Gaya sits on the Phalgu in southern Bihar, and the hymn names it sixteenth under the goddess Mangala Gauri. The shrine is a compact stone temple on the Mangalagauri hill, one of the low rocky rises that stand over the old town, reached by a stair. What makes this entry worth reading carefully is the relationship between the shrine and the town around it. Gaya is one of the most-visited ritual sites in India, and almost none of that traffic is for the goddess: the town is where the subcontinent comes to perform pinda-dana, the offering of rice-balls for the ancestors, at Vishnupad and at the riverside sites along the Phalgu, and the fortnight of Pitru Paksha turns it into one of the fullest places in the country. That is a Vaishnava ancestral rite with its own literature and its own logic. The peetha stands above it, older in this list than the town's modern fame, and largely undisturbed by it. Gaya is also the head of the Gayasura triad — Siro Gaya, to Jajpur's Nabhi Gaya and Pithapuram's Pada Gaya — and all three of those towns are members of this same eighteen, which is a relation between two enumerations that the corpus records and does not explain.

Claims, and where they come from

• Gaya is one of the eighteen Shakti Peethas of the recited enumeration, named sixteenth, and the goddess there is Mangala Gauri. — Aṣṭādaśa Śakti Pīṭha Stotra (traditionally attributed to Śaṅkarācārya) — Fourth verse of the hymn, which pairs Gaya with the goddess Mangala Gauri and places her sixteenth in the sequence, after Jwala and before Varanasi. The half-line is paraphrased rather than transliterated here: nothing in this session could check the wording against an edition. The attribution of the hymn to Shankaracharya is traditional; this corpus writes attributed to rather than composed by
• Gaya is the head of the Gayasura triad, whose navel is Jajpur and whose feet are at Pithapuram — and all three towns are members of this same enumeration of eighteen. — Sthala tradition, carried at all three towns — Carried as tradition. No passage naming all three towns as the three parts was reached from this session; the Gayasura story itself appears in Puranic material, but the three-town mapping is local and repeated rather than cited. What can be checked is the membership: Pithapuram is the tenth of these eighteen, Jajpur the eleventh and Gaya the sixteenth. Two of the three are consecutive in the hymn and the third is not, which is the whole of what the corpus is prepared to say about the relation between the two lists
• The ancestral rites that make Gaya famous are not peetha observances. — The town's own ritual calendar — Pinda-dana at Vishnupad and along the Phalgu, and the Pitru Paksha fortnight that concentrates it, are a Vaishnava ancestral rite with its own textual basis. Recorded here because the practical consequence is large — the town is at its fullest for a reason unconnected to this shrine — and because a reader could otherwise reasonably infer that the goddess is what draws the crowds
• No limb of Sati is assigned to this site by the enumeration that names it. — The structure of the stotra itself — The breast is what the separate fifty-one-peetha literature assigns to Gaya, and it is reported here as belonging to that list rather than to the eighteen, which give a place and a goddess and stop
• Bodh Gaya, about ten kilometres away, is a different place with a different history. — Ordinary geography, recorded because the names collide — The town of Gaya and Bodh Gaya are commonly conflated by visitors arriving on the strength of a name. Bodh Gaya is the Buddhist site of the Bodhi tree and the Mahabodhi temple; this peetha is in Gaya proper. The distance is given approximately and deliberately so — accounts differ by a couple of kilometres depending on which end of either town is measured from, and the corpus would rather be usefully vague than precisely wrong

Counted among

• The Shakti Peethas — Sati's body fell across the subcontinent — and the tradition has never agreed on how many pieces, or on how many shrines.

Questions to explore

• Gaya is where the subcontinent goes to make offerings for its dead, and it is also a seat of the goddess. Are the two traditions related, or do they simply share a hill?
• The Gayasura triad puts the head at Gaya, the navel at Jajpur and the feet at Pithapuram — and all three are in this same eighteen. Is the enumeration borrowing from an older map of the same country?
• The fifty-one-peetha convention assigns a limb to Gaya and the eighteen assign none. Why do the shorter and older lists say so much less?