Panchayatana Puja -- Worshipping Five Deities as One

In many traditional Hindu homes, the shrine holds not one image but five small stones arranged on a plate: a smooth egg-shaped stone for Shiva, a black fossil stone for Vishnu, a stone or metal emblem for the Goddess, a crystal for Surya and a reddish stone for Ganesha. One of them sits at the centre and the other four at the corners. This is the panchayatana, "the five abodes", and the daily worship offered to it is Panchayatana puja.

The practice belongs especially to the Smarta tradition -- Hindus who follow the smriti texts and the teaching of Vedanta without making one deity exclusive. Tradition credits Adi Shankaracharya with establishing or popularising it, which is why he is sometimes called shanmata-sthapaka, "the founder of the six-fold worship" (adding Kartikeya to the five). Whatever its exact origins, it became one of the most widespread forms of household worship in India.

The arrangement expresses the idea behind it. Each worshipper places at the centre the deity they feel closest to, their ishta-devata, and arranges the other four around it in prescribed positions. A Shiva devotee puts the banalinga in the middle; a Vishnu devotee, the shaligram; and so on. All five are worshipped every day, with the same offerings, but the centre is a matter of personal devotion.

Behind this lies the Vedantic conviction that the many deities are forms of the one Brahman. No one need deny the others to love their own. The Gita gives the principle: whatever form a devotee wishes to worship with faith, the Lord makes that faith steady -- for all worship reaches the one.

The daily worship follows the ordinary steps of puja -- invocation, bathing (abhisheka) of the stones, offering of sandal paste, flowers, incense, lamp and food, and aarti -- often in the sixteen-step form, shodashopachara. Because the emblems are natural stones rather than consecrated images, families can keep and worship them at home without the elaborate rites a temple image requires, and many panchayatanas have been handed down for generations. It is a quiet way of holding together the whole of Hindu devotion on a single plate.