The Juggernaut and Older Stories

Encouraged by the feedback on my Badrinath Kedarnath trip report, here I am with my new offering on the Jagannath Puri. This part is centred mainly around the Jagannath Temple and other places in Puri. Hope you will like this humble effort also. Please also bear with the quality of snaps, all of which are captured from my mini DV video footage.

The Abode of Lord Purushottam Jagannath

Based on response to this one, I will also post the write-up on other places that we visited viz. Chilika lake, Konark temple, Lingaraj temple, Nandan Kanan, Dhauli, Pipli. We consciously skipped the Dhaulagiri-Khandagiri caves.

So, the legend of the temple of Lord Jagannath in Jagannath Puri goes like this:

As per Brahma-Purana, Skand-Purana and other Puranas, there used to be a tribal king by the name of Viswavasu who would worship Lord Jagannath known as Neel Madhav at some secret place at the Neel Mountain. The king of the land, named Indradyumna, wanted to locate and see and worship the deity. He sends one of his priests, the intelligent Vidyapati to locate it. Vidyapati comes to the tribal village and tries hard, but in vain, to locate the deity, and eventually ends up marrying the daughter of the tribal king – Lalita, as another effort in that direction.

At last, one day, he manages a blindfolded and guided trip to the secret place where the deity resided. The intelligent spy that Vidyapati was, he dropped mustard seeds along the way. Sometime later, when the row of mustard seeds germinated (wonder whether he could not have tracked by the seeds alone!), he tracked down the secret place and informed the king. King proceeded on the pilgrimage to the place, but deity conveniently disappeared, turning the whole effort futile. King went on to fast unto death at Mount Neela, when a celestial voice (Akashwani) announced that he will be granted the privilege of seeing the deity. After that he went on to built a magnificent temple there and installed Narsimha Murti. Then he had a dream in which he was told by the celestial power to bring a particular fragrant tree from the sea shore and make the idols of lord Jagannath out of it. Then king got the idols of Bhagwan Jagannath, Balbhadra, Subhadra and Sudarshan Chakra made and installed in the temple.

This was the legend. But are you not surprised that the idols were made of wood? I really was when I heard as much as above from the benign lady, who with her son was our co-passenger from Delhi to Puri in the 2816 Puri Express on 15.03.2008.

After our Badrinath Kedarnath pilgrimage, the next one had been pending for more than a year or so and kept falling short of materializing for one or the other reasons. It had to be either to the East or to West, as per our long term plans of playing proverbial Shravan Kumars!. Somehow, it was decided in favor of the East as the number of leaves needed for the western leg are more.

The meticulous planner that SPV is, he started putting things together in January 2008 itself. Earlier he had thought of including Ganga Sagar too, but the gathered feedback was that there is not much to be done or seen there except during the Makar Sankranti Mela. Eventually the trip was frozen as Delhi-Puri-Delhi/Kanpur. Our family was to get off at Kanpur on the way back in the night of 20.03.08, to celebrate Holi, which was on 21-22.03.08, at our ancestral home in Lucknow, where it is truly wet and wild on Holi, as against the sanitized festivals elsewhere.

We booked the Puri Holiday home. We got our tickets booked in a jiffy. Onward by Neelachal/Puri 2816 Express and Return by Purushottam 2801 Express. Well, Neelachal means Neel Achal-Blue Hill, remember the Neel Madhab, told of above. The place where Jagannath Temple is located is supposed to be the Neel Achal of the yore. And the Purushottam Kshetra was the name of the area since the vedic ages as per the legends. The name of the present temple built by Raja Chodaganga Dev was Purushottam Jagannath Temple. Probably, the name Puri was derived from the word Purushottam-The most noble man. So, a lot is there in a name-the bard must have been jesting when he professed the opposite.

As mentioned above, our fellow passenger in our bay was a lovely lady – Mrs. Mohapatra – traveling with her son Aditya (Adi-4yrs) to Puri. She was a native to Puri, settled in Gurgaon with her Brahmin (Mohapatra) husband, who would not eat meat earlier for quite sometime after their marriage. As we talked, and she did most of which, in the course of the journey, it turned out that they were related to one of the three main priests of the Puri Temple. She was a sweet lady, who managed a whole lot of time for educating us, out of her hectic routines of effort-fully making Adi eat all that he could and probably couldn’t.

