Juggernaut

The ancient King Indradyumna, it is said, sought to find the Lord of the Universe--Jagannath, one of the names of Vishnu, the Preserver. After many hardships, it was miraculously revealed to him that Jagannath would come to him as a log of wood, and soon thereafter a huge log with strange markings appeared, floating in the Bay of Bengal near the city of Puri. The king ordered his carpenters to carve an image from it, but their chisels broke. At last the Lord Vishnu himself appeared, disguised as an old carpenter, and the king agreed to let him try his skill with the great log alone in a locked room. But after several days, when he had heard no sound of hammer and chisel, the king flung open the doors. The old carpenter was nowhere to be seen; there were only three large idols--Jagannath and his brother and sister, Balabhadra and Subhadra.

Last week, as they have each year in the thousands of years since the time of legendary King Indradyumna, the three gods made their triumphal procession from their temple at Puri to their summer house, a mile away down a broad avenue. It was an awesome sight. For Jagannath is the famous Juggernaut, riding the vast cart beneath whose creaking wheels fanatic worshipers once threw themselves to be crushed to death.

Quicksilver or Bones. For 45 days before the festival this year, 400 carpenters worked three shifts around the clock to build the carts, each 45 ft. high and 35 ft. wide. (After each year's ceremony, the carts are torn down and the lumber sold to contractors.) The deities themselves take two weeks of preparation. First they are taken from their thrones to the holy bathing pavilion and bathed with scented water from 108 pitchers. Then they are repainted and dressed for their ride.

Jagannath is 6 ft. tall, with a flat-topped black face, round white eyes, a diamond painted on the forehead, a mouth set in a wide led smile. His brother, Balabhadra, is 7 ft. tall, with a white face, a rounded skull and oval eyes; sister Subhadra is only 5 ft. high, with a yellow, pinched face that gives her a hungry look. Making a new set of idols to replace the worn-out trio at least once every 25 years is a tricky business. First a neem tree must be found, in which no bird is nesting, and on which no other tree has cast a shadow. It must be marked beneath its bark with the shape of a conch shell and a wheel; holes must be found beneath it to show that snakes have lived there. When the tree is carefully cut down, selected carpenters carve the three images. A priest--his eyes blindfolded, his hands covered with cloth--transfers from the old idol to the new its essential mystery; some say it is a box of quicksilver, some that it is bones from Vishnu himself.

Babies & Walking Dead. Last week, when the day of the Jagannath Festival dawned, the city of Puri (pop. 60,000) was packed with 150,000 pilgrims from all over India. Some had come crammed into special trains from Calcutta, 265 miles to the north; wide-eyed peasants had come on foot, herded by professional guides. There were women with babies, young students of Yoga, families of dark, half-naked tribesmen from the jungles. Medical officers manned every road, armed with hypodermic needles to head off the cholera which used to sweep through Puri after the festival. Holy men, their naked | bodies smeared with ashes, and the "walking dead" (lepers and the congenitally deformed) begged their way through the crowds. Along the route the gods would travel peddlers hawked souvenirs. And through the shrill mass moved boys with water buckets and bicycle pumps to spray the sea of heads in the searing heat.

At midmorning, behind dancing drummers and holy men waving fans and yak tails, the priests began bringing out the gods. The crowd cheered and surged against police lines at the sight of each deity swathed in colored gauze, profusely garlanded and shaded by an umbrella. In a shimmering uproar of crashing gongs they were loaded aboard their high carts. The 29-year-old Raja of Puri, hereditary superintendent of the Jagannath Temple, swept each cart with a golden broom to show that in the eyes of the god all men are lowly.

Beatitude & Absorption. Suddenly a wail came from the crowd, as hundreds of hands seized the great ropes of Balabhadra's chariot and began to pull. With a screech of stretched leather and a grinding of wood on wood, the towering structure swayed into motion and started down the sandy avenue, flanked by policemen to keep people back from the huge wheels (though it has been decades since anyone committed the traditional holy suicide beneath the carts, accidents have been common).

Twenty minutes later, Subhadra's cart shuddered on its way. At last, in a din of gongs and cymbals and a blaze of flags came the Lord of the Universe himself. The sound of praying paced the god's slow journey to his garden house, and before his passage people fell back in heaps.

Watching from the Raja's balcony, the librarian of the Jagannath Temple turned to a Western visitor: "To witness the Lord of Lords on the Holy Car," he said, "guarantees the beholder eternal beatitude and absorption in the Supreme Being."

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