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THE Hindus have left *#tlzqm3 an eloquent history of their efforts to answer tl riddle of Creation. The Vedas, sacred hymns in archaic women nike air max 95 Sanskrit from abo1500 to goo B.C., do not depict a benevolent Creator, but record a man's a before the Creation as singers of the Vedas chant the radiance of this worl Their objects of worship were devas (cognate with Latin deus, god) deriv from the old Sanskrit div, meaning brightness. Gods were the shining om The luminosity of their world impressed the Hindus from the beginnin Not the fitting-together-ness, not the hierarchy of beings or the order nature, but the blinding splendor, the Light of the World. How the wor once came into being or how it might end seemed irrelevant before t brightness of the visible world. The Vedic hymns leave us a geology of names and myths and legem untroubled by the mysteries of origin and destiny. Over all shines a radia fire illuminating the Hindu vision. The fire-god was everywhere~hc many was he? Sacrificial fire was a messenger carrying the consumed obI tion upward to the gods. Benares, the pilgrim's destination, was the Ci of Light. The god Agni (meaning fire, related to Latin ignis) was said be "the priest of the gods and the god of the priests." In the heavens he u the sun, in the atmosphere he was lightning, and on earth fire. O Agni, illuminator of darkness, day by day we approach you with holy thought bringing homage to you. Presiding at ritual functions, the brightly shining custodian nike air max 2011 shoes of the cosmic order. . . . The god who makes fire and light makes all seeing possible. What sanc fies the worshiper is no act of conversion, no change of spirit, but the simj act of seeing, the Hindi word darsan. A Hindu goes to a temple not"worship," but rather "for darsan, " to see the image nike air max shoes 2012 of the deity. Each the cities sacred to each of the thousands of gods offers its own spec darsan: Benares (Varanasi) for the darsan of Lord Visvanath, the hi Himalayas for the darsan of Vishnu, or a nearby hilltop for the darsan a local air max shoes 95 cheap nike god. In the life of the sacred city of Benares the quest for seei embodies much that is distinctive to the religions of Hindus. The Hindi dazzled by a vision of the holy, not merely holy people but places like . Himalayan peaks where the gods live, or the Ganges which flows fri Heaven to Earth, or countless inconspicuous sites where gods or goddes