The Summer Turn

The spring festivals end and the heat comes. In the weeks before the monsoon breaks, the land bakes, the rivers shrink, and the year offers three observances that could hardly be more different from one another. A day on which nothing begun can ever be lost. A day on which god himself comes down into the street. And a day given entirely to the one who teaches.

They share a season and almost nothing else. Together they carry the year from the dry heat into the rains.

The imperishable third

The first is a single word made into a day. The word is akshaya. It means undiminishing, that which does not decay, the imperishable.

Akshaya Tritiya falls on the third tithi of the bright fortnight of Vaishakha, in late April or early May. The tradition holds it among the most auspicious days of the entire year, and holds it so in a particular way. It is an abuja muhurta, an auspicious time that needs no calculation: the whole day, every hour of it, is held fortunate, so that a thing one might otherwise wait to begin until the almanac found a good moment can simply be begun on this day, anywhere in it. And whatever is begun, the tradition says, will not diminish. Merit earned does not decay. Charity given returns. Ventures started endure.

The associations gathered onto the day are many, and they are of mixed weight, which the treatise will mark honestly. The strongest is textual. The Mahabharata tells, in the third section of the Vana Parva, of the years the Pandavas spent in the forest, and of the gift the Sun gave them so that they could feed all who came: a vessel that would not empty. Ganguli’s public-domain translation gives the Sun’s words: the food in it “shall from this day be inexhaustible.” The Akshaya Patra, the inexhaustible vessel, is the clearest image of what the day means, abundance that does not run out. Other associations are more traditional than textual, and the treatise flags them as such: that Parashurama, the sixth avatara, was born on this day; that the Treta Yuga began on it; that the Ganga descended to earth on it; that the sage Vyasa began on this day to dictate the Mahabharata to Ganesha. These are held by tradition, with varying support in the texts, and the treatise gives them as that.

The day is kept by acts meant to last. Charity, above all, and the giving suited to the heat: water-pots, fans, shade, relief from the coming summer. Gold is bought, as a thing that does not decay. New ventures and new homes are begun. In Jainism the day carries its own meaning, the day the first Tirthankara, Rishabhanatha, broke a fast of many months with sugarcane juice, and Jains who keep the year-long Varshitap fast break it on this day. In the Himalaya, the gates of the high shrines of Yamunotri and Gangotri open on Akshaya Tritiya for the pilgrimage season. A day named for the imperishable, spent doing the things one hopes will endure.

The lord comes out

The second festival of the summer turn is unlike anything else in the year, and to understand it you have to understand how the tradition usually works.

In the ordinary way of things, the deity stays in the sanctum. The innermost chamber of the temple holds the image, and the devotee comes to it, climbing through the temple’s thresholds to the dark heart where the lord waits. Darshan, the seeing of the deity, is something the worshipper travels inward to receive.

Once a year, at Puri in Odisha, that order is reversed. The lord comes out.

On the second tithi of the bright fortnight of Ashadha, the great wooden temple of Jagannath gives up its three deities. Jagannath, the lord of the universe, a form of Krishna and Vishnu, carved in a startling form with great round eyes. His elder brother Balabhadra. Their sister Subhadra. They are brought from the sanctum and set upon three colossal chariots built new every year, Nandighosha for Jagannath, sixteen-wheeled and forty-five feet high, Taladhwaja for Balabhadra, and Darpadalana for Subhadra. And then the crowds take up the ropes and pull.

The chariots roll the three kilometres from the temple to the Gundicha temple, the place the tradition calls the deities’ aunt’s home, where they stay some days before the return journey, the Bahuda Yatra, brings them back. For the length of the festival the lord is not in his house. He is on the road, in the open, where anyone at all can see him, where the lines that keep most worshippers at a distance from the sanctum fall away, where a person may even lay hands on the rope that pulls god through the street. The tradition reads this as grace and as inclusion: the lord leaving his chamber to meet his people, the darshan that comes out to find you.

The scholarship, gathered most fully in the great study edited by Eschmann, Kulke, and Tripathi, reads the Jagannath cult as a long synthesis, an originally local and tribal wooden deity drawn over centuries into the worship of Vishnu and into the service of the kings of Odisha. The present temple was raised in the twelfth century. The treatise gives this history as history, beside the devotion as devotion, and keeps them distinct, as it has promised. The English word juggernaut, an unstoppable crushing force, comes from these chariots, by way of colonial accounts that sensationalised them. The word is a distortion. The festival is an offering of nearness.

The full moon of the teacher

The third observance turns from abundance and spectacle to gratitude. On the full moon of Ashadha, as the monsoon settles in, comes Guru Purnima.

The guru is the one who carries knowledge across the dark, the teacher through whom a tradition reaches a new generation. Guru Purnima is the day given to that figure, to one’s own teacher and to the principle of teaching itself. The disciple honours the guru, offers the guru-dakshina, the gift owed to the teacher, and recites the texts of the lineage. The day is also Vyasa Purnima, for it honours Vyasa, Krishna Dvaipayana, the sage who divided the single Veda into four so that it could be carried and kept, who composed the Mahabharata, and to whom the tradition credits the arranging of the Puranas. The guru behind all gurus, the one who organised the very knowledge the lineages transmit.

The full moon of Ashadha opens Chaturmasya, the four months of the monsoon during which wandering ascetics traditionally stop and stay, settling in one place while the rains make the roads impassable and the small creatures of the earth come out, so that the renunciant does no harm by his walking. The festival of the teacher begins the season of stillness and study. The wider tradition keeps the day too: it is held to be the day the Buddha gave his first sermon at Sarnath, setting the wheel of his teaching turning.

So the summer turn ends on the quietest of its three notes. The imperishable day was about what endures. The chariots were about the lord coming near. And the full moon of Ashadha is about the line of teachers down which all of it has been handed, the parampara without which there would be no festival to keep, no story to tell, no calendar to read.

The treatise itself is a small late link in that chain. It says so plainly. The knowledge does not need the treatise. The teachers carried it here without it.

The rains have come now. The roads have closed. And in the heart of the monsoon, on a midnight in the dark fortnight, the year keeps its most beloved birth.