Lord Jagannath

About

The form is meant to be unfinished Almost everyone who comes to a Jagannath murti for the first time asks the same thing: why the great round eyes, why the arms that stop short, why no hands or feet. The tradition answers with a story. Vishwakarma agreed to carve the deities only on the condition that he be left undisturbed behind closed doors, and the doors were opened before he had finished. What stood there was accepted exactly as it was, because the incompleteness was read as the will of the deity rather than an accident of the carving. Every Jagannath since has kept it, from the deities in the Puri sanctum to a murti small enough for a desk. It is the one thing worth knowing before you buy, because a first-time buyer occasionally mistakes it for a badly made idol. Three figures, and a fourth most people miss Jagannath is rarely kept alone. He stands with Balabhadra, his elder brother, also called Balaram, and with Subhadra, their sister. At Puri a fourth stands beside them: Sudarshana, a plain pillar rather than a figure. The four together are what the temple calls the chaturdha murti, and a set sold as a trio gives you the three siblings. In any painted image the three are told apart by colour, Balabhadra white, Subhadra yellow and Jagannath dark. A gold or silver plated set is the colour of its plating instead, so there you identify them by their placement and the shape of the crowns. The Puri deities are neem wood. These are not. This is the gap between what people picture and what is actually for sale, so it is worth being plain about. The deities at Puri are carved from daru, a neem wood chosen by a search party against a list of marks the tree has to carry, and because wood ages they are replaced at Nabakalebara, the new body, in a year that carries a second month of Ashadha. That falls somewhere between twelve and nineteen years apart. During it the Brahma Padartha is moved from the old body to the new one at night, by priests who are blindfolded and who