Jagannath, the name means Lord of the World, is worshipped at the great temple of Puri, on the coast of Odisha in eastern India, together with his brother Balabhadra and his sister Subhadra. His image is unlike any other in Hinduism: a massive wooden figure with a broad, dark, round-eyed face, stump-like arms and no legs, brightly painted, and its very unfinished appearance is bound up with the legends of its origin.
Jagannath is understood as a form of Krishna, and thus of Vishnu, though his worship also draws in tribal, Buddhist and other strands, and scholars see in him a remarkable convergence of traditions gathered around one shrine. Unusually, the images are not permanent: at intervals set by the calendar, in the rite called Nabakalebara, they are ritually renewed, new figures carved from specially chosen trees and the mysterious sacred substance transferred from the old to the new.
Jagannath is most famous for the Ratha Yatra, the chariot festival, in which the three deities are brought out of the temple and drawn through the streets on enormous wooden chariots by great crowds of devotees, a spectacle so overwhelming to early European observers that the deity's name, in the form juggernaut, entered the English language for an unstoppable and crushing force. To his devotees the festival is the moment when the Lord of the World leaves his sanctuary to come out among the people.