JUGGERNAUT, a corruption of Sans. JAGANNATHA, "Lord of the World," the
name under which the Hindu god Vishnu is worshipped at Puri in Orissa.
The legend runs that the sacred blue-stone image of Jagannatha was
worshipped in the solitude of the jungle by an outcast, a Savara
mountaineer, called Basu. The king of Malwa, Indradyumna, had despatched
Brahmans to all quarters of the peninsula, and at last discovered Basu.
Thereafter the image was taken to Puri, and a temple, begun in 1174, was
completed fourteen years later at a cost of upwards of half a million
sterling. The site had been associated for centuries before and after
the Christian era with Buddhism, and the famous Car festival is probably
based on the Tooth festival of the Buddhists, of which the Chinese
pilgrim Fa-Hien gives an account. The present temple is a pyramidal
building, 192 ft. high, crowned with the mystic wheel and flag of
Vishnu. Its inner enclosure, nearly 400 ft. by 300 ft., contains a
number of small temples and shrines. The main temple has four main
rooms--the hall of offerings, the dancing hall, the audience chamber,
and the shrine itself--the two latter being each 80 ft. square. The
three principal images are those of Vishnu, his brother and his sister,
grotesque wooden figures roughly hewn. Elaborate services are daily
celebrated all the year round, the images are dressed and redressed, and
four meals a day are served to them. The attendants on the god are
divided into 36 orders and 97 classes. Special servants are assigned the
tasks of putting the god to bed, of dressing and bathing him. The annual
rent-roll of the temple was put at £68,000 by Sir W. W. Hunter; but the
pilgrims' offerings, which form the bulk of the income, are quite
unknown and have been said to reach as much as £100,000 in one year.
Ranjit Singh bequeathed the Koh-i-nor to Jagannath. There are four chief
festivals, of which the famous Car festival is the most important.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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