Daily
Sandhyavandana — the joints of the day.
Water sipped, the breath held, the Gayatri counted on the finger-joints, the sun addressed at the moments when day and night hand over. It is the oldest daily rite in the tradition and the one most quietly abandoned.
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Puja — the daily offering.
Flame, flowers, food before the deity's image — hospitality to the divine as household routine.
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Japa — the name, repeated.
A mala of 108 beads worked with the thumb, one name per bead. Initiated Hare Krishnas count sixteen rounds a day, which is 1,728 repetitions, and keep a book.
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The doorway, the tulsi, and the kitchen.
A rice-flour kolam at the door before sunrise, a lamp at the tulsi plant at dusk, lemons and chillies against the evil eye, and a kitchen with rules about who cooks and who may walk in. The domestic religion is run almost entirely by women and needs no priest at all.
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The fire offering.
Ghee and grain into a fire in a brick or copper altar, each offering named as it goes and given away with the words idam na mama — this is not mine. The full shrauta rites survive with a few hundred Nambudiri and Andhra families, and the twelve-day Athirathram they perform is arguably the oldest ritual still being carried out anywhere on earth.
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Aarti — the circling flame.
Lamps waved before the deity in slow circles while the bell rings: light offered to the source of light, then carried to every open palm in the room.
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Weekly
Darshan — going to be seen.
You do not attend a service. You queue, look at the deity through a doorway for a few seconds, and are looked at back. Tirupati moves sixty to eighty thousand people through that doorway on an ordinary day.
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Satsang — the singing evening.
Bhajans and kirtan with harmonium, dholak and cymbals, a reading, and food afterwards. No priest is required and no caste rule survives an hour of it intact, which is why bhakti movements have always run on it.
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Monthly
Ekadashi — the fast that comes twice a month.
No grains and no beans; fruit and milk, or in strict households nothing at all. Twenty-four of them a year, plus Nirjala Ekadashi in the June heat, which is kept without water.
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Yearly
Diwali.
Lamps in every window for Rama's return and the victory of light — the year's brightest night.
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Kumbh Mela.
The largest human gathering on earth: bathing at the rivers' meeting to wash lifetimes clean.
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The fasts women keep for men.
A day without food or water for a husband's long life, broken when the moon is sighted through a sieve. Indian feminists have called it what it looks like; many of the women keeping it say it is theirs, that they enjoy it, and that they would like the argument conducted with them rather than about them.
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Holi — the festival of color.
Winter's end celebrated by abolishing dignity for a day: powder in the air, hierarchy suspended, everyone dyed the same dozen colors.
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Once in a life
The samskaras — life, marked.
Sixteen classical rites from conception to cremation: the name-giving, the first solid food, the sacred thread, the wedding fire, the last fire. A life kept in ritual punctuation.
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Samadhi — union in stillness.
The yogi's summit: awareness absorbed in its object until the seam disappears. Patanjali maps the approach in eight limbs.
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