Consecration Rituals in South Asia

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

Consecration rituals are key prerequisites for the building of temples and the worship of temple images in South Asia. These complex rituals accompany the construction process of sacral buildings, as well as the consecration and installation of temple statues. In the latter case, which is the overarching theme of the present volume, man-made sculptures are ritually transformed into (containers of) deities by the rite of infusion with life, pranapratistha or simply pratistha. The pratistha belongs to a wide category of practices classified under the umbrella-term puja, ritual activities performed in connection with the worship of iconic or aniconic ritual images in temples and domes- tic contexts. These practices can be subdivided into several subcategories, the most common of these being regular (nitya) rituals such as, for instance, the worship offered on a daily basis by religious specialists and devotees alike at public shrines and temples, or by laypersons in the privacy of their homes. Rituals connected to particular occasions (naimittika) comprise another sub- category. These, too, can be performed either regularly (for example as yearly temple celebrations) or in connection with specific occasions. Image consecrations are exactly such occasional rituals that often constitute unique events in the lives of their sponsors and are performed in connection with the construction or renovation of shrines and temples.

The gradual transition from Vedic religion to a more personal and image centered religiosity that started in the last centuries BCE led to the development of new rituals in both public and domestic contexts. The performance of image consecrations in private settings is described in late (fourth-fifth century) Grhya texts, and Varahamihira's Brhatsamhita (sixth century) presents the public installation (samsthapana or sthapana) of temple images. Scholars such as Einoo and Takashima (2005) have suggested a development of the pratistha from the simpler, personal form to a much more complex (and public) ritual system. In his introduction to the volume on Indian rituals of consecration that he jointly edited with Jun Takashima, and summing up the findings of several of the volume's contributors, Shingo Einoo points out that the pratistha gradually gains in complexity through absorbing 'various kinds of ritual elements, and that 'in its fully developed stage the pratistha ceremony consists of a great number of ritual acts' (Einoo 2005: 2-3). Analysing in the same collection the description of linga installations in early Saiva agamas, Jun Takashima identifies several stages, from the ritual appropriation of an existing linga to the simple installation in a small temple for private worship, to the construction of a temple and the more complex consecration of a linga for public worship (Takashima 2005: 136-7). Colas (2010: 319f.) has argued more recently against a diachronic development leading from private and less elaborate to public and more complex forms suggesting that there are reasons to assume that public and private pratisthas existed contemporaneously in the first centuries CE, and that the ritual procedures described in the fifth- century Grhyaparisista texts might as well be reduced versions for domestic use of more elaborate public installation rituals that were already common in South Asia. Colas points-among other examples-to Buddhist epigraphic records from the first four centuries CE that mention public pratisthas of relics and images, emphasizing at the same time the importance of political, social, and historical factors for the development and transformation of image consecration rituals over the centuries. In addition to the aforementioned texts, descriptions of consecration rituals of different types can be found in a large number of Puranas and other theological and liturgical works from the Saiva, Vaisnava, and sakta traditions, not to mention the numerous ritual handbooks (compiled from the eighth-ninth centuries onwards) meant to serve as manuals for officiating religious specialists.