Reaching the temple—
Just a few kilometres from Dehradun city, there is this sacred place of Lord Shiva called Tapkeshwar Mahadev Mandir. It’s a temple of Lord Shiva that’s been made inside of the Limestone caves and these scales are always dripping with small droplets of water. That’s why it’s called Tapkeshwar Mahadev, Tapakna in Hindi means dripping.
Once you park your car in the parking and you come out of the parking lot, you are welcomed by a lot of shop selling Prasadam and the offerings that you can make to the Gods inside of the temple.
There are incense sticks, flower, offering, and many other sacred things including prasad that you can buy from here. Apart from selling all the stuff required for worship and visiting the temple, the shops also sell general items like chips packets, biscuits, and daily use items also.
Shops outside the temple
As already mentioned that the parking of four wheelers is a few metres from the shops, but if you’re coming on a two wheeler, you can park it just below this big tree that’s right outside the temple.
Parking for two wheelers
The main entrance of the temple is just a few metres from the tree and on the way while we were going towards the temple, we saw a sadhu who was immersed in meditation and was sitting inside of a tiny temple outside the main temple.
A sadhu immersed in prayer
Entering the temple premises—
This is the main gate of the temple and on it tt’s written Sri Tapkeshwar. As soon as you enter from this gate, you can feel the peace within you in a moment you feel a strong connection with the existence and fall in love with life. There is always something special about the holy places if you observe closely.
Main gate of the temple
You must know that shoes are not allowed inside of the Hindu temples, and you have to deposit them outside of the temple. Here at Tapkeshwar Mahadev as soon as you enter through the main gate you come across this little room, full of shelves, and aged man depositing shoes of the people who are coming to visit the temple so that they can be careful about their shoes. It’s also considered as a Seva in Hindu culture. Seva is something that a person do without expecting anything in return. It’s like a person is getting peace of mind and expecting nothing else out of helping another person.
Place to keep shoes
It’s not like it’s just a single temple situated there, but it’s more like many temples built around stream of water on both banks of the stream. It looked really amazing and mysterious later we got to know that stream that comes here is the same stream that we saw at the robbers cave.
Multiple temples around the river stream
We also spotted some people who are taking bath in this holy stream at this holy place, even in this cold temperature. On your way to the main temple, you will find a lot of small temples of different Hindu Devi and Devtas.
Getting inside the temple caves—
But when you enter the main temple with the caves, you get really amaze. It’s not very high or big caves, but still, it was comfortable for a person to crawl inside it and walk by saving his head from the top. Another thing that one has to keep in mind, here is the continuous dipping water from the top of the caves.
After walking a few steps inside the cave, we spotted the Shiv Ling that was present inside of the cave. We were really stunned to see it up close. We bowed down and prayed there.
Holy Shiv Ling of Tabkeshwar Mahadev
We went out of the main temple to explore the other temples around the campus. There were many temples including Ganesh temple, Shani temple and also temples of many Hindu goddesses.
The main temple was on the left side of the stream, but the other temples were on the right side of the stream. There was a bridge connecting both of them, and at this time we were standing on that bridge. I captured the photograph below from that bridge, and it came out to be awesome as you can see.
Shree Ganesh temple
The formation on the right side of the stream was not a cave like structure, but limestone Cliff instead, in spite of that the water was still flowing through the limestone on the idols of God’s place below it.
It really was a mysterious place and had a unique vibe to it. The holy vibe of this place was rooted deep inside us and made us really peaceful and meditative.
We spent around a couple of hours there, and we didn’t had the sense of time at all. It was only when all the temples and everything was covered up. Then we realised how much time we took. It was now time to get back to our place and head for a new adventure tomorrow.
That’s all for today.
Thanks for passing by.
Peace ☮️
