A form deliberately incomplete
The image of Jagannath at Puri startles visitors who expect the refined bronze figures of the south. He is carved from wood, broad-faced, with great circular eyes and arms that end without hands. The temple's own sthala-purana — its local sacred history — explains the form through the story of a king, a divine carpenter, and an instruction that the carving must not be interrupted. When the door is opened too soon, the figure is left as it is, unfinished, and the tradition chooses to worship that very incompleteness. It is one of the rare instances in Indian sacred art where the imperfect is held to be the holy.
Nabakalebara: the god who is renewed
Most temple deities are permanent. The Puri images are not. In a rite called Nabakalebara, 'the new body,' the wooden figures of Jagannath, his brother Balabhadra, and his sister Subhadra are periodically replaced — a particular neem tree bearing the right marks is sought, felled with elaborate ceremony, and carved anew, with a small substance transferred from the old image to the new in the most secret moment of the temple year. The deity dies and is reborn on a roughly twelve-to-nineteen-year rhythm tied to the lunar calendar. A god of wood, the tradition seems to say, can model impermanence in a way a god of stone cannot.
The chariots and the reversal they enact
Once a year, at the Rath Yatra, the deities leave the temple altogether. Placed on towering wooden chariots, they are pulled by the hands of enormous crowds through the streets of Puri to a garden temple and back. The English word 'juggernaut' descends, by a long misunderstanding, from these chariots. What the festival enacts is a reversal of the ordinary order: the deity who is normally approached only by the qualified, in the inner sanctum, comes out onto the open road where anyone may pull the rope. For the days of the journey the hierarchy of the temple is suspended, and that suspension is the festival's whole meaning.
Reading a temple on its own terms
Puri rewards a particular discipline: taking the temple's own account seriously before reaching for an outside explanation. The unfinished form, the renewed body, the public procession — each can be rationalised, and each loses something in the rationalising. The more useful approach is to ask what the tradition is teaching through these choices. Incompleteness as holiness, renewal as the law even for the divine, and the road as a place where everyone is equal: these are not quaint customs but a coherent theology, carved in neem and pulled through the dust.