Jagannath Puri

Puri is the eastern abode of the Char Dham, the four shrines that Adi Shankaracharya wove into a single all-India pilgrimage — Badrinath in the north, Dwarka in the west, Rameswaram in the south and Jagannath Puri in the east. It is also counted among the Sapta Puri, the seven cities held to grant liberation, so that for many Hindus a journey here is the culmination of a lifetime of devotion.

At the heart of Puri's spiritual life is the Mahaprasad, the food first offered to Jagannath and then shared among all pilgrims without distinction of caste or standing. Cooked in the temple's vast kitchen — often called one of the largest in the world — in stacked earthen pots over wood fires, it is distributed at the Ananda Bazaar and revered as supremely sacred. In that openness the temple voices a powerful ideal: before Jagannath, the 'Lord of the Universe', all devotees stand equal.

The Jagannath Temple crowns the Nilachala, the 'Blue Hill', in the coastal town of Puri, a little way from the Bay of Bengal. Unlike most Hindu shrines, its sanctum holds not stone icons but a triad carved from neem wood — Lord Jagannath, a form of Vishnu-Krishna, with his elder brother Balabhadra and their sister Subhadra, worshipped alongside the Sudarshana Chakra on a jewelled platform called the Ratnavedi.

The present temple was raised in the 12th century by Anantavarman Chodaganga Deva of the Eastern Ganga dynasty and, by most accounts, completed under his successor Anangabhima Deva in the 13th century. Puri had long been a great centre of Vaishnava devotion, and Adi Shankaracharya is traditionally said to have established one of his four cardinal monasteries, the Govardhana Matha, here.

The wooden images set Jagannath apart in another way. Because the sacred daru (neem wood) slowly decays, the deities are ritually renewed in the Nabakalebara — the 'new body' ceremony — when fresh images are carved from specially chosen trees and the old ones reverently buried. Recurring every twelve or nineteen years, it draws some of the largest crowds the town ever sees.

The temple is a masterwork of the Kalinga style of Odishan architecture. Its curvilinear tower, the deul or vimana, rises about 65 metres (214 feet) over the sanctum and is crowned by the Nilachakra, an eight-spoked wheel cast from ashtadhatu, the traditional alloy of eight metals; above it the Patita Pavana flag is changed by hand each day by a priest who scales the sheer tower, a ritual said to be unbroken for centuries.

Two concentric walls enclose the complex, entered through four gates facing the cardinal directions — the Singhadwara or Lion Gate (the main eastern entrance), the Hathidwara, Vyaghradwara and Ashwadwara. Before the Lion Gate stands the sixteen-sided Aruna Stambha, a monolithic pillar brought from the Sun Temple at Konark. Along the main axis the sanctum is preceded by three great halls — the Jagamohana (assembly hall), the Nata Mandir (hall of dance) and the Bhoga Mandapa (hall of offerings). Devotees also cherish the beliefs that the temple flag flutters against the wind and that the great tower casts no shadow at noon — mysteries held in faith rather than settled by science.