Rameshwaram is eleventh in the enumeration of the twelve and the southernmost of them, on an island off the Tamil Nadu coast with the Palk Strait on one side and the Gulf of Mannar on the other — the last land before Sri Lanka, reached from the mainland across the Pamban channel. The shrine is the Ramanathaswamy temple, and it is the only one of the twelve named for the person said to have worshipped there rather than for the deity worshipped: Ramanatha, Rama's lord. Two lingams stand in the sanctum rather than one, and the tradition here is emphatic that the one Hanuman brought is honoured before the one Rama installed. Pilgrims do not simply take darshan; they bathe first in the sea and then through a fixed sequence of wells inside the temple. Rameshwaram is also one of the four Char Dham — a separate enumeration, not encoded here — and the southern anchor of the pairing with Kashi.

Claims, and where they come from

• Rameshwara at the setubandha is one of the twelve jyotirlingas, eleventh in the order this set follows. — Shiva Purana — Koti Rudra Samhita, ch. 1 — the dvadasha-jyotirlinga list
• Returning from Lanka, Rama is held to have installed and worshipped a lingam on this shore to be released from the killing of Ravana, who was a brahmin by birth — the son of the sage Vishrava and grandson of Pulastya — so that his death carried brahmahatya. — Later Puranic and regional tradition (the Setu Mahatmya material, and the tradition of this coast) — NOT Valmiki's Ramayana. Valmiki's Yuddha Kanda gives Rama's fast on the shore, Nala's causeway, the crossing and the funeral rites Vibhishana is told to perform; the installation of a lingam here and the expiation it is said to accomplish are absent from the text critical editions establish. The Setu Mahatmya is carried as an attached mahatmya rather than as a Purana in its own right, and this file does not name which Purana it travels with, because that could not be verified. This corpus records the episode as later tradition and does not attribute it to the epic
• Rama sent Hanuman north to bring a lingam; the hour set for the installation arrived before he did, and a lingam was made from the sand of the beach, which Rama installed and worshipped. Hanuman returned with the lingam he had fetched and could not remove the one already standing; Rama had his installed beside it and ordained that it be worshipped first. The two are the Vishwalingam and the Ramalingam, and the order of worship still holds. — Sthala-purana of Rameshwaram and current temple practice — Carried by the shrine's own tradition and by regional retellings rather than by a verse this corpus can cite, and not part of Valmiki's poem. Tellings differ over where Hanuman was sent — Kailasa in most, Kashi in others — over who shaped the sand lingam, and over which of the two names attaches to which stone. The precedence of the lingam Hanuman brought is observable practice
• A causeway was built across the sea to Lanka by the vanara army under Nala, after Rama compelled the ocean to yield a crossing. — Valmiki Ramayana — Yuddha Kanda — the building of the setu. This is the epic's own account, and is a separate claim from anything below
• The chain of shoals running from the tip of this island toward Mannar is identified with that causeway, and is called Rama Setu here and Adam's Bridge on European charts. — Devotional identification, alongside the modern geographic record of the shoals — That the tradition makes this identification is a fact about the tradition. What the shoals are, how they formed and how old they are, is a separate question this corpus does not answer and makes no claim about
• The temple's third and outermost prakara is a granite colonnade widely described as the longest corridor of its kind in India. — Architectural description of the Ramanathaswamy temple, widely repeated — No measurement or pillar count is given here: the figures cited in circulation disagree with one another and none was checkable in the session that drafted this file. The corridors are later work than the sanctum and are commonly credited to the Sethupathi rulers of Ramanathapuram
• Pilgrims bathe in the sea at Agni Theertham in front of the temple and then at twenty-two wells inside it, in a fixed order, before taking darshan. — Current practice at the Ramanathaswamy temple — Living practice, not a scriptural claim. The count of twenty-two is the one pilgrims are given at the shrine; the explanations offered for it — commonly the arrows in Rama's quiver — are traditional rather than cited
• A pilgrimage to Kashi is held to be completed at Rameshwaram, and the reverse: Ganga water is carried here to bathe the lingam, and sand from this shore is carried back to the Ganga. — Pilgrim practice across northern and southern India — Devotional practice rather than a text this corpus can cite. It is recorded here as practice, not as a rule any source lays down
• Dhanushkodi, the settlement at the eastern tip of the island nearest the shoals, was destroyed by a cyclone in 1964 and was not rebuilt. — Modern record — Recorded modern event, not scripture. The name is traditionally explained as the point where Rama broke the causeway with the end of his bow

Counted among

• The Twelve Jyotirlingas — Twelve places where Shiva is worshipped not as an image but as a pillar of light with no beginning and no end.

Questions to explore

• Almost everyone arrives believing the Ramayana tells the story of Rama installing the lingam here, and Valmiki's poem does not. Where did that account come from, and when?
• Rama gave the first worship to the lingam Hanuman brought rather than to the one he installed himself. Is that story about the two lingams, or about Hanuman?
• Pilgrims carry Ganga water south to this shore and sand from it back north. When did the two ends of the country become one pilgrimage?