The incorruptibility of the Ganges

Upadesamrita

By Srila Rupa Gosvami

Verse 6:
Being situated in his original Krsna conscious position, a pure devotee does not identify with the body. Such a devotee should not be seen from a materialistic point of view. Indeed, one should overlook a devotee's having a body born in a low family, a body with a bad complexion, a deformed body, or a diseased or infirm body. According to ordinary vision, such imperfections may seem prominent in the body of a pure devotee, but despite such seeming defects, the body of a pure devotee cannot be polluted. It is exactly like the waters of the Ganges, which sometimes during the rainy season are full of bubbles, foam and mud. The Ganges waters do not become polluted. Those who are advanced in spiritual understanding will bathe in the Ganges without considering the condition of the water. (Upadesamrita, verse 6)


The incorruptibility of the Ganges

William R. Corliss

The Ganges is 2,525 kilometers long. Along its course, 27 major towns dump 902 million liters of sewage into it each day. Added to this are all those human bodies consigned to this holy river, called the Ganga by the Indians. Despite this heavy burden of pollutants, the Ganges has for millennia been regarded as incorruptible. How can this be?
Several foreigners have recorded the effects of this river’s “magical” cleaning properties:

• Ganges water does not putrefy, even after long periods of storage. River water begins to putrefy when lack of oxygen promotes the growth of anaerobic bacteria, which produces the telltale smell of stale water.

• British physician C.E. Nelson noted that Ganga water taken from the Hooghly – one of its dirtiest mouths – by ship returning to England remained fresh throughout the voyage.

• In 1896 the British physician E. Hanbury Hankin reported in the French journal Annales de I’Institude Pasteur that cholera microbes died within three hours in Ganga water but continued to thrive in distilled water even after 48 hours.
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• A French scientist, Monsieur Herelle, was amazed to find “that only a few feet below the bodies of persons floating in the Ganga who died of dysentery and cholera, where one would expect millions of germs, there were no germs at all.

More recently, D.S. Bhargava, an Indian environmental engineer measured the Ganges’ remarkable self cleansing properties:

Bhargava calculations, taken from an exhaustive three-year study of the Ganga, show that it is able to reduce BOD (biochemical oxygen demand) levels much faster than in other rives.

Quantitatively, the Ganges seems to clean up suspended wastes fifteen to twenty times faster than other rivers.