Puja (daily worship)

Puja is structured as hospitality, and once that is seen the sequence stops looking arbitrary.

The classical service offers the deity what a household would offer an honoured visitor, in order: a seat, water for the feet, water to rinse the mouth, a bath, fresh clothing, perfume, flowers, incense, a lamp, food, betel, and finally praise and a formal leave-taking. The lamp is moved in a circle before the image, and worshippers draw the warmth of the flame toward their own faces afterwards. Food that has been offered is returned as prasad, and eating it is the moment at which the worshipper receives something back rather than only giving.

At home this may take two minutes at a shelf of printed images, performed by whoever in the household does it, most often a woman. In a large temple it is performed by hereditary priests at fixed hours, and the image is woken in the morning, bathed, dressed, fed at intervals through the day, entertained, and put to bed at night with the sanctuary closed. Major temples have run that schedule daily without interruption for centuries, which makes the deity a resident with a household rather than a presence that is summoned.

The central act for the worshipper is darshan, seeing and being seen by the deity. It is a visual exchange rather than a verbal one, and it explains a great deal both about temple architecture, which is organised to deliver a sightline, and about the crowds: people will queue for hours for a few seconds in front of an image and regard that as the substance of the visit rather than a disappointing fraction of it.

Whether an image is the god, contains the god, or represents the god is a question Hindu theology answers in several incompatible ways, and outsiders have consistently reported only the crudest of them.

The ritual answer is that a properly consecrated image is inhabited. Consecration involves a rite of installing life-breath, and there are corresponding procedures for asking the deity to depart when an image is damaged or when a temporary image is to be dissolved, which is why the clay figures made for festivals are immersed in rivers and the sea at the end without any impiety. An image that has not been consecrated is not treated as anything in particular, and this is the detail that most often surprises people.

The philosophical answer, in the non-dual traditions, is that the absolute has no form at all, that images are concessions to human limitation, useful for concentrating an untrained mind, and are to be dispensed with eventually.

The devotional answer, in the bhakti traditions, is that the form is a real self-limitation undertaken by God for the sake of being loved, and that treating it as a mere aid is itself the error.

These three have coexisted for a very long time, and practitioners frequently hold more than one at once without any sense of contradiction. Accusations of idolatry, made by Muslim and Christian critics over many centuries and used to justify a great deal of temple destruction, engage only the first answer and only in its simplest form. It is worth adding that the critique is not solely external: Hindu reform movements of the nineteenth century, the Arya Samaj most sharply, attacked image worship from within on grounds that would be recognisable to any Protestant iconoclast.