Aryan Books

COMMUNICATION WITH GOD: The Daily Puja Ceremony in the Jagannath Temple (Spl. Janmashtami Offer)

By :- Gaya Charan Tripathi

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Type: English

Pages: xxii+510

ISBN-13: 9788173053115

Place: New Delhi

Edition: 1st

Publisher: ARYAN BOOKS INTERNATIONAL

Size: 19cm x 25cm

Product Year: 2004

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The work for the first time presents in a very detailed manner the various rites forming the daily Puja ceremony of one of the most famous and important temples of the Hindus, namely that of Jagannatha at Puri. The Study is based on a large number of authentic palm-leaf manuscripts discovered and collected by the author in Orissa, substantiated by his personal observation and information acquired from the temple functionaries. It is a well known fact that the study of Hindu temples rituals has not yet been taken up so extensively and seriously as that of the Vedic rituals. This work seeks to fill up this desirable gap and is a significant contribution to the study of the process of formation of the medieval Hinduism and its gradual development. The rite of the Hindu Puja is basically a very subtle and sublime spiritual phenomenon in which the worshipper, in the course of meditation, first dissolves his mundane body to create a divine body for himself, identical in nature with that of his Deity. Thereafter visualising the tejas of the Deity in his heart through concentrated meditation upon His/Her form, he transfers this divine effulgence into the image for the time being in order to achieve a subject-object relationship with the Deity, who is identical with the self, and starts communicating with his God from the same elevated plane. An analysis of the Puja ritual of a deity not only sheds light on the primeval concept and the character of that deity, but also reflects changes, which he or she has undergone from time to time. The study, consequently, brings to light the various streams of religious practices and philosophical thoughts which have gone into making of the phenomenon which is now commonly known as the ?cult of jagannatha? representing the Orissan form of theistic Visnuism.

Preface Abbreviations 1. The Sthala-mahatmyas 2. Manuscripts Bearing on the Puja of Jagannatha 3. Preparations and Preliminaries 4. Ritual Purification of the Self 5. Deification of the Self 6. Internal Worship (Antaryaga) of the Deity 7. Realisation of the Deity and Her External Worship 8. Concluding Rites and Building Farewell to the Deity Appendices Line Drawings of the Mudras Described in the Text Bibliography Index

Prof. Gaya Charan Tripathi, born at Agra in 1939 in a family of traditional Sanskrit scholars, studied at Agra, Moradabad, Pune, Varanasi, Freiburg; M.A. Sanskrit, Agra 1959; Ph.D. on Vedic deities, Agra 1962. German Academic Exchange Service Fellow to the University of the Freiburg 1962-66; Dr. Phil. Freiburg 1966; D. Litt. in Ancient Indian History, Allahabad 1986. Taught at the Universities of Freiburg (twice), Aligarh, Udaipur; Principal, G.N. Jha Research Institute (Kendriya Sanskrit Vidyapith), Allahabad 1977-2001, Visiting Professor to the Universities of Heidelburg, Tubingen (twice), British Columbia of Vancouver (twice), Berlin, Leipzig. Presently Professor at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Head of its Kalakosha Division. Publications: 20 books and 80 research articles in Hindi, Sanskrit, English and German. Fields of specialization: Vedic studies, Puranic literature, Agama, Sahitya, Manuscriptology.

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