IB World Religions 4.2.2. Worship: Puja, Murti, Darshan and Pilgrimage Notes

4.2.2. Worship: Puja, Murti, Darshan and Pilgrimage

Achamana and ritual purity

1. Hindu worship begins with purification rather than with words. Achamana is the sipping of water three times from the right palm with short mantras, and it is performed before puja, before the recitation of scripture and at many points inside a longer ritual.
2. The purity involved is shaucha, a ritual state rather than a moral verdict. A person who is clean in this sense is fit to approach the deity, and a person who is not simply waits until the state is restored.
3. The state is lost easily and restored easily. Contact with death, with birth, with bodily fluids or with certain foods removes it, and bathing, sprinkling with water and the passing of time bring it back.
4. Snana, the bath, is the fuller form and is expected before any significant ritual. Clean clothes are put on afterwards, and shoes are left outside the shrine room or the temple door.
5. Water carried from a sacred river carries the purity of its source. Ganga jal, water from the Ganga, is kept in many households and sprinkled over the worshipper, the utensils and the offerings.
6. How strictly these rules are kept varies widely. A temple pujari (priest) observes restrictions on food, touch and dress that a lay worshipper at a home shrine does not, and families differ from one another in the same street.

Puja at the home shrine

1. Puja is the central act of Hindu worship, in which a deity present in an image is honoured with offerings and attention. Far more puja is performed at home than in temples.
2. The home shrine may be a whole room, a cupboard or a single shelf holding images, pictures and a lamp. A member of the household performs a short puja daily, often in the early morning.
3. What is worshipped there is usually an ishta-devata, the deity chosen by a person or family as their own. Many Hindus hold that the one supreme being, Ishwara, is approached under the form that suits the worshipper, so choosing one form is not a denial of the others.
4. Households also keep a kula-devata, the deity of the family line, and villages a grama-devata, the deity of the place. These are worshipped alongside the chosen deity rather than instead of it.
5. The classical form of puja is a sequence of upacharas, services offered to the deity. The sixteen include invitation, a seat, water for the feet, bathing, clothing, sandal paste, flowers, incense, a lamp, food and a farewell.
6. Daily practice compresses this drastically. A lamp lit, incense waved, a flower placed, a verse said and a bow made may be the whole of it, and Hindus regard the shortened form as complete worship rather than a substitute for it.

The murti and its installation

1. A murti is the image in which a deity is worshipped. Hindus generally describe it not as a likeness of the deity but as a form the deity is willing to take so that worshippers can approach something with their eyes, hands and food.
2. Murtis are made to fixed proportions set out in the shilpa shastras, the manuals of sacred craft, and are carved in stone, cast in bronze, or modelled in wood and clay.
3. An image only becomes a murti through the rite of prana pratishtha, the establishing of life breath. Mantras invite the deity to be present, and the eyes are opened last, after which the object is treated as the deity rather than as a representation.
4. A temple murti is then served daily like a living presence. The pujari wakes it, bathes it, dresses it, offers it food and puts it to rest at night, and the temple's hours follow that schedule.
5. Not every focus of worship is a figure. Shiva is very widely worshipped in the form of the linga, Vishnu in the shaligrama stone, and some traditions use a yantra, a geometric diagram, instead of an image.
6. Some Hindus reject image worship altogether. The Arya Samaj holds that the Vedas do not authorise it, and devotion to God as nirguna, without form, has a long history in Hindu thought.

Darshan and the temple

1. Darshan means seeing, and it names the point of a temple visit. The worshipper comes to look at the deity in the murti and, in Hindu understanding, to be looked at in return.
2. The exchange runs both ways, which is why murtis are made with large open eyes and why the moment the curtain is drawn back from the shrine is the moment worshippers press forward.
3. The murti stands in the garbhagriha, the womb chamber, a small dark room at the centre of the temple with the tower rising directly above it. Only the pujari normally enters it.
4. Worshippers perform pradakshina, walking clockwise around the shrine so that the deity stays on their right. Many temples are built with a corridor for exactly this purpose.
5. Darshan is not confined to images. Hindus speak of taking darshan of a guru or a holy person, and crowds gather for the sight of a teacher in the same way.
6. A temple visit needs no sermon, no fixed hour and no congregation. Worshippers come and go through the day as they choose, which makes Hindu temple worship look very unlike a weekly congregational service.

Arti, prasad and bhajans

1. Arti is the lamp ceremony that closes most puja. A lamp of several wicks, or a piece burning camphor, is circled before the murti while a song is sung and a bell is rung.
2. The lamp is then carried to the worshippers. Each person passes their hands over the flame and touches them to the eyes or head, taking the light that has been in the deity's presence.
3. Food offered during puja is called naivedya. Hindus hold that the deity accepts it, and what returns to the worshippers is prasad, food carrying the deity's grace with it.
4. Prasad is shared out and eaten, and even a spoonful of sweet or a few grains counts. Distributing it turns the offering into something communal, and pilgrims carry it home for those who could not come.
5. Bhajans and kirtan are devotional songs, usually sung in local languages rather than Sanskrit and often in call and response. Groups meet for satsang, singing together for an hour or several.
6. Arti is also performed on a public scale. The evening arti to the Ganga at Varanasi and Haridwar is offered to the river itself, with rows of lamps raised on the steps as crowds watch from boats.

Yatra, ashrams and seva

1. Yatra is pilgrimage, and its destination is a tirtha. The word means a ford or crossing place, and Hindus use it for sites where the distance between this world and the divine is held to be shorter.
2. The great tirthas cluster on rivers and coasts. Varanasi, Haridwar and Prayagraj sit on the Ganga, while the Char Dham circuit of Badrinath, Dwarka, Puri and Rameshwaram marks the four directions of India.
3. Pilgrims take on temporary disciplines. Shaving the head, fasting, walking the last stretch barefoot and bathing in the river at the ghats are common, and many carry river water home in a sealed pot.
4. The Kumbha Mela is the largest of these gatherings, rotating between Prayagraj, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik on a cycle set by the positions of Jupiter, the sun and the moon. Orders of sadhus (ascetics) bathe first in a fixed order of precedence.
5. An ashram is a community gathered around a teacher, where residents and visitors keep a daily round of worship, study and manual work. Many run schools, clinics and free kitchens alongside the religious routine.
6. Seva is service given without payment or expectation, and Hindus treat it as worship carried out in action. Cooking for pilgrims, cleaning a temple and staffing a hospital are all counted as seva.
7. Practice differs everywhere. A Tamil family, a Gujarati family and a Hindu family in Leicester or Durban will keep different festivals, favour different deities and travel to different tirthas, and all of them would call what they do Hindu worship.