Puja

Puja is the central act of Hindu worship, the honouring of a deity present in an image (murti), a symbol such as the Shiva linga, or a sacred object. Its logic is hospitality: the deity is received and treated as an honoured guest, and the standard sequence of services (upacharas) is drawn from the etiquette of welcoming a distinguished visitor, offering a seat, water to wash the feet, bathing, clothing, sandal paste, flowers, incense, a lamp waved before the image (arati), and food, which is returned to the worshippers as blessed leavings (prasada).

Puja can be a brief daily act at a home shrine or an elaborate temple liturgy performed by trained priests, and it marks a historical shift within Hinduism from the older Vedic fire sacrifice, which had no image and no temple, toward the image-centred devotional worship (bhakti) that has dominated the tradition for well over a thousand years. What is offered and how varies enormously by region, sect and deity, but the underlying gesture, that the divine is made present and served as a guest is served, is remarkably constant.

The word puja does not appear in the earliest layer of Hindu scripture. Vedic religion centered on yajna, fire offerings poured to gods with no fixed body or image, chanted by priests according to precise formulas. Puja as devotion offered to a housed image, a murti treated as a living guest to be woken, bathed, dressed, and fed, rises to prominence only in the later Puranic and Agamic periods, roughly the first millennium of the common era, alongside the growth of bhakti, devotion to a personal god one can see and touch.

Temple Agama texts from this period supply the detailed manuals still used to consecrate an image and conduct its daily service, and it is this image centered devotion, not the older fire ritual, that most Hindus today mean by worship. The change was not uncontested: currents within Hinduism itself, and later reform movements such as the nineteenth century Arya Samaj, criticized image worship as a departure from the aniconic Vedic religion and argued for a return to fire and mantra without a physical image. Puja also diverged sharply by setting: elaborate priest led temple worship with its Agama rulebook coexists with an entirely informal home puja that a householder performs without any priest, using whatever image, however modest, the family keeps.