The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1883 page)

BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
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relates humans to the domain and action of the deities in all their many ways of sustaining or threatening the cosmos and life within it, and thus it takes a vast number of different ritual forms, of which the simplest is
dar
an
, looking on the image of the deity (or in the case of Jains, on the image of a
t
rtha
kara
; among the Jains, an ascetic can only look at an image, never act toward it; such interior devotion is known as
caityavandana
, and is one of the six obligations). P
j
is mentioned in the early
G
hya S
tras
, with focus on home rituals (which remain central). In the
S
tras
, the reception of, and hospitality for,
brahmans
in the home to preside over rites for ancestors is called p
j
, and it may be that
devap
j
(worship of deities) developed from this:
devap
j

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