Few places are shared by so many religions at once. In Hindu tradition the lake was formed in the mind of Brahma so that his sons would have somewhere to bathe, which is what its name records, and it is associated with Shiva and Parvati, whose home is the mountain above it; the swans that summer there carry their own symbolism of discernment. Buddhist cosmology identifies it with Anavatapta, the lake at the centre of the world from which four great rivers flow to the four directions, and one strand of the tradition places Maya's dream of the white elephant, and so the conception of the Buddha, at its shore. For Jains the mountain is Ashtapada, where the first tirthankara Rishabhanatha attained liberation. For Bon the mountain is the nine-storey swastika mountain and the whole region the heart of the ancient land of Zhangzhung, and Per Kvaerne's work on the living Bon tradition shows how far its sacred geography here is its own rather than borrowed.
The physical facts underwrite the cosmology to an unusual degree. The Indus, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra and the Karnali, a headwater of the Ganges, all rise within a short distance of the lake and run to four different quarters, which is close enough to the four rivers of the texts that the correspondence has been noticed by every tradition in turn.
Beside it lies Rakshastal, a salt lake with no outlet, held in several of these traditions as its dark counterpart.