Gorakhnath Math
— — the seat the Nath order kept lit.
Not only on a wall.
“The mother house of the Nath yogi tradition, set on a walled campus in the city of Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh. The math takes its name from the eleventh-century saint Gorakhnath, whose samadhi sits inside the central shrine. The compound holds the temple, a working monastery, a Sanskrit school, and a hospital, and fills past capacity every January for the Khichdi Mela on Makar Sankranti. The white walls catch the low winter sun; the bell at the entrance carries across the campus in the early morning quiet. from the studio
Gorakhnath Math, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Gorakhnath Math sits on a walled campus in the northern part of Gorakhpur, the principal city of eastern Uttar Pradesh, about 270 kilometres east of Lucknow. The math is the spiritual seat of the Nath sampradaya — the yogi tradition that traces its lineage to the eleventh-century saint Gorakhnath, who lent his name both to the monastery and to the city around it. The compound today holds the central temple, the working monastery, the Maharana Pratap Shiksha Parishad schools, and the affiliated Guru Sri Gorakshanath Chikitsalaya hospital. The mahant of the math is, since 2014, also the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
The math's year is anchored to Makar Sankranti, the mid-January solar festival, when the Khichdi Mela fills the compound for nearly a month. Pilgrims from across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Nepal bring offerings of raw rice and lentils — khichdi — to the shrine of Gorakhnath; the math distributes the cooked offering through the fair. Attendance routinely runs above one million across the period, and the temple keeps the shrine open through the night on the principal day. The rest of the year the campus runs as a working monastery and school, with daily aartis at dawn and dusk.
The math is open to visitors through daylight hours, with no admission fee; quiet dress is expected and shoes are removed at the inner shrine. Most travellers come into Gorakhpur Junction by rail, which is one of the busier rail hubs in eastern Uttar Pradesh, or by air through Gorakhpur airport, about 8 kilometres west. The campus sits in the northern part of the city; auto-rickshaws run there from the railway station in under twenty minutes. The cool months from November through February are the easiest for an unhurried visit; the Khichdi Mela in January is the most crowded and the most alive.