we put the five limbs to work. For this is the very thing they were made to do. Let us answer a question almost everyone has asked.
Why does Diwali land on a different date every year? Why does Holi move about, and Ekadashi seem to come and go? On the common wall calendar they look restless, never sitting still. Are the dates simply uncertain?
Not at all. The truth is the opposite. These festivals are held with great exactness. It is only that they are held to the moon, not to the wall. Almost every one of them is fixed to a , a lunar day. Once you see that, the wandering stops, and a clear pattern shines through.
Take the gentlest example first. . The name simply means "the eleventh." It is the eleventh tithi, the eleventh step of the moon's phase. And because the moon waxes and then wanes, the eleventh step comes around twice each month. So Ekadashi, a day many keep as a light fast, falls twice a month, every month, exactly on the eleventh tithi. The name is the rule.
Now . Holi is a festival of the full moon. It falls on the full-moon tithi of the month called Phalguna, near the end of winter. That is why Holi is a festival of light and colour and the coming spring. It rides the brightest night of its month.
And , the great festival of lamps. Where Holi rides the full moon, Diwali rides the opposite, the new moon, the darkest night, in the month called Kartika in autumn. Now the lamps make perfect sense. On the year's darkest night, every home answers the dark with rows of small flames. The festival and the sky tell one story together.
The pattern holds across the year. Maha Shivaratri, the great night of Shiva, falls on the night just before the new moon. Krishna's birthday is kept on the eighth waning tithi of his month, at midnight. Rama's birthday falls on the ninth waxing tithi of spring. Each festival is a chosen meeting of a moon-phase and a remembered story.
There is one more careful touch. The tithi and the day do not begin at the same moment, for a tithi starts whenever the moon reaches its step, at any hour. So the almanac-keepers have gentle rules for which sunrise a festival belongs to when a tithi falls awkwardly. This is the patient, exact work the exists to do.
So the calendar does not hand out these days like numbered tickets. It discovers them, by watching the moon. A festival is the moon arriving at a certain step, met by a story the people have carried for ages. The date moves on the wall precisely because the festival is faithful to the sky.
There is something tender in a people who light their lamps on the darkest night, and throw their colours under the fullest moon. The festival answers what the sky is doing. When have you marked a moment not by a date, but by what the world itself was doing around you?
Now we put the five limbs to work, for this is what they are for. People often ask why Hindu festivals seem to wander across the ordinary calendar, never on the same date twice. The answer is simple and lovely. They are not fixed to a date at all. They are read straight off the sky, almost always from the tithi, the lunar day. Ekadashi, the gentle fasting day, is just its name: the eleventh tithi, counted twice a month, as the moon waxes and as it wanes. Holi is the full-moon tithi of the month called Phalguna, a festival of the bright full moon. Diwali falls on the new-moon tithi of the month called Kartika, the darkest night, which is why it blazes with lamps. Maha Shivaratri is the night before the new moon. Krishna's birthday is the eighth waning tithi of his month. Each festival, then, is a meeting of the moon and a story. The calendar does not assign these days. It discovers them.
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