Jyotisar

Jyotisar is a shrine on the Jyotisar Sarovar tank, west of Thanesar in the Kurukshetra region, where Hindu tradition places the opening of the battle of the Mahabharata. Its name means the lake of light.

On the first day of fighting, Krishna is said to have answered the doubts of Arjuna, who shrank from killing his own kin, with the sermon that became the Bhagavad Gita, and to have revealed his universal form beneath a banyan tree. A banyan venerated as an offshoot of that tree rises at the water's edge.

In the 700s the Hindu scholar Adi Shankara identified Jyotisar as the exact spot of the discourse. An old Shiva temple on the site is said to have been worshipped at by both the Kauravas and the Pandavas, and the shrine forms one of the stops on the 48-kos circumambulation of Kurukshetra.