Pilgrims take a dip in the Ganges.

We're accustomed to hearing how many millions of people simultaneously tune in by television to some event like "American Idol" or the World Series. But imagine instead tens of millions of people gathered in person, living in community for weeks, drawn by a common intention of finding and teaching joy and love. That has been happening for thousands of years as Hindu devotees make their way to four cities in India for religious festivals, or kumbh mela (kumbh, vessel or pot; mela, festival), in a cycle that repeats every 12 years, when the planets are in appropriate alignment. Of these recurring pilgrimages, the most sacred is the kumbh mela in Allahabad, at the confluence of the holy Ganges and Yamuna Rivers. The temporary conglomeration of humanity that makes the trek for eight weeks of religious teachings, rituals, self-purifying, meditations, celebrations, and entertainments is captured in the documentary Short Cut to Nirvana, showing this month at Time and Space Limited in Hudson.

The film's coproducers/codirectors, Nick Day and Maurizio Benazzo, decided to go to the most recent one in 2001, on just a few weeks' notice. "I was just staggered that something so vast could be going on and I'd never heard of it," says Day. "I just couldn't miss it, the chance to record something that seemed so momentous and vast." Benazzo adds, "The 2001 [gathering] was especially auspicious because this was the Maha Kumbh Mela, the one that happens every 144 years, based on a specific alignment of the planets." Both men have traveled widely and have a strong interest in other cultures, so they quickly gathered equipment, flew to India, and became two of the few thousand "westerners" who were warmly welcomed to a very different world.

And a vast gathering it was. "The biggest event in the history of the world," says Day. "They say 70 million went to this one. The big numbers of people come for the bathing days," during which everyone goes into the river. "On the most important bathing day [the one depicted in the film], 25 million people passed through in 24 hours. That's a million every hour. It really was insanely huge." (By comparison, the population of New York City is about eight million; of Kingston, about 25,000.)

A pilgrim on main bathing day.

The logistics would seem impossible; nevertheless, all who come are housed and fed, simply, but for free. "This temporary tent city starts going up around two to three months before, with electricity and water," explains Day, "and the Department of Works puts up 12 temporary bridges." Those bridges carry the pilgrims across the rivers to a wedge of bare sand flanked by the rivers, where the tent city comes to life. Food is provided by thousands of Hindu religious teachers—the gurus, yogis, and babas—whose followers settle around them in a unique opportunity to learn from and be blessed directly by their master.

The diversity of spiritual teachers, several of whom are interviewed in the film, and the pilgrims who come—mostly poor people from India's agrarian countryside—create a sensational world of colors, sounds, and spectacle. "It's something like a spiritual trade fair," Day says. "In Hinduism, all things are manifestations of the divine, so it has an all-embracing characteristic. It's very inclusive. You can find the path that will work for you." The film treats the viewer to proof of that, from familiar practices, like meditation and chanting, to the more unusual, like sitting and walking on nails; to the utterly bizarre (I'm not giving those away—go see the film). Whatever way may work as a means to reaching enlightenment is fair game as a spiritual practice. "It's easy to get lost in it," Day notes. "Spiritually, there are areas where you can be misled or go down the wrong path for yourself."

The filmmakers include the perspectives of a few westerners who "appeared in our life to make the film once we were there," says Benazzo. One woman recounts that her most spiritually rewarding experience was not any particular guru's practice, but the people everywhere exuding love. Indeed, it is disarmingly compelling that in spite of how different our cultures and appearances are, the messages of love and hope at the kumbh mela are showered on everyone. Would we open our hearts so freely to people who happily trod in the mud barefoot, decorate their faces and bodies with paint and henna, drape themselves with yards of cloth, or, for many men, wear almost nothing?

"The Hindu spiritual teachers talk about nonduality," says Day, "the idea that all things are one, and are god. Hinduism accepts Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha as holy men," an inclusiveness that the two largest world religions, Christianity and Islam, don't profess. It is encouraging that, as the world's third largest religion, Hinduism teaches tolerance of diversity, as well as respect for others and kindness in daily living. As Benazzo explains, "In the Hindu tradition, there is much more attention to the detail of day-to-day life, because there clearly will be immense repercussions from every action, in your karma and in your next reincarnation. Every action, even the more minor, like saying 'Hi' to a beggar, serving him food, loving your neighbor—all those things will improve your state now and in the future."

Swami Krishnanand explains life and the universe to westerners.

At kumbh mela, people have a chance to repair some of their past failings by bathing in the river. "It accelerates your progress toward moksha, Sanskrit for enlightenment or nirvana, the state of merging with the universe and breaking the cycle of life and suffering," says Benazzo. The title of the film refers to this. But the bathing is a small assist, not a forgiveness of everything at once. "As Catholics, we have a chance to buy paradise, being bad all our lives, as long as we say 'Sorry, I didn't mean it' in our last seconds of life." It's not so easy by Hindu belief; the bathing is "a karmic credit that gets you a little step ahead."

Bathing day in the Ganges is the film's culmination, preceded at kumbh mela with days of chanting, singing, prayer, and ritual. Then, entered first by a group of men whose spiritual practice includes a vow to live naked, the Mother Ganges once again receives millions of ecstatic people, as it has done for thousands of years. "I was up to my knees in this soupy water, very cold," Day recounts, "and people are just leaping around, splashing, expressing this incredible joy, from the heart. And they've been doing this for thousands of years. It seemed to me that something was being expressed that I'd never experienced before, like something that will happen only once in a lifetime."

As Day and Benazzo take the film out to audiences, they hope it shows the potential for human connection. "We're giving you the experience of what it's like to be surrounded by this sea of humanity, and seeing that we don't need to be afraid," says Benazzo. "It's a big message of tolerance and understanding." And he reveals something special about the film: "We asked everyone we interviewed to bless every audience member who sees the film." Perhaps each person who comes out of Short Cut to Nirvana hopeful and encouraged, as many will, is receiving that blessing, consciously or not.