Mrs Mohapatra

She narrated to us the entire legend of the Puri and Konark Temples. (I will take up Konark later, in case you are really keen, and I manage to finish this one;-)). We were surprised to know from her that the idols in the Puri temple are made of wood. The wood is no ordinary wood and it is selected over so many stringent criteria and after sighting of special Vaishnav symbols like Sudarshana, Shankhaetc on the tree plank. The priests select the wood. It feels very rubbery to touch. During this discussion itself I came to know about the humongous sizes of the Idols of the Jagannath Temple.

If you want to know further about the Idol replacement -the Nabkalebar  ritual-that last took place in 1996 (yes these idols are not permanent!), here is what I learnt. Hold your breath… The Daru (meaning wood – Neemwood to be precise- in this case) for the idols comes from any part of Orissa. The specifications for the woods are very stringent. Whereas, the Krishna idol is to be made from a black Daru, with four branches sprouting from the main tree, the Balabhadra idols is made from a white tree with seven branches and the Subhadra Idol from a yellow daru trunk with five branches. Apart from this, there are so many other conditions to be fulfilled viz:

1.The main tree must have three other trees in vicinity.

2.These trees are Bel, Varun and Sehad, having different qualities.

3.The tree has to be surrounded by mountains on three sides.

4.A colony of ants, a Shiv temple, a cremation ground, a point joining three roads(Tiraha), a sarovar (Pond) and a running river should also exist close to the divine tree.

5.The tree must be free from any diseases or damage caused by lightening.

6.The tree must not be hosting a guest plant or bird nest.

7.There should be a snake living in a hole close by to protect the plant.

And most importantly, the four signs of lord Vishnu-Shankha-Chakra-Gada-Padma should be clearly discernible on the bark of the tree.

Phew… I am sure they get these simple specs met. Aftar all a Mohapatra (Maha-Brahmin) and a team of 16 priests embark on the mission to find the trunks. The search party is guided by the dream had by the head-priest of the Jagannath Temple.

After a tree is selected for cutting, the chief ‘Mahapatra’  touches the tree with a small axe, which is made of gold. Then his deputy touches the tree with a small silver axe. Then the head of the ‘Maharan’ family touches the tree with an axe made of iron after which the tree is cut with an ordinary axe. During the cutting, 108 different names of Lord Narsinghdev are chanted.

After the cutting ceremony, the wood is loaded on a special four-wheeler, which is hand-drawn all the way to Puri by the head priest and devotees. In 1996, when such a tree was cut last, the special vehicle was hand-drawn for more than 80 km.

As narrated above, the tradition of NeelMadhab vigrahasbeing made of wood started by Raja Ramchandra Dev, also known as Raja Abhinaya Indradymna of the legend told in the begining, in 16th century. But it is apparent that the current form of the deity has metamorphosed over centuries of reproduction of the idols and is influenced by Budhism, Jainism among other styles.

During the journey Mrs Mohapatra told a whole lot about the rituals, the expected lifestyle for the Mohapatrasand Konark temple, in between here chores of spoonfeeding the adamant Adi, by telling him the stories of Demon and Mayavi. It is not possible to narrate the entire talk, as my memory fails me on many counts.

It was 16.03.08- a Sunday – morning. Our train had bounced backfrom Kharagpur, where it had stopped for anout 15 minutes and we sipped the station tea. We had entered Orissa and the sight of freshly tarred GQ highway (Calcutta-Chennai, along the east coast), without much traffic was an inviting one. We were in the the Jaipur Keonjhar area. The sight of spring bloom in Orissa was mesmerizing, what with the rows of orange and red flowers of Palash probably, which gave a very exotic look to the otherwiseplain terrain.

Palash Springing (correct me)

Going Fishing
Further on, we were awestruck to see the width of river Mahanadi. After passing Bhuabneswar, we also sighted the Dhauli stoop, atop a hillock, beside rever Daya, which was on our itinerary for Tuesday. Train was running late by about two hours and instead of the scheduled arrival of 12:10 at Puri it would arrive by 14:30. We had exhausted our foodstuff and the pantry was closed for the day and our coach was at the back end of the train (we started at front, but after reversal at Kharagpur our position also reversed) usually falling few kilometers beyond/ahead of stations, where the train stopped.

Please Read further in The Juggernaut and Older Stories-II

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