Shrine offerings and worship

Puja is the characteristic act of Hindu worship: the honouring of a deity present in an image or symbol through a sequence of offerings and attentions. At its heart lies the treatment of the divine image as an honoured guest of the highest rank, welcomed and served with the courtesies due to a king or a revered visitor. The worshipper offers water to wash, a seat, cloth and ornament, sandal paste and flowers, incense and a flame, food and finally the circling of a lamp before the image in the rite of arati. What is offered is then returned to the worshippers as prasada, grace-bearing food and substance that has passed through the deity's presence and is shared and consumed.

Puja may be elaborate temple ritual conducted by trained priests according to detailed manuals, or the simple daily service of a household shrine performed by any family member. In either case its logic is hospitality and reciprocity: the deity, made truly present in the consecrated image, is served, and returns the service as blessing.

In the temple, puja follows the rhythm of the deity treated as a living resident, woken, bathed, dressed, fed and put to rest at fixed hours, and the great festivals magnify this service to a civic scale. In the home, a shrine holding images or prints of the family's chosen deities is tended daily, often by the women of the household, with lamp, incense and a few flowers and offerings of food. The practice does not depend on priestly mediation: the direct offering of the devotee, made with love, is held sufficient, and the Bhagavad Gita has Krishna promise to accept even a leaf, a flower, a fruit or water offered with devotion.

The offering of the lamp, the presenting of food, and the sharing of the returned prasada recur across the diversity of Hindu worship as its common grammar, uniting the grandest temple ritual and the smallest household rite in a single gesture of service and communion with the divine.