This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Diana Eck's study of India as a sacred geography traces how thoroughly its rivers, the Ganges above all, are woven into a documented tradition of pilgrimage, myth and ritual bathing, with a single river carrying distinct religious significance at different points along its own course and drawing pilgrims whose specific reasons for visiting a given stretch of it are themselves part of the documented tradition.
That geographic specificity matters for a body of water entry because it shows a single body of water's religious meaning is rarely uniform along its whole length or across its whole history, one stretch of a river carrying one documented significance and another stretch carrying a genuinely different one, and an entry records that internal variation rather than treating an entire river as religiously identical at every point.
A body of water entry therefore records the specific documented practices, myths and pilgrimage patterns attached to a particular stretch or feature of a body of water, on the tradition's own terms, rather than describing its religious significance only in the most general possible language. A body of water entry records that finer geography wherever the documented evidence supports it, rather than treating an entire river, sea or lake as a single undifferentiated sacred site.