Rath Yatra -- The Day Jagannath Comes Out to Meet Everyone

For most of the year, Jagannath of Puri -- Krishna as "Lord of the Universe", with his elder brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra -- is seen only by those who enter his temple, and for centuries not everyone could. Once a year that changes. On the second day of the bright fortnight of Ashadha, usually in June or July, the three deities are carried out of the temple in a swaying procession and placed on three enormous wooden chariots in the broad street outside. Then the crowds take the ropes and pull.

This is the Rath Yatra, the chariot festival, and it is one of the largest religious gatherings in the world. The chariots travel about three kilometres down the Bada Danda, the grand road, to the Gundicha temple, where the deities stay for about a week before the return journey, the Bahuda Yatra. For those who cannot enter the temple, this is the day the Lord comes out to them.

The festival is the climax of a cycle of rituals. On the full moon of Jyeshtha, Snana Purnima, the deities are bathed in public with 108 pots of water -- after which, the tradition says, they catch a fever and withdraw from view for about two weeks, a period called Anasara, while they are treated with herbal remedies and only special servitors attend them. They reappear refreshed just before the Rath Yatra. After the return journey, on the chariots outside the temple, they are dressed in gold ornaments (Suna Besha), and only then go back inside.

One moment of the festival is especially remembered. Before the chariots move, the Gajapati king of Puri, the traditional first servant of Jagannath, comes and sweeps the floor of each chariot with a broom with a golden handle, sprinkling sandalwood water. The rite, called Chhera Pahara, shows that before the Lord even a king is a sweeper.

The chariot is an old image in Indian thought. The Katha Upanishad compares the body to a chariot, the senses to its horses and the Self to the lord who rides in it; the Gita is spoken from a chariot with God as charioteer. Many devotees read the Rath Yatra in that light: the Lord rides in the chariot of the body, and pulling his chariot together is a picture of a life directed towards him. Tradition also says that whoever pulls the rope, or even touches it, gains great merit -- which is why people press forward in their thousands just to lay a hand on it.

The festival has travelled far beyond Puri. Rath Yatras are held in many Indian cities, notably Ahmedabad, and since 1967, when the first was held in San Francisco by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, in cities around the world. The English word "juggernaut", for an unstoppable force, comes from early European accounts of the Puri chariots.