Puja & worship
Worship at home and in the temple: what happens step by step, what each act is understood to mean, and why the image is treated as a guest.
Puja is hospitality. That single idea explains almost everything a visitor finds strange about it. The deity is treated as an honoured guest who has been invited to occupy an image: welcomed, offered water for the feet, bathed, dressed, given food and music, and eventually allowed to rest.
The sequence of offerings, the upacharas, is the same in outline whether performed in a temple by a priest or at a household shrine in two minutes before work. What differs is elaboration rather than kind.
The step that makes it possible is prana pratishtha, the rite of installing life in the image. Before it, the image is stone or metal. After it, the tradition treats it as a presence with a daily schedule.
These pages set out what happens, in what order, and what each act is understood to mean.